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Standing up for media's full democratic role

Thursday, August 20, 2009

SETTING OUT TO WATCH today’s elections in Afghanistan, it’s hard not to be anxious. With six election workers, as well as six American troops, reported to have met their deaths in the twenty-four hours before polls opened this morning, it’s understandable that in international overview reports the dominant headlines should express fears like “Afghan Nerves Shaken Over Vote”.

There can be few intimidatory challenges to the democratic process quite as stark, after all, as the Taliban’s gruesome threat to cut off a finger of anyone who goes to the polls – the finger that is stained with indelible dye (pictured above) to signify a vote cast.

 

But official reaction to such inescapable electoral anxiety is clumsily wrong-headed. The Afghan government has gone so far as to order by decree that broadcast media outlets do not air news of any election-day attacks that could, indeed are inevitably bound to happen. Its blind rationale is that such reports would discourage turnout (even more, presumably, than the discouragement caused by menaces and actual violence already perpetrated).

 

My experience of reporting elections that took place in atmospheres of real or anticipated violence has taught me that if people are determined to vote - or indeed are understandably reluctant to do so - their intentions are not going to be changed by seeing the day's TV news.

 

Oddly, perhaps, out of all the elections I’ve covered against a background of bloodshed, it was South Africa’s rightly-celebrated 1994 election (giving Nelson Mandela his historic presidency) that turned out to be the only one where I've ever been obliged to wear Kevlar body-armor.

 

During the month before that vote, election-related violence was running at the rate of 10 deaths per day. On one especially terrible day I recall, a march by Zulu nationalists in opposition to Mandela ended in violence that claimed 34 lives and left hundreds wounded.

 

And yet, as we all know, an astonishing 88% of registered voters, comprising some 20 million people, showed up to vote on the appointed day, forming lines stretching for miles, many hours before polls opened. Thus the people ushered in a wholly new, non-racial, democratic era for their previously long-benighted country.

 

  

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IN AFGHANISTAN THE NATIONAL MEDIA, like the Pajhwok Afghan News agency, and Tolo TV have developed a valuable and admirable degree of independence, even in the face of ever-more heavy-handed (as well as corrupt) rule under incumbent President Hamid Karzai. Such independence is of course a quintessential dimension to the democratic event itself that unfolds today, whatever the security conditions may be.

 

Rahimullah Samander, head of the Independent Journalists’ Association of Afghanistan, is surely right to insist his members will defy the official order and “continue with our normal reporting and broadcasting of news”. He has pointed out in common-sense terms the counterproductive nature of the clampdown: “If there is, for example, an attack on a highway going to a polling station, the people should know about it. It may be dangerous for them to use that highway."

 

International media operatives too, who are threatened with expulsion by the Foreign Ministry if they don’t also observe the same order, are equally – and gratifyingly – determined to stick to and fully demonstrate their real purpose here.  John Daniszewski, an international editor at the Associated Press could hardly have put it better, in saying that with the government gag, “reports of any violence will be spread by rumor and word of mouth” in place of genuine and reliable news.

 

This of course would, in all likelihood, have what Daniszewski calls an “even more chilling" effect on people’s willingness to vote.

 

To try and rule by public ignorance - even for just one day, possibly the political calendar 's most critical day, no less - is surely the height of folly in a national leader. Afghan voters might understandably add both idiocy and despotism, as well as the Karzai regime's well-attested corruption, to their reasons for suporting another candidate ... if they do, in spite of everything, get to the polls today.

 

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