http://www.dailynews.lk/2010/01/05/fea01.asp
Western media fuels conflicts Dr. Kalinga Seneviratne “Critics of developed countries have been rather slanted and sly in categorising us Information Ministers as ‘Misinforming Ministers’. Whatever they say, we have to carry out our responsibilities because if we don’t inform, others will do the job for us,” warned Malaysia’s Information, Communication and Culture Minister, Dr Rais Yatim in a speech to the 10th Conference of ASEAN Ministers’ Responsible for Information (AMRI) held in the Laotian Capital in November. This was a strong theme of the conference titled ‘Enhancing Media Cooperation in ASEAN Community Building’ and the conference also included an AMRI + 3 component, where ASEAN Information Ministers were joined by their counterparts from China, South Korea and Japan on the second day. The East Asian giants were also in agreement with the need to enhance Asian media cooperation. Korea also added its voice to the call for Asian nations to pool their media resources to blunt Western media’s power to set the regional political and cultural agenda. “It is true that the global perception of Asia is not that positive considering the region’s economic influence. To the eyes of the people of the other parts of the globe, Asia is no more than a poor, peripheral region with a development gap, which suffers economic crisis, terrorism and disasters,” observed Director of the Media Policy Bureau at the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism in Seoul Kim Kab-soo, in an address to the first ever AMRI+3 conference. Self employment opportunities provided for IDP youth in Kadirgamar welfare village. Picture by Chaminda Hittetiya East Asian viewpoints Kim added that this ‘misrepresentation justifies the need for enhancing media cooperation at the ASEAN+3 level’, as it is necessary to ‘disseminate various uniquely East Asian viewpoints to the media in the rest of the world’. With the likes of the BBC, CNN and CNBC expanding rapidly in Asia and the South in general, even the local media outlets in many parts of the developing countries of the South depend on these media agencies to be informed about what is happening around the world. The question is, are we being properly informed or are we being misinformed? The answer tends to be in the latter if we closely look at how countries like Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Iran, Venezuela and China are being reported by the global (meaning Western) media outlets. Recently, when I tuned into BBC World Service Radio news one of the news headlines said: “Sporadic battles have broken out between protestors and Police in Iran following the death of a dissident cleric”. The headline may persuade one to believe that the cleric - Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri - was killed by the Iranian Government, when in fact, he died of natural causes at the age of 87. It could also be argued that such reporting could incite violence within Iran because the small dissident groups know that they can get international coverage for their protests if they can hook on to a satellite phone or whatever to give the pictures and voices to media outlets like the BBC and CNN. When the rest of the media uncritically follow the news agenda set by the Western media it creates fertile ground for Western interference in the domestic affairs of countries in the South which are not subservient to them, such as the current campaign to impose UN Security Council sanctions against Iran or bring war crimes charges against Sri Lanka or the campaign for sanctions against Robert Mugabe’s Government in Zimbabwe or the military regime in Myanmar or the attempts to blame China for the failure of the Copenhagen Climatic Change Conference. At the World Electronic Media Conference in Kuala Lumpur in December 2008, I pointed out to the Director of News at the BBC who had just given a lecture on BBC’s core values (based on fairness and balance) that they have started calling Myanmar by its old name Burma lately when all international organisations recognise Myanmar as the official name for the country, and when I asked a BBC reporter recently she said “we do not recognise a name given to it by a military regime”. If that is so hasn’t BBC taken sides and how can I trust your news reports in respect to Myanmar? His response was that the people in Britain know the country as Burma and that is why they use that name. For me it was a meek response to cover up an obvious misinformation campaign. Global Media Forum In June 2008, I was at a Global Media Forum in Bonn organised by Deutschewella Radio and met a young Ugandan journalist. In the course of the conversation I said I live in Singapore which is next door to the world’s largest Muslim country Indonesia. His immediate response was, “You must be having problems with Islamic terrorism in Singapore?” “Not at all” I said, and I went on to explain to him that I visit Indonesia often as part of my work, and many Indonesians have told me over the past few years that 95 percent of Indonesians are secular Muslims (meaning liberal Muslims) and five percent are fanatics who are the only Indonesians Western media likes to talk about. Thus Indonesians themselves complain that the International media misinforms the rest of the world about their country. There has been a similar misinformation campaign waged by the Western media and BBC in particular - against President Mugabe and Zimbabwe over the past decade or so. It all started when Mugabe’s ZANU-PF ruling party members stormed White owned farms in the country and occupied them protesting against lack of land for the country’s Black majority. Under the Lancaster House constitution the British imposed on Zimbabwe at the time of liberation in 1980, the government could only buy White land from willing sellers. When this expired after ten