[Swprograms] Radio Afghanistan

["Eric Floden" <ericf@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

article located at: http://www.thetyee.ca/Fisheye/current/Jabal+Saraj.htm 

Good Morning Jabal Saraj! 

What difference could a radio station make in Afghanistan? A Vancouver 
non-profit helped find out. 

Thu., May. 13, 2004 

By Christopher Grabowski 

GALLERY (click on THIS button from the URL, & you get some great pictures! 
-ef) 


TheTyee.ca
Words and pictures by Christopher Grabowski 


The Solh radio station is a pale yellow cube, two stories high. It is the 
last human-made structure on the northern edge of the Shomali Plains, about 
80 km north of Kabul. Beyond it, the massive mountains of the Hindu Kush 
rise steeply and quickly reach 12,000 feet. 

The cook and the engineer sleep downstairs in the meeting room. They get up 
early; eat flat bread and one hardboiled egg each for breakfast end clear 
the room before the rest of the radio crew arrive from town. 

The station's director, Zakiya Zaki, comes around 9 a.m., takes off her blue 
burka and turns on the red radio powered by a car battery.  She listens to 
several news broadcasts in Dari and makes notes. These notes, and the notes 
made by her deputy Ibrahim Kawish who listens to BBC and Voice of America at 
midnight, are the basis of the station's morning broadcast. 

It is how the town of Jabal Saraj and surrounding villages learn about 
national Afghani affairs and the world beyond. In the rural communities of 
the Parvan province, illiteracy reaches 70 percent. There are no newspapers, 
no television and no telephones. 

Radio Solh came into existence in October 2001 as the result of an agreement 
between the French organization, Droit de Parole (Right to Speak), and Ahmed 
Shah Massoud, a charismatic warlord of the Panjsheer Valley. It was the 
first independent radio station in the country, and still one of only a few 
in Afghanistan. Today, besides Zakiya, there are three other women among 
Radio Solh's staff: announcer Doshiza, who is also a nurse in the town's 
clinic, reporter Salma, and Muzda who prepares and reads daily English 
lessons on air. 

In January 2002, two Canadians from the Vancouver-based nonprofit Institute 
for Media, Policy and Civil Society, Jane McElhone and John Keating, went to 
Jabal Saraj for ten days to provide journalistic training for the Radio Solh 
staff. Zakiya Zaki says this training gave her and her crew the necessary 
professional background for preparing the local news and reporting. Having 
such ability, Radio Solh became a truly functional community radio station. 

Land mines the new harvest 

Once a breadbasket of Afghanistan, the Shomali Plains are scarred by years 
of war. Thousands of landmines have made patches of the fertile land into 
no-go zones. The ancient but practical irrigation system was blasted over 
and again by retreating armies. Many settlements turned into ghost towns, as 
the land could no longer sustain life. 

Jabal Saraj was the war-front town many times in the past two decades. The 
Taliban's rockets hit the town's small hydropower plant, with museum quality 
Siemens turbines from the beginning of the 20th century. A similar fate 
befell the cement factory and the textile factory with its machines build in 
England in 1941. This sums up most of the region's industry. At the entrance 
to the boy's school, an enormous wreck of a heavy Russian tank makes an 
unintended, intimidating monument of the Northern Alliance's last battle 
with the Taliban. Boys pay it as much attention as to a boulder, some sit in 
its shadow to review their homework after classes. 

Station's dynamo producer 

In Tajik dominated Parvan province, women are more socially active and 
independent than in the provinces to the South and West, where ? Zakiya Zaki 
pointed out ? "they still can't broadcast women singing on the radio." In 
Parvan she herself is a cultural and political force to reckon with. A 
one-time member of National Assembly Loya Jirga, she splits her time among 
being a mother of six, a headmistress of the girls' school and a radio 
producer. 

When she recorded at the school a conversation with one of her students, 17 
year-old Nazifa, about a hundred girls crowded around absorbing the unusual 
event. It was a sad interview. Nazifa, a victim of a land mine, talked about 
living in constant pain, being afraid that she will become a burden to her 
family, and her wish that she had died in the blast that took her legs. The 
tragedy only briefly registered in the expressions of the girls surrounding 
them, unable to hide their excitement, they quickly reverted to subdued 
chatting and giggling. 

Radio Solh frequently accommodates kids in its broadcasts. A couple of times 
a week, groups of girls and boys climb the winding path to the top of the 
small hill above the town where the station sits. They sing and chant poetry 
to mark occasions like the anniversary of Massoud's death. The kids have no 
political agenda and their presence on the air does not upset the delicate 
balance between dozens of political and ethnic groups that the radio needs 
to consider in its programming. 

Warlords told hands off 

The station earns a little money from advertising local businesses like a 
new restaurant and a dress store. It charges about $2.50 Canadian per 
minute. More substantial support comes in occasionally from several 
non-governmental organizations like Aide Medicale Internationale that 
broadcasted basic health education announcements in cooperation with Radio 
Solh. 

Radio Solh's staff volunteers most of the time. Their station is still a 
fragile experiment.  Its independence is a function of support from the 
community. The elders of several clans repeatedly warned local warlords to 
leave the station alone. Along with some fuel for the generator, that's all 
the people are able to give to their radio station. In return, the community 
receives fresh local news and a sense of coherence resulting from being able 
to tell their own stories and have them broadcasted in a radius of about 50 
km. 

With a significant part of Afghanistan's infrastructure bombed and 
re-bombed, quite literally, into the Stone Age, and the political system in 
a good part of the country reverted to the middle-ages stage, with warlords 
of different rank holding the balance of power, one could regard Radio Solh 
as some sort of token independent media. Perhaps it's true. 

It is also true that this little radio station transmitting voices of 
several women at the foot of the Hindu Kush is a testimony to the inherent 
ability of communities and clans in the mountain valleys and northern 
Shomali Plains to constantly find ways to build consensus at the village 
level ? the trait that surely allowed them to survive and preserve their 
culture for hundreds of years. 


Vancouver-based Christopher Gabowski is organizing a documentary exhibition 
on Afghanistan by four Canadian photographers, planned for September. He 
publishes photo-stories in North American and European print media, and is a 
founding director of Narrative 360, a non-profit society for documentary 
arts. 

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