AfghanWire Podcast #7
Welcome to AfghanWire’s 7th Podcast. Every week we will be discussing the major news from Afghanistan, with exclusive interviews and in-depth analysis. In a themed special edition, this week we asked three media professionals how they saw media developing in Afghanistan. In Around Afghanistan with Vanni Cappelli, he offered his insights into the historical context of the media in Afghanistan.
Dominic Medley: “an incredible success”
Dominic Medley has been working on media development and journalist training projects in Afghanistan since February 2002 when he established Internews in Kabul. In 2003 he was a journalist trainer at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and in 2004 he worked at Radio Arman, the country’s first commercial radio station was he was responsible for transforming. In 2006 Dominic returned to Kabul firstly as Media Relations Officer at UNDP and then as the head of the civilian advisory group for ISAF Commander General David Richards. He is a former BBC radio and TV journalist and has spent much of the last ten years overseas working on media development.
We spoke to him in South Africa and asked how he’d personally seen the media environment change and develop over the past few years.
“Well basically since February 2002, I’ve been working on media development and journalism training in Afghanistan. And I think it’s one of the things that’s overlooked quite often when people look at the humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan, that media has actually been one of the most incredible successes in the country, if you consider at the end of 2001 all the stories about no music, no female presenters on television, no kite-flying…all those things that were imposed by the Taliban – media development has boomed massively with hundreds of magazines and newspapers across the country; private TV stations; Radio Arman, the first private radio station opened in April 2003; and even in 2002, when I was director of Internews, the media development NGO, we were handing out money in the form of grants to small regional publications to get started. This was all part of Ahmed Rashid – who wrote the book, Taliban – and established the Open Media Fund for Afghanistan.
“Now at that time he described the state of the media as below zero. Five to six years on, it’s incredible the boom in the media that has happened: radio, television, newspapers and magazines. And in parallel with this as well is the development in communications; mobile phones, three or four networks, the first network in the summer of 2002. So media and communications has been, I think, a huge success.
“When you consider the freedom of the media in Afghanistan compared to 2001. Let’s compare it to the region. Let’s look at the countries surrounding Afghanistan, and let’s consider how free the media is in those countries surrounding Afghanistan and then I think we can put it on more of a comparable scale to the region.”
We asked him just how important he saw media in Afghanistan countrywide as being, given low literacy rates, and often minimal access to radio and television.
“I think certainly in terms of newspapers and magazines the print runs are still very small. Even the popular Kabul Weekly was never going over 10,000 copies, and unfortunately that actually folded at the end of last year. The editor, Faheem Dashty [interviewed later in the podcast], was very worried about people trying to politically fund him, to fund him with certain conditions, and he decided basically to pull the plug on the newspaper. So they never had huge outreach, the papers.
“I think the outreach that the papers did have was, if you can imagine, the bureaucrats, the civil servants, the opinion-makers in the country speaking Dari and Pashtu, and even some of the newspapers that had an English-language section as well, the audience that they were targeting – for example, the civil service – would be people sitting in offices, people who would make decisions, people who would act as bureaucrats within the government. It was not the mass audience, but it was the opinion-formers. Maybe the people in parliament, in between meetings would be reading the newspapers. They wouldn’t be listening, or watching, the mainstream TV and radio.
“Out in the Styx, we know for sure over the last 25 years that radio has been massively popular. Even with a simple one or two dollar transmitter [sic] from China, people in the last 25 years have listened to the radio on huge scales, and BBC audience research figures hold that out for their Dari and Pashtu services. And even since the beginning of 2002, when Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America restarted in Afghanistan on short wave, on medium wave, and on FM in the cities, even out in the Styx they’ve picked up massive listenership.
“In terms of the development of private television, that’s very much been centered around the huge urban centers, the big population zones, and we know from anecdotal evidence, that – for example – people have been watching the soap operas, people have been watching the mainstream news. Even if they’ve just turned on their television for just half an hour with the help of a car battery or a generator. It does seem, you know, particularly in the winter when there’s not a lot to do, that people have turned to the media for a source of entertainment, but also it’s been where they’ve been getting their information from.”
