PEACE AND CONFLICT REPORTING for PC

Media can serve good or evil purposes. For conflict resolvers, media is usually seen as a threat, keen to pounce on any indiscreet or conciliatory remarks by the negotiators and publish them without any thought of the consequences. This is why the Oslo Peace Accords in the Middle East and the Dayton Accords which ended the Bosnian War took place as far away from the media as possible.

Examples of media inflaming conflicts

1. Hitler used the media to create an entire worldview of hatred for Jews, homosexuals and other minority groups.

2. During the Rwandan genocide, a community radio urged listeners to pick up machetes and take to the street to kill what they called the cockroaches.

3. Broadcasters in Balkans polarized local communities to the point where violence became an acceptable tool for addressing grievances.

4. Vernacular radios in Kenya incited their communities to rise against other communities during the 2007/2008 post-election violence.

Media in peace-building

1. The CNN played a role in the withdrawal of American troops from Somalia in the 1990s by showing graphic pictures of the bodies of American solders being dragged along the street.

2. During the 2017 elections in Kenya, Ushahidi platform helped keep people safe, by informing them about the places to avoid and where there were riots or unrest.

3. Radio Douentza in Mali managed to prevent conflicts between the pastrolist communities and the settled farmers.

a). They developed a series of public service announcements reminding the farmers and the herders about their traditional collaboration and advising restraint.

b). They reported any incidents very promptly so that the local administration could intervene before the conflict got out of hand.

c). They encouraged farmers to post messages on the radio as to when they would be finished harvesting so that the herders who were listening to radio could safely move across these particular fields.

3. Radio Agatashya in Bukavu (Zaire) was very instrumental in peace building in Rwanda. It countered the calls for hatred during the genocide for not taking sides with any group. It rapidly earned a nickname "the radio that doesn't take sides."

4. Studio Ijambo which was introduced in 1995 in Burundi to assist in curbing the negative effects of mid-1990s hate radio in the African Great Lakes region has transformed the methods in which media gathered news and trained journalists. Under the slogan "Dialogue is the future", the studio has produced media content that directly addresses the roots of regional conflict.

5. The @Ma3Route (On Twitter) platform in Kenya shares information from citizens on which roads to avoid.

This toolkit is aimed at equipping reporters with knowledge, skills to transform conflicts through their way of reporting.