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Sudan: International Media Ignore Sudanese Voices
AfricaFocus Bulletin
Apr 22, 2007 (070422)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor's Note
The janjaweed militiamen are used "by a racist regime that is in
many respects worse than the apartheid regime in South Africa,
which at least had the dignity not to employ rape as a tactic of
suppression." Did this scathing remark appear in the New York Times
or Le Nouvel Observateur, two newspapers known for criticising the
Sudanese government? No, surprising as it may seem, it was made in
an editorial in the Citizen, a Khartoum daily, on 18 March. And
there was no angry reaction from the government. - Reporters
without Borders
The international media, says a new report from Reporters without
Borders, systematically ignores the voices of the media inside
Sudan and of Sudan's diverse civil society, both in Khartoum and in
Darfur itself. While the obstacles imposed on journalists by the
government are real, in fact the media within the country is
expanding its coverage and even critical comment. If the world is
to have a more accurate picture of what is going on, it should pay
attention to these voices.
This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains excerpts from the report. The
full report is available at http://www.rsf.org
Another AfricaFocus Bulletin being sent out today contains excerpts
from a policy paper by John Prendergast analyzing the history of
pressure on the Khartoum regime, and how the international
community is failing to learn from past successes. Instead,
Prendergast charges, it is repeating ineffectual policies of
"walking loudly and carrying a toothpick."
For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on Sudan and additional
background, see http://www.africafocus.org/country/sudan.php
++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++++++++
"Darfur : An investigation into a tragedy's forgotten actors"
Reporters without Borders
http://www.rsf.org
After a fact-finding visit to Sudan from 17 to 22 March, Reporters
Without Borders today issued a report entitled "Darfur: An
investigation into a tragedy's forgotten actors," in which the
press freedom organisation tries to contribute new elements to the
international debate about the tragedy which the peoples of western
Sudan have been enduring.
The Reporters Without Borders team found that the Sudanese press,
like the country's society as a whole, is both active and diverse.
Even in Darfur, the team was able to talk to members of a very real
civil society, one that is aware of the unfolding tragedy and the
challenges it must face. The newspapers published in Khartoum are
also very diverse and reflect the voices of Sudanese human rights
activists, university researchers and other civil society actors,
voices that find it hard to make themselves heard outside Sudan.
Contrary to the prevailing media image, Reporters Without Borders
found that Sudan is not "a land of massacres, a terra incognita in
which the 21st century's first genocide is unfolding in Darfur, out
of sight, without foreigners reporting what is happening, without
any Sudanese voicing criticism." The reality is much more
complicated and often contradictory.
Like many wars around the world, Darfur's crisis poses complex
coverage problems for both the national and international media.
The intrinsic problems - the large number of armed factions, the
absence of a "front line," the hostile nature of the terrain and
lack of a distinction between combatants and civilians - are
deliberately compounded by the "bureaucratic fence" which the
government in Khartoum has erected around the war zone to try to
"regulate"and influence the work of the press (which the report
describes). ...
The international media react to these obstructions by approaching
their coverage of Darfur in a spirit of "resistence" to a
government perceived as "hostile," the report concludes. When
reporting the worst atrocities, foreign journalists may sometimes
offer a stereotyped image of Sudan focused solely on the suffering
in Darfur, without taking account of the historical causes of the
crisis or the solutions proposed by Sudanese civil society, whose
very existence, diversity and commitment seem unknown to many of
them.
In its conclusions, Reporters Without Borders recommends that the
Sudanese government should take all necessary measures to open up
the country to the foreign press and to increase a dynamic civil
society's freedom or action; that international organisations
should take account of local realities, above all by supporting
Sudanese civil society, and should overhaul their communication
methods; and that the international media should not neglect the
"forgotten actors" of the crisis, in order to portray Sudan in all
its diversity and help it to resolve its internal contradictions.
Darfur : An investigation into a tragedy's forgotten actors
April 2007
Reporters Without Borders - Africa Desk
http://www.rsf.org
[Excerpts only}
Obstacles, obstruction and danger
The international media turned its attention to Darfur because of
the insurrection that began in February 2003. From the start of the
rebellion, many security and administrative obstacles prevented
foreign reporters from freely reporting on the situation in western
Sudan, a region as big as France. Even when not completely blocking
access to Sudanese territory, this "bureaucratic fence" often
suffices to deter the international press, especially the broadcast
media, which are particularly susceptible to the dictates of time
and money and the "no pictures, no story" principle. Enclosing a
vast country, Africa's biggest, a country that is having to cope
with several crises at the same time and with considerable
international pressure, this "fence" is based on several
provisions.
