Radio for the refugees
By Thorne Anderson Posted Wed, Sep 1 1999
“I don’t know if I can do this much longer,” Fetah Bakija tells me as he wipes a bead of sweat from his forehead with the tip of his microphone. It’s 11 a.m. in the Olimpia camp for nearly 3,000 Kosovo deportees on the outskirts of Tirana, Albania. Bakija places a tape in his recorder and presses “play.” We listen to a minute or two of folk music from Kosovo before he rewinds the tape to record over it. “I’m old, and I’m getting older in this camp,” Bakija says. He’s 54.
Bakija, an ethnic Albanian who was forced out of his home in Pristina by Serb police, is a reporter for Radio SPEAR (Support Program for Emergency Assistance by Radio), a non-profit effort to bring news and humanitarian feature stories to the people of Albania and Kosovo.
Radio SPEAR is a project of Media Action International, a Geneva-based organization formed in May by the merger of the International Centre for Humanitarian Reporting and Radio Partnership. SPEAR produces the half-hour of broadcasting time with a paid staff of 10 Albanian journalists and technicians and two Kosovar journalists. Radio Tirana, which produces programs 24 hours a day, donates a half hour of time at 6:30 each night to broadcast the Radio SPEAR program without charge. Because the program is broadcast on both FM and short-wave frequencies, it can be picked up by Albanians far beyond the Balkans.
SPEAR is made possible through technical and financial support from IREX (The International Research and Exchanges Board), the Albanian Media Institute, the International Rescue Committee, UNICEF and the Soros Foundation. Albanian and Kosovar psychologists and the World Health Organization provide programming advice and assistance.
As a humanitarian broadcast, SPEAR serves as a complement and a model for mainstream media. In December 1998, ICHR organized presentations by humanitarian media producers in a workshop titled “Strengthening Lifeline Media in Regions of Conflict” in Capetown, South Africa. The workshop concluded that there is a need to “influence the mainstream news media, both in the developed and developing world. The role of the media in conflict is changing and becoming increasingly pro-active. ... It is the hope of the workshop that media projects for peace-building will become a normal practice of mainstream media.”
SPEAR Project Manager Maria Frauenrath is the successor to Tim Weaver who, together with Loretta Hieber, provided the initial direction and supervision of the project. Frauenrath, with a history in print journalism and five years of BBC World Service behind her, is no newcomer to conflict reporting and has worked in relief service in Gaza, Sudan, Kenya and Somalia for three years. “My real profession is journalism,” she’s careful to point out. “Working in relief shows you what kind of impact media can make.”
Maintaining a high standard of journalism at Radio SPEAR, where many of the reporters are young and mostly inexperienced, is made easier through daily one-on-one training with experienced professionals whose services are funded by ProMedia, an adjunct of the IREX organization.
Sheldon Markoff, ProMedia resident adviser, says ProMedia and the project directors strive to bring journalists to a level of competency consistent with international standards of reporting. “The level of journalism that currently exists in Albania is generally quite low. It is based on innuendo, slander and supposition. Seldom is there any balance,” he says. “Radio SPEAR is a news program. The features have a humanitarian aspect, but our job doesn’t change much. It’s journalism. The subject of your reporting doesn’t matter. It should be accurate and fair.”
Markoff’s training colleague, Andrea Stefani, a well-known Albanian economics reporter with distinguished Western journalism experience, says the training of the Albanian journalists is as important as the Radio SPEAR programming itself. “We want to make a long-term investment in the country, not just in this radio project,” Stefani says.
Radio SPEAR devotes the first 10 minutes of each broadcast to a political news bulletin gathered from Western and local sources, but the bulk of the programming is focused on meeting more specific informational and psychological needs of its listeners. “Many refugees are very keen on politics, but other media are doing that,” Frauenrath says. “I think the mainstream and commercial media are not interested in the detail we cover. You need space and time to explain the details of refugee life.”
Following the news bulletin, Radio SPEAR includes roughly 10 minutes of topical stories on such issues as refugee registration and relocation processes, camp winterization projects, or even appeals of Kosovars searching for lost family members. There is also a daily 10-minute newsmagazine of extended social feature stories, which are often about the psychological effects of the conflict.
Today in Olimpia camp, Bakija is working on a newsmagazine feature for a twice-weekly series called “I Hope,” which deals with the conflict’s traumas. For today’s feature, Bakija talks with people who have lost members of their family either to death or to uncertainty.
