Betydningen af ikke-statslige, uafhængige medier, der er vokset frem efter Talibans fald, er revolutionerende. De giver mulighed for en åben debat om alt fra landets sikkerhed til kvindens rolle. Men det er ikke risikofrit at være journalist.
Af Sanjar Sohail udgiver af Hasht e Subh, Afghanistans største avis og
af Janan Mosazai, journalist og menneskerettighedsaktivist.
The rise and impact of non-state, independent media in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban regime cannot be described as less than revolutionary.
The new Afghan media – comprising about 400 TV stations, print publications and radio stations, five mobile phone companies, over 100 internet providers and the most progressive media law in the region – represent the most concrete, most visible and most certain story of post-Taliban success in this otherwise still unstable country.
Now for the first time in the country’s history, this new media scene provides the broadest and most open platform for public debate and awareness of issues close to Afghans’ hearts and minds – from the detailed and nuanced discussion of the country’s current security predicament, talks with the armed insurgency, the need for deep and broad reforms in state structures, the rights and role of Afghan women in public life to a multitude of other social, political and cultural issues.
The Afghan media scene, of course, isn’t free of serious challenges. The fragile security conditions threaten the physical safety of Afghan journalists. Local strongmen, some government officials and the armed insurgents beat, threaten, intimidate and kill journalists who come into direct clash with their interests; at least 16 Afghan journalists, including three female reporters, have lost their lives in the past nine years.
All this has resulted in a kind of self-censorship. Perhaps as another sign of the nascence of this new Afghan media, journalists overwhelmingly focus on the coverage of daily news, often at the cost of digging deeper into issues critical to the country’s future.
Specific hurdles for women’s issues
When it comes to coverage of Afghan women and their issues, Afghan journalists face three quite specific additional hurdles: cultural sensitivities towards raising women’s issues publicly in the news media often viewed as part of a Western plot to take Afghan women out of their homes, lack of access to women in the unsafe areas to report on their issues, and the severe underrepresentation of female managers among Afghan media.
Overcoming these hurdles obviously requires better security, the hiring of more female media managers and more culturally sensitive reporting of women’s issues. Next to this, the Afghan media we believe has a major advocacy role to play when it comes to women’s issues.
This advocacy can be best manifested in making women’s issues a daily topic of public discussion through more and better reporting, better and close cooperation with civil society organizations and activists. A fairly successful example of this is the media’s cooperation with “The 50% Campaign,” a young, women-led initiative to increase female participation in politics and other walks of public life.
Making this sort of media-driven advocacy effective requires better training for Afghan journalists on the substance of the issues that most directly affect women’s lives.
This sort of advocacy, for example, would include sustained, investigative and reporting on problems faced by Afghan women in the justice sector in order to make their access to and treatment in the formal court system easier and more fair.
Another example is the documentation of the unique health and economic suffering of Afghan women during the country’s thirty-year war to refocus attention on the urgent need of improving health and welfare services for them.