To start with, the Sudanese government issues visas on a
case-by-case basis as it mistrusts international public opinion and
assumes it to be hostile. News media and individual journalists are
blacklisted if they are deemed to have crossed the red lines it has
laid down, although it is not always clear what criteria determine
the choice. It is impossible to get exact figures for visa
refusals, especially as embassies often just ignore requests from
journalists considered undesirable. The issuing of visas is a
discretionary prerogative and in this sense, Sudan is no different
from other countries.
The refusal to let a UN Human Rights Council special mission led by
Jody Williams enter the country at the start of 2007 was just the
tip of the iceberg. And it is no secret. Sudanese officials are
often open about it, both in embassies and in Khartoum. A
government source acknowledged to Reporters Without Borders that
keeping a blacklist could be counter-productive but it was
attributed to the fact that "many media had proved to be insulting
towards the Sudanese government." ...
Many journalists who are denied entry to Sudan or access to Darfur
(which requires a special travel permit) cover the crisis in
western Sudan from refugee camps in neighbouring Chad or illegally
enter Sudan across the border, risking arrest and trial.
Anticipating the difficulties of getting a visa and travel permit,
foreign journalists have often taken the easier option of
"covering" Darfur's tragedy from eastern Chad, solely on the basis
of what refugees there tell them.
Whatever the reasons for this, any report on Darfur from refugee
camps in Chad is inevitably incomplete. It can even misrepresent
the reality if, for example, refugees who fled at the height of the
atrocities in 2003-2004 describe a situation that has evolved since
their forced departure. (The violence has spent itself in a land
razed and emptied of its inhabitants, while the two initial rebel
movements have split into many factions and, since the peace accord
some of them signed with the government in May 2006 in Abuja, are
fighting among themselves and are also carrying out atrocities on
the civilian population.)
...
Khartoum, crossroads for special envoys
...
Most of the leading international media that cover Africa or the
Arab countries, such as Al-Jazeera or Reuters, have a correspondent
or a bureau in Khartoum. The Gulf-based satellite TV stations used
to be punished for the least offence, because of their weight in
the Muslim world, but now they benefit from a steadily expanding
room for manoeuvre which the Sudanese authorities have also
accorded to the national print media since the signing of an accord
with the south. All the publishers and editors interviewed by
Reporters Without Borders acknowledged enjoying a "degree of
freedom" - the accepted term in Khartoum - that was unknown
before 2005.
But visiting foreign correspondents have to meet many
administrative requirements if they want to travel outside
Khartoum. Permits to visit the Darfur region's three capitals,
El-Fasher, Nyala and El-Geneina, have to be approved by the
security services. To get through the checkpoints at the airports
of each of these three cities, foreigners much provide photocopies
of the travel permit issued by an interior ministry office that
controls the registration of foreigners. The permit is a sort of
internal visa without which it is impossible to move about the
country legally. The application form clearly states that it is
forbidden to go outside of the Darfur region's three capitals
without prior permission from the Humanitarian Aid Commission
(HAC). ...
Administrative requirements and restraints do not normally prevent
journalists from moving about Darfur altogether but they render
such movements complex and unpredictable and they function as a
slip-knot ready to tighten as soon as the situation deteriorates.
On 7 November 2006, for example, the Sudanese government officially
ceased to issue travel permits to foreign journalists after a
resumption of fighting. A week after a decree to this effect was
issued, the Sudanese air force violated the Abuja accords by
bombing Birmaza, in North Darfur, in support of pro-government
troops on the ground. The Darfur travel ban and resulting news
blackout lasted three months. ...
Once they are in the government's sights, foreign journalists
accredited in Khartoum are liable to be blacklisted. "I suppose
they did not like my stories," Reporters Without Borders was told
by a Khartoum-based journalist who was suddenly facing expulsion
because his residence permit had not been renewed. "But I really
don't know if I am being personally targeted or if it is my
employer," he added. ...
"You can work despite all the hassles," said Opheera McDoom, the
Reuters correspondent in Sudan, who has made many visits to the
country's troubled areas. ...Discretion, patience and prudence are
all needed, while familiarity with Sudan and the national language
significantly increase a foreigner's chances of not being caught by
the many kinds of traps set by the Sudanese civil service and
police.
For a long time, McDoom was the only foreign correspondent in Sudan
to speak Arabic and she stresses the usefulness of this skill. "It
is essential to be able to communicate with the security forces at
a checkpoint, understand their questions and know how to negotiate
your way out of a problem," she stressed. ...
Finally, some foreign reporters have a limited grasp of local
reality. "Foreign journalists come here for just two days and are
insistent on going to one of the camps for displaced persons
surrounding the city," said Mohammed Badawi, the North Darfur
director of the Amel Centre, a local NGO that concerns itself with
torture victims. "Getting all the permits entails lots of
problems," adds this young Darfurian, who often functions as a
guide or fixer for foreign journalists in their relations with the
authorities and displaced persons. A foreign correspondent
complained: "Some arrive in Sudan, and ask to see the rebels
without really knowing who they are talking about. And then they
leave."