Recent weeks have seen increased discussion about the media in Afghanistan, most stemming from a raid that the Attorney General ordered on Tolo TV’s offices. Seeing the topic in context, we asked whether he saw Afghanistan’s media as being under siege in some way.
“It’s become…I was actually in Afghanistan in Kabul when Tolo TV was raided. I actually left 5 minutes before the major event happened. I was there on the street when the police arrived. Two days later I was there when the big demonstration was outside the building. It is of concern. What struck me about the raid on Tolo and then the demonstrators was in less than one week since the killing by the Taliban of the translator [sic] Ajmal, within less than one week you have the government against the private media.
“Now a lot of people say that in past wars where both sides have criticized a journalist – for example I remember John Simpson during the Kosovo bombings when the Milosevic regime was criticizing him and NATO was criticizing him, and he replied saying, ‘I must be getting something right because I must be in the middle, therefore I am balanced, fair and objective – it does strike me that in the same week of the Taliban killing a translator and the government trying to take on the private media, this is a real shame, this is really worrying, but it also shows the strength of the private media, which as we all know Tolo has been leading since October 2004 when they actually started broadcasting two days before the presidential elections.
“You know, Afghanistan has not had a free media in its history until now. Let’s face it. The media law that was looked at from 2002 onwards comes from the 1960s. I know many people that told me – particularly with a Communist background in Afghanistan – that government people, civil service bureaucracy, are not aware, are just not educated, and perhaps don’t even want a free media. They want some kind of control.
“Unfortunately, what this has meant is that the national broadcasters, RTA – Radio TV Afghanistan – has been totally blocked and stopped in any efforts to reform itself into a public broadcasting service, to the detriment of its own staff and own audience.
“And what has happened is that the private media has boomed because everyone has wanted free media – the journalists have wanted to push forward programming, the audience has wanted to watch something interesting. So you’ve seen the boom of private media and the stagnation – I think – at the national broadcaster.
“But I think Afghanistan is in a tipping point of worries and concern about the freedom of the media, when you can have the Taliban killing a translator [sic], but at the same time you can have the Attorney General, just on a whim, issuing a document trying to arrest a journalist. In any normal democracy, if someone had a complaint – and it happens every day of the year I’m sure in Britain – about a TV report, you know the editor, you know the director personally. You give them a ring and you say, ‘Could you check that story? Could you ask the journalist to account for what he did? I was a bit concerned.’ And it would all be done behind the scenes and off the record. You don’t go issuing arrest warrants because you don’t like a sentence in the report.”
The media law under which Afghanistan currently operates under is seen by many as one of the most permissive in the region. We asked whether he had any concerns about the discussions currently underway about possible amendments to the law.
“I’ve not been tracking the full media law. This has been going on since 2002 now. When I was director of Internews in September 2002 we hosted a conference which brought media law experts to discuss the media law. The media law has gone through about 5 or 6 revisions now.
“What I’ve always said about media, and I feel that this is unfortunate, is that it’s almost like football. Everyone thinks they’re a good football manager. Everyone thinks they know what the football team should be able to do. I think in Afghanistan you have the same parallel. Every member of parliament thinks they know what media should be. Indeed, there are ex-journalists in parliament. Every member of parliament wants some control of the media. I think the media law is likely to be one of the first passed by parliament because they all want some sort of control over the media and they all think they know about it.
“There are actually far more pressing engagements the parliament should work on rather than just the media, but unfortunately because it gets such an international spotlight on the human rights scale, on the freedom of expression scale, that for some reason parliament seems to keep going ahead with it and of course the government is getting entangled with it. Unfortunately, in terms of what I just said about the national broadcaster, the only people who are going to lose out there are the staff and the audience.
Saad Mohseni: “tug of war between the media and the government”
Saad Mohseni is the director of the Moby Capital Group, which runs Tolo and Lemar television stations, as well as Arman FM, a radio station. He came out to Kabul from Australia in 2002 to start the group and is now one of the most important figures in the country’s media industry.
AfghanWire spoke to him in Kabul to get his perspective on what was happening regarding the Attorney General’s raid on the Tolo’s offices, as well as the licensing issues as concerns re-broadcasts of Al-Jazeera’s international programming.
