Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA - General (theory, practice and history)
Propaganda for Peace by K Spicer 
Propaganda for Peace By Keith Spicer The following ran as an op-ed piece in the New York Times of Dec.10, 1994. Hate campaigns on Serbian and Croatian television helped brew Bosnia's horrors.The Hutus' Radio Mille Collines ordered half a million murders and a death march of two million Rwandans. The United Nations staggers under an unpaid peacekeeping bill of nearly a billion dollars. Yet the instruments that keep running up the bill - military interposition, humanitarian aid, economic embargoes, diplomacy - all fail to end root conflicts. Could the U.N. head off or stop ethnic wars by mobilizing airwaves that are too often used to set them off? Used against (and by) dictators and demagogues, broadcasts are subversive. That's why Serbian aggressors put such a high priority on destroying or capturing Bosnian radio and TV stations. And that's why the Hutus set up a mobile radio transmitter 24 hours after the U.N. stopped Radio Mille Collines. Unlike printed media, both radio and TV reach all social and cultural groups, especially the illiterate or poorly educated, whom dictators so easily manipulate. Broadcasts can convey anti-racist facts and perspectives in the same powerful way that hate is peddled. They are fairly inexpensive; they require only a modest amount of equipment and supplies, and only a few staff members. They are hard to silence. And they risk no lives, or very few. How could the U.N., and perhaps NATO and other regional security organizations, make electronic peacekeeping work? Broadcasting can help stifle ethnic conflict before and during armed combat. Networks of "early warning" volunteers could advise the U.N.'s 24-hour situation center of hate campaigns that preach violence. Such networks are already run informally by independent media groups. The Security Council could order a new, well-equiped media section in its Department of Peacekeeping Operations to broadcast corrective news and views to places inundated with aggressive propaganda. At the heart of such an effort - call it propaganda for peace - should be a handful of experts in the use of the media for war and peace. They should be trained in politics, mass psychology and traditional and unconventional warfare. If war broke out despite their effort, the department would have standing authority to ship transmitters and media experts to the region to fight back with facts and balanced comment. In some situations, saving lives might temporarily demand jamming or incapacitating mass killers' transmitters. But the emphasis should always be on freedom: on countering evil voices, not silencing them. At both stages, volunteers from the West's private media aid organizations - for example, Article 19 in England and Reporters sans frontières in France - could be enlisted to bring their beliefs, resources and specialties to help the U.N. Why hasn't the U.N. taken up information diplomacy as an obvious and routine peacekeeping instrument? First, because some governments may still not believe that transmitters can save as many lives as soldiers or relief supplies.They ask: Isn't broadcasting some kind of public relations frill - like the U.N.'s Department of Public Information? The analogy is wrong. Public relations has nothing to do with peacekeeping. Second, cynics argue that a few chummy broadcasts won't sway people with blood in their eyes. If so, why the dictators' frenzy to prevent any syllable of peaceful talk? Third, some governments fear that allowing radio and TV to invade so-called sovereign airwaves might one day be turned against them. That's why the West backed Serbia against free Bosnian journalists who tried to use unauthorized frequencies to broadcast factual peace propaganda on the "pirate" radio ship Droit de Parole. But shouldn't the frequency of death in wartime override niceties of radio frequencies? Fourth, the U.N.'s Legal Directorate, conservative as are all legal departments, sees no mandate for such untraditional roles. The Security Council should instruct U.N. lawyers to devise new theories, as they always can, to fit the needs of their political masters. A few journalists may be skittish about anything that seems to involve the news media in public purposes. But we're not talking about corrupting the media.We're talking about using technology, a few volunteers and some vision - all at a pittance - to stop ethnic bloodbaths. We're talking about using our heads to stop wars that always start, and end, in somebody's head. |