...
[In Darfur] The only conceivable way of getting out of the cities
is to travel with the UN, the AMIS or nongovernmental
organisations. The UN and the AMIS sometimes take journalists with
them to cover their activities. But the NGOs operating in the area
(which with some 14,000 agents is the world's biggest theatre of
humanitarian operations) are more and more reluctant to do this, or
even to talk to the media. They have good reason to fear having the
HAC's sights turned on them. ...
In the absence of organised political structures or even a clear
chain of command, it is hard in Darfur to identify rebel groups,
which keep splitting. Aside from the "historic" armed movements,
many new guerrilla groups have emerged since the signing of the
Abuja accords in May 2006.
...
A living country
But the press freedom situation in Sudan is not just about these
many obstacles. There are no longer any restrictions on the
possession of satellite dishes and, like the rest of the Arab
world, Sudanese viewers prefer to get their news from Al-Jazeera
and Al-Arabiya than the state-owned Sudan TV. As for radio, RMC
Moyen-Orient and the BBC have their own FM frequencies and are easy
to tune into for most of the Khartoum public. Radio France
Internationale's French-language programmes can be heard throughout
the country on RMC Moyen-Orient, as can Deutsche Welle's Arabic,
English and German-language programmes. At Nyala, the BBC World
Service Trust, the British public broadcaster's humanitarian wing,
has even created Lifeline Darfur, an Arabic-language programme
employing Sudanese journalists broadcasting 30-minute programmes
twice a week for Darfur, eastern Chad and the northeast of the
Central African Republic. The sole gap in radio broadcasting -
and it is a significant one - is the fact that the only two
privately-owned Sudanese stations whose broadcasts reach the entire
country are essentially commercial and just carry back-to-back news
bulletins. In all, there are seven privately-owned radio stations,
all of them on the political sidelines.
With 35 dailies, six weeklies and three monthlies, Khartoum is a
major city in which the independent press finally has a place after
10 years of slow progress and then sudden acceleration in the wake
of the peace accord between the north and south in January 2005.
The news stands along the capital's main avenues offer a diverse
range of news of all tendencies in Arabic and English. All the
newspaper editors that Reporters Without Borders met agreed that
the Sudanese print media have enjoyed increasing freedom since the
peace accord was signed with the south. "Censorship has been
abolished and our room for manoeuvre is unquestionably more
flexible than before," said Mahgoub Erwa, the editor of the
independent daily Al-Sudani, which claims to have 100,000 readers.
(No daily has a print run of more than 40,000.) "Newspapers like
ours, which do not toe the government line, are nonetheless subject
to frequent intimidation, on the least pretext," he added.
Arbitrary use of article 130 of the code of criminal procedure,
which punishes violations of the confidentiality of judicial
investigations, has been a favourite weapon of the authorities
since 2005. ... The National Press Council insists that it is
committed to improving the situation, even if the editors Reporters
Without Borders met accuse it of being "weak" and "under the
government's control." It has began an overhaul of the press law
that should see the light of day by the end of the year, and it
boasts of only once taking action of its own accord against a
newspaper. ...
Lawsuits are nonetheless common and newspaper editors often have to
go to the law courts. "That said, even if our judicial system is
not perfect, it is relatively independent and anyway much better
than in Iraq or Saudi Arabia, for example," Elbaz said. ...
Precarious but real freedom
From the viewpoint of newspaper editors subjected to both political
and financial pressure, the overall climate for the Khartoum press
may seem rather poor. But the outspoken style of the editorialists
and columnists, especially those writing for the pro-south
English-language dailies, is quite astonishing in a country that
less than 10 years ago was a relentless dictatorship. ...
[On March 21, for example] John Lemi Stephen wrote a column in the
Sudan Tribune warning the government against the brutality of its
policies in Darfur: "Those who used the iron fist to impose
hardship on the population in Darfur and other regions in Sudan
will also have their own share one day; for it is written that the
measure you give is the same you will receive from the people of
this country."
Although these articles might seem quite scathing, they did not
result in any lawsuits or prosecutions, perhaps because the
English-language press has little impact in Khartoum. The
Arabic-language media are monitored more closely. ...
Caught in the democratic transition's cross-winds, Khartoum's
newspapers are increasing their room for manoeuvre a bit more every
year. "Sudan today has more freedom of expression and the no-go
areas for the press are shifting as developments take place," said
Eltyeb Hag Ateya, the head of Khartoum university's Institute for
Peace Research. "The newspapers are playing a significant role in
society," he continued. "They are the ones that launch debates,
analyse the news and question the government's behaviour. It is
thanks to them that we argue about Darfur." ...