years, the Government passed a law empowering it to make compulsory purchases. More than 20 years after the country was liberated from White-rule some 4,500 White farmers own 70 percent of the best farmlands in the country. Thus, since March 2000, a group of war veterans of ZANU-PF have occupied many White-owned farms claiming this as their dividends for fighting the war of liberation. If one were to cover Zimbabwe’s conflict in a fair and balanced manner, should you not focus on the unfairness of a few privileged rich White farmers owning 70 percent of the land while most Blacks are landless and suffer in poverty? For the BBC unfairness started when the Black masses started to grab the land of the rich White minority. Would the BBC take the side of the farmers if they were rich Black land owners? Certainly not, BBC would have depicted them as a corrupt selfish rich minority who enjoy political patronage, as they do when reporting similar conflicts between rich landowners and the masses in many former colonies of the West. Let me now focus on the latest misinformation campaign by the BBC and the Western media on a developing country of the South. It is the campaign against the Government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka - the country where I was born and raised. Thus, I have followed closely Western media reporting of Sri Lanka in recent years. Terrorist groups In May 2009, the Sri Lankan Armed Forces defeated one of the most ruthless terrorist groups in the world - the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) - which has been terrorising the small island republic for over 25 years. During the final battle on May 19 the Army wiped out almost the whole leadership of the LTTE who were taking refuge behind some 150,000 Tamil civilians who were being held as human shields by the rebels. Most of these civilians survived the battle and were taken into government controlled refugee centres. The International media has failed to acknowledge a rare success story in fighting terrorism. They have not been able to focus on how a small country with limited resources - compared to almost unlimited financial and military resources available to NATO Forces in Afghanistan - was able to defeat a terror group who had a lot of backing from official and unofficial sources in the West. Instead they are happy to swallow lock, stock and barrel LTTE propaganda manufactured in Western cities like Toronto, London, Paris and Sydney, by the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora who have supported the LTTE with funds to buy arms to wage their terror campaign in Sri Lanka for most part of the past 25 years. Though Sri Lanka has won the military battle they have not won the global propaganda battle against the LTTE. Recent attempts by some Western countries to force the UN Human Rights Commission to mount a war crimes investigation against Sri Lanka for the conduct of the final stages of battle against LTTE and EU’s recent suspension of trade concessions to Sri Lanka - which could cripple its garment industry in particular which employs tens of thousands of women from rural areas - are two such issues, where the LTTE propaganda machine is playing a leading role. For Sri Lankan Tamils to get easier access to the greener pastures of the West (as political refugees fleeing repression in their homeland), they have to keep the flame of human rights violations burning. Thus they have made a mountain out of a molehill by exaggerated claims about human rights abuses in the IDP (Internationally Displaced Persons) camps in the North where an estimated 150,000 Tamils are being held. They have painted these as Nazi-era type concentration camps, where people are held at gunpoint and Western journalists have taken their propaganda without examining it critically and spread it across the world. The LTTE propagandists in the West have cleverly exploited the gullibility of the Western media to claims of human rights violation in a country of the South. LTTE cadres The Sri Lankan Government has repeatedly emphasised that the IDPs cannot be let loose that easy because of sophisticated landmines LTTE has planted all over the area and the Government also fears that thousands of LTTE cadres have escaped to the centres at the end of the war and they need to be weaned out before the centres are emptied. The Western media which criticise the IDP welfare centres in Sri Lanka seem to forget Guatanamo Bay in Cuba and scores of such camps the West operates around the world to hold suspected Al-Queda or Taliban terrorists. Also the same media that accuse Sri Lanka of war crimes gleefully report on pentagon statements without questioning, that says that Taliban militants have been killed by bombs dropped by US unmanned aircraft over Pakistan, as if no civilians live in those areas. Sri Lankans have been incensed by the glaring double standards in the West’s call for a war crimes investigation in Sri Lanka while covering up their own actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Sri Lanka’s current ambassador to the UN Dr. Palitha Kohona, a former Australian and UN diplomat, responding to a question in an interview on Australia’s ABC Radio last year, said, “those who point fingers at us, should have three fingers in each hand pointing towards them hidden inside their pockets”. They will only see those fingers, when the Western journalists let go their prejudices against leaders in developing countries who are not subservient to the West. The writer is the Head of Research at the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre in Singapore. He has written this piece in his personal capacity and not on behalf of his employer. ------------------------------------ -- INFORMATION OVERLOAD? Get all ZESTMedia mails sent out in a span of 24 hours in a single mail. 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