Learning peace journalism from Manado

Learning peace journalism from Manado

Jake Lynch, Reporting the World, London, jakemlynch@aol.com

If there is one group of people in Indonesia whose lives have
changed most dramatically since the fall of the New Order
government four years ago, it must be journalists. News crews
played an important part in the process of change by bringing us
pictures of demonstrations against the regime, for the first time
on television, in November 1998; since then, images and
experiences of conflict have been seared into the minds of many
reporters from many areas, as our recent training workshops made
clear.

One correspondent, from Kalimantan, told how a Dayak gang
forced him to eat the heart of one of their victims; another had
made good his escape from a rampaging mob in Ambon only by posing
as a member of the state intelligence service.

With so many conflict zones to choose from, why did we end up
in Manado for a field trip in peace journalism? Manado, the
capital of North Sulawesi, is known as one of the safest places
in Indonesia. To European eyes, it resembles nothing so much as a
hotter version of Switzerland -- sweeping mountainsides, dense
forests and deep blue waters. In place of fairy-tale castles, the
landscape is dotted with Manado's fantastical white churches,
glistening in the tropical sun.

In fact, Manado offers important lessons about both conflict
and peace. Yes, like Switzerland, North Sulawesi has managed to
avoid the violence engulfing its neighbors. In North Maluku and
Ambon to the East, and Poso to the South, Muslims and Christians
ended up at each other's throats -- but not here. Just across the
Sulawesi Sea lies the troubled Philippine province of Mindanao,
wracked by what the outside world sees as a "Muslim separatist"
struggle.

What's at stake for such a community is not the absence of
conflict but the capacity to respond with non-violent means. The
word "conflict" is often used, in news reports, as a synonym for
fighting or violence. Understanding the difference is crucial to
peace journalism. In an analytical sense, conflict simply means
two or more parties pursuing incompatible goals. In the words of
Johan Galtung, the globe-trotting professor who coined the peace
journalism concept, conflict is "a ubiquitous phenomenon in human
and social reality".

The "peace journalists" descended on Manado to try to find out
how this beautiful city has managed to live with conflict, within
and without -- and yet avoided lapsing into the violence
afflicting surrounding areas across a radius of hundreds of
miles.

Peace, in Manado, is something many people are actively
working at, all the time. They include religious leaders, coming
together to give messages of tolerance and mutual understanding
to their followers.

Relief agencies have worked to prevent the trauma brought
here, in the minds of refugees from North Maluku, from festering,
and potentially inflaming religious sensibilities in Manado
itself. The journalists filed some great stories based on
interviews with Christian children, singing Christian songs in a
refugee camp, led by a Muslim teacher wearing a jilbab (veil).

There was no shortage of "hard news" either. This was the time
of the Bali bomb, and Manado had its own explosion on the same
night. Its location -- outside the Philippines consulate --
seemed to portend infiltration by outsiders, intent on drawing
Manado into political struggles which have taken on a religious
overtone.

The incident drew a show of strength from the city's militia
groups; prominent among them, Brigade Manguni, the "Night Owls"
of North Sulawesi. Their rampage through the streets, hundreds
clinging to open-topped vehicles, wearing black t-shirts and
shouting at the top of their voices, looked both spectacular and
slightly sinister.

Listen carefully to these people, though, and they project a
sort of muscular communitarianism, which may not be as
threatening as their appearance suggests. What would they do, if,
for instance, any of their members discovered "outsiders" in
Manado? Why, hand them over to the authorities. If they keep
their word -- and the signs are that, so far, broadly speaking,
they have -- then that would at least represent a step forward
from the situation in other, more troubled parts, where a lack of
trust in the police has led to people taking the law into their
own hands.

In Manado, police were just beginning to carry out sweeps for
ID cards, something the militias have been calling for, but there
were fears that this could prove divisive. Word on the street was
that, if you wanted accreditation, you had to pay considerably
more than the official going rate of Rp 5,000, or face an
interminable wait. Those without papers were likely to be the
marginalized poor, like refugees who now cling to one of the
lowest rungs of the economic ladder as street vendors.

So conflict issues are a fact of everyday life. But
journalists are not the only ones now taking an interest in
cities like Manado where such issues seem to be successfully
defused before they lead to violence. The United Nations has
seized on a new book, Ethnic conflict and civic life, by Ashutosh
Varshney, an Indian political scientist based at the University
of Michigan.

The book offers a sociological profile of Peaceful Cities in
India, which identifies several common characteristics. One is
that members of different sections of the community mingle freely
in civic society. Whilst in Manado, we watched a game in the
local volleyball league. Some players were Christian, some
Muslim; the match took place in the shadow of a beautiful church,
with a local ulema among the spectators.

Journalists were making their own contribution. In Ambon,
notoriously, the giant Jawa Pos group runs both a Christian and a
Muslim newspaper, each of which has often adopted a strident
sectarian stance. Here, there is just one Jawa Pos group
newspaper, the Manado Post, and every day it has a double-page
spread called Teropong -- "Lens" -- devoted to cross-cutting
religious issues. A Muslim and a Christian journalist form the
dynamic two-person team responsible for it.

The theory of Peaceful Cities tells us how they are helping;
anyone -- including journalists -- could do something practical
for peace at any time. Satish Mishra, head of the UN Support
Facility for Indonesian Recovery, told the New York Times: "We
thought this method could apply to the dynamics of Indonesia;
Varshney's findings raise the possibilities of future peace."

Now that would be a story worth telling.

The writer recently led a training program in peace journalism
for the British Council in Jakarta. The above is a shortened
version of an article prepared for the Inside Indonesia magazine.