“Well what happened was, initially with the Al-Jazeera dilemma that we had: the ministry basically decided that our airing of Al-Jazeera was illegal. But they couldn’t produce any document or any law that supported these allegations. We then went to them and said we see no reason as to why we should stop. They referred the case to the media complaints commission, which ironically is chaired by the minister himself. So then they decided against us, again without any real legal justification. We went to the prosecution. The prosecution wrote back to the minister saying that they saw no reason as to why we should stop it. Then they wrote back to the prosecution and the prosecution then instructed us to stop airing Al-Jazeera and we asked why and they still could not produce anything legal – I mean not an article, not a clause…nothing. So, we actually started re-broadcasting Al-Jazeera, because we’ve said to them, ‘if you do want to take us to court, we’d be happy to fight it out’, because we cannot just stop doing something when you can’t even provide us with any reason why we should stop broadcasting
“The issue of the Attorney General: well we submitted a lengthy legal document specifying where we felt the Attorney General had broken our laws, not following due process. That letter technically has also gone to the president’s office. We have yet to receive a response from them. At the same time, the ministry of information, which controls the complaints commission, instructed us to apologise to the Attorney General or face the consequences. We have not made an apology, and if anything we have made it very clear that we will not apologise. So the case has gone back to the Attorney General’s office, which actually announced on the day that they would investigate us, oblivious to the fact that they are conflicted if they attempt to investigate us, because they are investigating an issue relating to themselves. But it’s not going anyway. We haven’t heard back from them, we haven’t heard back from the government, and again it highlights the problems we have in Afghanistan that people just don’t follow up on things.”
He commented on how this fits into the general context of what is widely held to be a new dawn for media in Afghanistan.
“I mean obviously things are becoming more restrictive. That’s not to say that we are not…to quote Nietzsche, I mean if it doesn’t kill you, it strengthens you, so in a bizarre way the media feels empowered by the fact that we stood up to the Attorney General, who until about 2 weeks ago or 10 days ago was seen as someone that one could not confront. And if anything this has strengthened the resolve of not just us but a lot of other people.
“It’s an ongoing battle. I think that in any society – democratic or undemocratic – you have a tug of war between the media and the government. Afghanistan is obviously not a police state as yet, and that’s mostly because of the presence of the international community and how free press has been enshrined in our constitution on the insistence of the international community, and how it was promised to the Afghan nation at the Bonn Agreement.
“So…there are other factors as well which have contributed to how and why the media is continuing to remain independent despite the pressures from within the government. I think if it was up to the Afghan government and there was no foreign – what’s the word – influence, we would have seen television stations such as ours shut down a long time back.”
We asked whether he had any concerns about the discussions currently underway about possible amendments to the media law in Afghanistan.
“The problem is - These are some of the things that concern us. For example, why it is that the government – which was tasked with drafting these laws – couldn’t come up with a better draft. These laws were drafted by a number of individuals on the instructions of, and of course guidance, of the ministry of information and culture, which is as far as the executive branch. And then of course once it got to the parliament, even if the laws were not drafted well and there were problems, the government could have done much to actually amend some of the laws within parliament, working closely with the commission that’s tasked with reviewing these laws.
“And of course the third and last stage is to lobby these laws […]. The problem is that at every step the government as messed things up, and I think that it’s a bit unfair, almost, to blame the parliament. I mean the parliament hasn’t had much guidance, it doesn’t have people from within the government working closely with it.
“If anything we’ve been very luck in the sense that the Journalists’ Union and some other individuals who are genuinely interested in free press have worked very closely with the parliament, and have managed to actually change things for the better; some articles for the better.
“So the laws are – at best – no better than the…you know, if we get the best option – which it’s still 50/50 – still the laws are no better than the laws we had previously. So why bother changing laws which don’t really improve anything for the free press. That’s one.
“The second thing is that we will end up with laws that will severely restrict what we can air, and I think that will be very sad because free press has been one of the highlights of this period, the post-Taliban period.”
