[A-DX] Economist über Propagandaradios

["Nils Schiffhauer" <dk8ok@xxxxxxx>]

Moin, moin - in der aktuellen Ausgabe des "Economist" fand ich einen
informierten Artikel über Propagandaradios, den ich nachfolgend in diesem ja
doch irgendwie internen Kreis mal weiterrreiche:

Radio propaganda
Crackles of hatred
Jul 23rd 2009?From The Economist print edition
Silencing murderous messages is not as easy as it sounds

LAST year, as Kenya slid into mayhem, the words that sputtered forth from
crude transmitters were cryptic but, to those in the know, horrifying.
?People of the milk?, a reference to the cattle-owning Kalenjin people, were
urged to ?take out the weeds in our midst?? in other words, the Kikuyus.
Meanwhile Kikuyu broadcasters inveighed against the peril posed by ?animals
from the west?: this meant the rival Luo (from which Barack Obama
originates) and Kalenjins.
In East Africa this use of radio to incite ethnic slaughter recalled an even
darker episode: the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which a station called
Radio Mille Collines (Thousand Hills Radio) seemed to be directing the
massacres. It not only poisoned the general atmosphere but urged on the
killers, with phrases like ?cutting the tall trees? and ?killing the
cockroaches?.

In an era of drones and spy satellites, it may seem odd that crude simple
radio transmitters can still make huge mischief. But the scale and
sophistication of broadcasting has mutated downwards as well as upwards. In
the mid-20th century, totalitarian dictators found national radio stations
were a handy way to foment hate and fear; and non-state actors (from
communist guerrillas to churches) have been using radio for almost as long.
In recent years the medium has been exploited in ever darker ways by petty
warlords as well as by big-time tyrants.
Take the war zone on Pakistan?s north-western frontier, where radio?s
sinister side has been on stark display. Scores of small FM
transmitters?used to propagate extremist ideas and to terrorise local
foes?have played a part in shoring up the Taliban?s power. One notorious
user of the air waves is Mullah Fazlullah, a Taliban leader in the Swat
valley who is known as the ?Mullah Radio? because of the threats he issues
from an FM transmitter. After claims that he had been wounded, his voice was
heard in mid-July for the first time in several months, albeit more subdued
in tone than before.
Peacekeeping pundits agree that more must be done to pre-empt and counter
the effects of ?hate radio?. Nipping conflict in the bud by silencing dark
propaganda would do a lot of good. If the problem were simply technical, it
would presumably be soluble; an army bristling with space-age gadgetry must
be capable of jamming a crude FM transmitter. But as anybody with experience
of the problem confirms, neutralising nasty broadcasts is not so simple.
In Pakistan?s war zones, a policy based purely on jamming, and confiscating
kit, would upset local Pushtuns, for whom radio is a vital medium.
Transmitters, often using batteries from cars or motorcycles, are easy to
re-establish, says Mukhtar Khan, an analyst with the Jamestown Foundation, a
think-tank in Washington, DC. He thinks the only antidote to hate radio is
rival FM transmissions, run by locals who speak familiar dialects and cater
to local interests, from farming to music.
A similar point is made by Eric Rosenbach, a veteran of American military
intelligence (with knowledge of the Balkans and Iraq) who is now research
director at Harvard University?s Belfer Centre. ?You can even further
alienate a population if you take away their only source of information?but
if you offer something new that?s not obviously artificial, they may grab on
to [it].?
American forces in Afghanistan already seem to be following that advice.
They are making broadcasts of local interest and handing out wind-up radios.
In the world of journalism, meanwhile, some hard thinking is going on about
how to stop abuse of the air waves. Radio Netherlands and Amsterdam
University are refining a proposal for an early-warning system that would
pick up hate-speech broadcasts, including cryptic ones, and at least
mitigate their effects.
But Jan Hoek, who runs the global arm of Radio Netherlands, says he has
grown cautious about lavish Western efforts to promote ?good? media in
places like Rwanda where radio was used for evil ends. It only works, he
says, when locals are in the lead; otherwise the whole effort stops as soon
as funds dry up. Despite these reservations, some fine courageous stations
do now serve the region?such as Radio Okapi, broadcasting from Congo; two of
its journalists have been killed.
For analysts of hate radio and its antidotes, the Balkans provide evidence
of what works. The ?ring around Serbia?, consisting of Serbian-language
broadcasts from neighbouring states, which America helped establish,
probably helped topple Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.
And in 1997, soon after arriving in Bosnia, NATO troops took swift action to
seize transmitters and stop broadcasts by hard-line Serbs opposed to the
Dayton peace deal. By contrast, during the bombing of Serbia in 1999, NATO
lost support when it heavy-handedly hit the state broadcasting building in
Belgrade, killing 16 staff. (A Serbian broadcasting boss was later jailed
for not passing on NATO?s warnings that the building was a target.)
Richard Holbrooke, the broker of the Dayton accord who is now America?s
envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, has named broadcasting as one area where
lessons learned in one war zone must be transferred to others. In the Swat
valley, he noted in March, ?Fazlullah is going round every night
broadcasting the names of people they?re going to behead or have beheaded.
Any of you who have a recent sense of history will know that that?s exactly
what happened with Radio Mille Collines in Rwanda.?

73 Nils, DK8OK

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