"The Sudanese press has conquered its freedom on its own," Ateya
nonetheless insists. Al-Sudani's editor proudly refers to a key
moment when Darfur rebels attacked El-Fasher airport and the
adjoining military base on 25 April 2003, and the Khartoum press
announced a boycott on coverage of government activities in protest
against the government's ban on referring to the raid "while it rid
the area of the rebels, which it expected to take two weeks." ...
The Sudanese print media in fact reflect all sorts of viewpoints in
columns, op-ed pieces, readers' letters, analyses, reports and
editorials on the issue of Darfur. Some articles blame the
government for the "appalling crimes" committed by the janjaweed.
Others criticise the president's obtuse behaviour towards the
international community or maintain that, yes, the international
community should try Sudanese. The editors that Reporters Without
Borders met spoke with a great deal of freedom about the war that
has emptied Darfur of at least a third of its inhabitants.
Everyone - Arabic speakers, English speakers, journalists and
academics - agrees in their analysis of the background to the
tragedy. Erwa of Al-Sudani said: "When the clashes began in
El-Fasher in 2003, the government made the mistake of not taking
the Darfur question seriously. It opted for a purely security and
military approach to the problem and disparaged the political
aspect. The international community, for its part, uses the
mistakes and the crimes for its own purposes and not to help us,
the Sudanese, to put an end to this war." Al-Sahafa's Elbaz said:
"Major crimes have been committed in Darfur by an irresponsible
government. But the international community, obsessed by the
terrifying image of the janjaweed, has not understood the crisis
either and, as a result, proposes unrealistic solutions." Al-Ayam's
Salih added: "The foreign press is blinded and forgets the
environmental and economic aspects of the Darfur question."
There is one criticism of the international community and its news
media that is repeatedly heard from Sudanese journalists and
academics - that their take on Sudan's crises is superficial. "The
crisis in Darfur has its origin above all in a serious
deterioration in the region's environment that encompasses the
entire Sahel strip," said Khartoum university's Ateya. "Successive
droughts and the growing shortage of water and pastures, combined
with a demographic explosion that has doubled the region's
population in 20 years has transformed a range of tribal conflicts
into a political and ethnic confrontation," Ateya continued. ...
In his view, the international press should not, for example,
ignore the famine of the 1980s, the earlier war between agrarian
and pastoral Fur tribes and nomadic, camel-raising, Arabic-speaking
tribes at the height of the drought from 1985 to 1989. The foreign
media should also bear in mind that there was a war in the west at
the end of the 1990s between Masalit and "Arab" peasants, and that
the Sudanese army already used "Arab" tribes to fight John Garang's
SPLA in the south, and then the Zaghawas, whose territory straddles
the Sudan- Chad border. "Darfur's recent past is a series of small,
forgotten wars," Ateya said.
In Darfur, this viewpoint is defended at El-Fasher university,
which has 10,000 students. There Reporters Without Borders met Abu
Elshir Abdel Raharman Yousif, a young Darfurian professor who
proudly showed his faculty's library, where a handful of students
were studying, and two rooms equipped with computers by the United
Nations Development Programme (UNDP). "The environmental and
demographic crisis in the three regions and the competition between
pastoral and agricultural tribes underlies what has become an
international crisis," he said. "The rebels and the Sudanese
government have played a poisonous role in the region, exploiting
ethnic and tribal conflicts and, above all, the poverty of this
people." After the drought upset the existing equilibriums, the
region's people began leaving their ancestral lands in search of an
alternative means of survival. "With firearms circulating easily,
Darfur had a score of wars in the 1980s, pushing the tribes to
create militias to defend their interests," Yousif said, adding:
"Solve the problem of access to water in Darfur and the fighting
will stop." ...
"The current situation is creating major problems in the south,
while implementation of the peace accord has ground to a halt,"
said the Sudan Tribune's Ezechiel, whose newspaper's motto is "CPA
and the unity of Sudan." The war in Darfur is not a forgotten war,
despite what the western press may sometimes say, he said. "If the
international community continues to focus solely on the Darfur
tragedy, without taking account of the Sudan problem in its
entirety, we are heading for failure in the south and the west,"
Ezechiel added. El-Fasher university's Yousif said: "Bearing in
mind, too, the extreme fragmentation of the rebel groups, any
solution to the Darfur conflict that is not based on the prior
unification of the rebel groups is completely unrealistic and
counterproductive." Khartoum university's Ateya asked: "An
international force would come and position itself between which
groups, and to ensure implementation of what?" ...
AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with
a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.
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