Faheem Dashty: “no harder than”
AfghanWire spoke with Faheem Dashty, the current editor-in-chief of Kabul Weekly. Born in Panjshir province in 1973, he spent a significant amount of time on the frontlines with Ahmed Shah Massoud during the Soviet-Afghan War. He was injured in the attack on September 9th that killed Massoud, but returned to Kabul in early 2002 to restart Kabul Weekly newspaper. He is a widely-respected member of the journalist community in Kabul.
We began by asking about the challenges that face journalists in Afghanistan nowadays. Just how difficult is it to be a journalist – Afghan or otherwise?
“In Afghanistan, in each side of life we have lots of problems. Journalism is not an exception. Of course doing journalism in Afghanistan is not easy. There are different reasons.
“Firstly, the journalists are not secure, and insecurity is bad. We have several examples of journalists being killed, or being arrested or mistreated by government authorities as well as drug mafias or Taliban and Al Qaeda.
“Since one year there are some efforts to make more limitations for freedom of expression through the media law; the media law will be sent to the parliament for being approved, and there is a group which is closed to president from the cabinet or the MPs, they are trying to make some more red lines on this media law.
“Then you have technical problems, you have lack of professionalism, and it’s not easy to get access to the information, and that’s a different problem. Of course it’s not easy to be a journalist in Afghanistan but when you compare it with sides of life in Afghanistan for me it’s natural.”
We asked whether he thought that it had become more difficult to be a journalist since the murder of Ajmal Naqshbandi and the Mastrogiacomo affair.
“I don’t really think so, but I can say that when Mr Khurram became minister of information, things have been getting worse and worse and worse, step by step. It has almost been 1 year. Of course, the incident that you are talking about has an effect on the journalists themselves. I mean, now journalists worry to go to the […] provinces like Helmand and those places, Afghans and internationals.
“Because Afghans worry that they may be killed by the Taliban if they are arrested. Foreigners, or expat journalists worry that if they go there they may be kidnapped by the Taliban. So in this sense it has been getting worse.
“Generally, the most fear for media workers and journalists in media itself is that freedom of expression has been getting worse and worse since Mr Khurram got his responsibilities with the ministry of information and culture.”
Many people have criticized the Afghan print media – including publications like Kabul Weekly – as being irrelevant because so many people in Afghanistan are unable to read. We asked him how important he thought print media is for Afghanistan.
“You know, different kinds of media are like a chain in a society. Wherever you go, you have electronic media, broadcasting media, you have print media besides that, and Afghanistan cannot be an exception in the world. So…
“Of course we have some problems with print media, but my understanding is that there hasn’t been enough investment in print media by Afghan investors, even by international donors. Of course we know that the percentage of uneducated people in Afghanistan is very high. Even people like to read newspapers, but the newspapers which can give them something different from radios and tvs, and a newspaper which can give him something of professional quality, which is not the case about our newspapers and one of the main reasons is the lack of investment.
“Because of this lack of investment, print media is not able to develop their qualities, to increase their circulation, to set up a distribution network, etc etc. So that’s why print media has not improved at the same rate as broadcasting media in Afghanistan. But I don’t think this is the fault of the print media workers; I think it’s the fault of some others.”
He explained about how he’s experienced these problems as editor-in-chief of Kabul Weekly newspaper.
“Definitely, definitely. I will give you the example of Kabul Weekly. I ran Kabul Weekly for a period of five years. And in these 5 years all I got from international donors was only $53,000. And I know that they give millions and millions for creating a news agency, or TV or radio or something like that.
“When you compare this with the others, then you will see there is a big difference. I am sure that if we were getting…Kabul Weekly was a flagship in print media in Afghanistan; I don’t say that because it was my newspaper. Most of the readers have the same view about Kabul Weekly.
“But even for such a newspaper nobody was ready to support, nobody was ready to help us when we were close to close the newspaper. So we had a very hard time to convince some of the donors to refund Kabul Weekly. We got it finally, but it wasn’t easy.”
Finally, AfghanWire heard from Vanni Cappelli, a freelance journalist who has covered conflicts in the Horn of Africa, the Balkans and Central Asia since the early 1990s. He is a co-founder and the current president of the Afghanistan Foreign Press Association.