I follow Bakija between rows of uniform-white mobile shelters as he searches for interviews. We stoop to duck the clotheslines, which zigzag at irregular intervals across the straight, dusty pathways.
Bakija was a well-known reporter for TV Pristina for 14 years before he was fired from his job when Kosovo lost its autonomy in 1990. He is met with recognition and affection as we move through the camp, and it’s not difficult to find people who are willing to talk to him.
In this camp without trees, Bakija crouches with his interviewees in the narrow strips of shade under the eaves of the mobile shelters. An old woman speaks and then sobs into Bakija’s microphone about her grandson who was killed by Serb police. The woman apologizes for crying and tells us that she is sick of crying every day, but she can’t stop it. Tears glaze Bakija’s eyes in empathy, and we move on.
Another family who is missing several members crowds Bakija in front of their shelter. “We know our son is dead,” one man says. “He’s gone. But it’s more difficult for us not to know about the others. That’s our greatest pain at the moment.” Bakija attempts to interview the widow of the son. She looks as if she’d like to speak, but no words come, and in a minute or so she simply stands and walks away.
Bakija looks wilted in the summer heat as we leave the family. “This job is very difficult for me,” he says. “You see. They begin to speak, and they begin to cry. And I cry. I know what it means to be a refugee. I don’t just see these problems like a journalist. I feel them. This can make it more difficult to be a journalist in the traditional sense. But for this humanitarian reporting, it makes it easier.”
Frauenrath hopes that the broadcast of stories like these, coupled with expert advice from psychologists, can help to ease some of the people’s psychological burdens. “Our mission is to inform and to assist,” she says. “We inform people and perhaps even lift their spirits from time to time. Many of these people think they’re going crazy, but their situation is normal, and we try to help them understand that,” she says.
In an attempt to get its message directly back to those in the refugee camps, SPEAR, in cooperation with UNICEF, has distributed 2,500 windup radios in the camps. The radios require no electricity or batteries. “We know people are listening to us. More and more people have been calling us, the last few days especially. They ask for, and sometimes offer, more information,” Frauenrath says. In one case, in response to a story Radio SPEAR broadcast about the World Food Program, a group of Kosovar bakers contacted the station to ask for ways to help when they go back to Kosovo. “We’ve made our contact,” Frauenrath says, “and I know we can help.”
Back in Tirana, Bakija leads me into a tidy compound in an otherwise underattended neighborhood. A plastic sign on the front building reads, “Albanian Rehabilitation Center for Torture Victims.” On a bench outside one office, two teen-age girls sit side by side and stare at the wall in front of them. Each of them bears an identical fresh scar from ear to chin on the left side of her face. I don’t ask.
We enter one of the examination rooms, where three doctors talk among themselves in Albanian. The only words I understand are the carefully enunciated “post-traumatic stress disorder.” A stack of shelves is loaded with mood-altering drugs that have queer, unsettling brand names: Stablon, Omnifix, Zoloft, Vivalan, Humoryl.
The doctors, I discover later, were talking about a man who just left their office. The man comes nearly every day because he is obsessed with thinking about his border-crossing experience. Serb police had taken his son, the last remaining heir in the family. The old man begged them to give back his son, and the police told him they’d exchange him for one of his daughters. One of the daughters heard this and agreed to go in order to save the family lineage. The police took her, kept the son and forced the rest of the family across the border.
Bakija and one of the psychologists move to a conference room where we listen to the recordings from Olimpia camp. The grandmother’s sobs sound tinny in the empty room. When the tape finishes, Bakija resumes recording, and the psychologist tells him that it’s important for people to talk about their trauma — to share it with someone else. That is the first step to relieving their burden. I find myself thinking that this is exactly what these people were doing with Bakija during the interviews. The process of reporting has perhaps initiated the first step in healing.
When Bakija returns to the newsroom he unwinds with his fellow reporters, most of them half his age. He’s still talking about the young widow in the camp who couldn’t find the voice to speak with him. There’s more talking, more healing.
Bakija says he intends to found a television center in Pristina as soon as possible. The center’s news programming, Bakija says, will contain fair information without political comment. “Kosovo has never had something like this on television,” he says. It’s an old dream of Bakija’s, but now he includes in his vision a strong component of social/humanitarian programming. Since the peace agreement, Radio SPEAR has continued to focus on humanitarian issues, and now Bakija files reports from Kosovo.
“This experience has made me a better reporter,” he says. “I know now that journalists have two responsibilities: to give information, yes, but we must also give hope. Without hope people are lost.”