He spoke from New York on how he sees the challenges that face Afghan media practitioners today.
“In a feature I wrote for Edward Girardet's Crosslines Afghanistan Monitor in October of 2003, I characterized the Afghan media as a "reluctant phoenix", rising out of the ashes of a quarter century of war but powerfully constrained by the harsh realities of history, conservatism, and continuing insecurity. Over the almost four years since then the potential obstacles to the development of a free press outlined by the people I interviewed for the piece and myself have indeed exerted a frustrating power, but none so much as the escalation of violence in the country.
“Although the history of the press in Afghanistan has had its dynamic and distinguished moments, the country has never had a "free press" in anything approaching the Western sense of the phrase. The Afghan media had a pyrotechnically brilliant birth at the turn of the last century with the influential modernizing polemics of Mahmud Beg Tarzi, which laid the basis for the progressive strain in the country's history. Tarzi's line, however, reflected the general policy of the government, and it must not be forgotten that he died in exile. Over the half century that passed between his fall and the Saur Coup of 1978, journalists experienced a similar dynamic of being kept on a leash that tightened or loosened according to the current mood of the government. There was never a free, independent press with its own center of gravity, though King Zahir Shah's relatively liberal Press Law of 1965 ushered in a few years of comparative latitude backed by a legal structure, before the forces of destruction overwhelmed Afghanistan.
“The fall of the Taliban in 2001 raised enormous expectations about the prospects for the media and the role it might play in rebuilding the country. But to the longstanding constraints of a historically constricted press that had been followed by a situation where any dissent might be greeted with summary violence, there was added the latent power of the country's profound cultural conservatism and the fact that a violent context was by no means assuredly a thing of the past. The triple fetters of a press corps that had not been trained in freedom and was therefore to a great extent psychologically inhibited, the angry influence of conservatism, and a persistent lack of security have had the stultifying role that was predicted for them.
“The many media training and support projects that the international community has undertaken in Afghanistan over the last five years, epitomized by the work of Ahmed Rashid's Open Media Fund, Internews, and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, have gone a long way towards ameliorating the first constraint, raising professional standards and relieving the weight of self-censorship. The revising and strengthening of the Press Law at the end of 2003 was one of the more substantial achievements of the Karzai government, and gave the Western input some legal foundation. Conservatism and violence have proved more intractable problems to tackle.
“Although the perennial issue of whether and in what manifestation women are allowed to appear on television and radio has garnered the most headlines in Western coverage of the subject, sometimes generating comic relief, there have been more serious instances of conservative pressure against a free press. The Aftab Affair of 2003, in which the editors of a small weekly were hounded into hiding and threatened with death by the conservative judiciary for publishing purportedly blasphemous statements is emblematic of how serious this threat can be. However none of these cases ended with any serious consequences for the parties involved. It is in fact the very violence that devastated the country for thirty years that has proven to be the one unbreakable chain.
“"The greatest challenge for an open and independent media is security and the rule of law, which is sadly missing at present," Ahmed Rashid told me when I was writing my Crosslines piece. He continued: "Until there is a wider security arrangement put in place by the international community, you are not really going to get a thriving free media or the chance for these groups of young people to use the media to help rebuild civil society in their communities," he ended.
“The failure of the international community to provide such security has unfortunately borne out Rashid's prediction completely. Although a retrained and emboldened press has multiplied and chalked up many achievements, it must in the end face the ultimate constraint of summary violence, as the fate of the respected Afghan journalist Ajmal Naqshbandi at the end of the Mastrogiacomo affair has shown all too brutally. Although it may be countered that journalists of all nationalities run such risks all over the world, the comparative fates of the Italian and his Afghan colleague is instructive.
“Until the international community undertakes policies that place foreign and Afghan lives in greater parity, a dynamic that applies to many areas besides the freedom of the press, there can be no reality to the vision of a reconstructed Afghanistan and the press phoenix that will help guide this national ascent.”
That’s all from us at AfghanWire. A transcript of this podcast will be released onto our website shortly. Details of future podcasts will appear on the website at www.afghanwire.com. Until then, good bye.
AFGHANWIRE MEDIA BLOG
Tuesday, 15 May 2007
