When the media helps and when it does not

Ivan A. Hadar, President Indonesian Institute for Democracy Education (IDe), Jakarta

Last year, two dates punctuated a continuing cycle of violence and counter-violence: Sept. 11 in the United States, and the Oct. 7 start of the attack on Afghanistan. The recent "Bali bomb" has affected Indonesia in many dimensions. What is the role of media in continuing or in breaking out of this vicious cycle?

Some days after Sept. 11, a psychologist gave advice on CNN to parents with children asking difficult questions. A young boy had asked "What have we done to make them hate us so much that they do such things?" A mature question, unlike the answer: "You could tell your child that there are good people in the world, and evil."

That boy had arrived at the stage of reciprocity on psychologist Jean Piaget's scale of child development, seeing the actions of others at least partly as influenced by our own actions (and vice versa). Yet the psychologist's answer remained at the early stage of autism, seeing evil actions by others as uninfluenced by anything we do -- as written by Johan Galtung and D. Friedrich in their book this year. You might hear similar answers to such questions everywhere. I heard it not only here, especially from the fundamentalist corner.

Fundamentalism, not only in Islam, and puritanism as the civic religion of the United States, share some common characteristics: Dualism, dividing the world into us and them, without neutrals -- we are good, they are evil; and the inevitability of a final decisive battle to "crush" them, like Armageddon.

A pamphlet last year in North Maluku, found after the attack in New York and Washington, declared Christianization as a religion which "endangers the Muslim community" and "paints Islam as the religion of terrorists." The pamphlet explains much about using religious sentiment of the folk for political ends.

Both use the media as weapons: In war, said Napoleon, the moral element and public relations are half the battle. Both sides use the media as a weapon.

Since early 1999, thousands of people have died in Maluku, in what seems to be a religious war between Christians and Muslims. Over 100,000 have become internally displaced persons. In October 1999, at the peak of the conflict in Ambon, a similar conflict erupted in Halmahera, North Maluku.

The conflict then spread to Ternate, early in November. Dozens died when Muslims went on a rampage after, they believed, their religion was insulted. Three days earlier the same had happened in Tidore. More than 10,000 Christians and ethnic Chinese fled to Manado in North Sulawesi. Since then, fighting has spread to villages in north and south Halmahera.

The conflict was triggered by a pamphlet distributed in Ternate and Tidore that called on Christians to rise up in holy war against Muslims. It urged Christians to convert "ignorant" Muslims. Little wonder people in Tidore were provoked. Very likely the unsigned pamphlet was actually a ploy by militants wising to provoke violence.

With fighting in Ambon, no church leader would want another conflict elsewhere. North Maluku is mostly Muslim, and a move like that would only make Christians easy targets.

Bashy Quraisy, chief editor of Media Watch of the Danish migrants organization Fair Play, has investigated the Western media after Sept. 11. His conclusion: "In the press and Internet media material that I went through from different countries between Sept. 11 and Oct. 12, 2001, most of the Western media used texts, pictures and terminology which did paint Islam as barbaric, fanatical and uncivilized.

"Recently I also made a survey of Danish media coverage of religions in Denmark. From May 15 to Aug. 15, six national newspapers and two national TV channels were researched; 75 percent of media coverage was about Islam and nearly 60 percent of the material were negative."

This uncritical journalism and intentional use of anti-Islam terminology as a tool of propaganda unfortunately had immediate side effects. International terrorism became synonymous with Islam as a religion, Muslims as its followers as its co- habitants.

Attacks on Arab and Asian-looking people have resulted in many deaths of innocent people in various countries; vandalism and looting of property, fire bombing of homes, harassment of jilbab- wearing women and girls on the streets, children in the schools and boycotts of co-workers. Alarm bells started ringing in the halls of Western power bases. President George W. Bush appeared in a mosque in Washington D.C and appealed to Americans to show decency and restraint. He even said that Islam is a religion of peace.

These very commendable gestures did lessen the tension.

Unfortunately, after the Bali tragedy of Oct. 12, many Western political leaders are talking about fundamentalist Islam and terrorism as the main enemy -- in the same breath. The common person in the West may have a hard time distinguishing between fundamentalism and fanaticism. These Western leaders seem unaware that the mere mention of the word fundamentalism might evoke anger among some segments of their populations, which in turn is sometimes quickly and automatically projected on to Islam.

The role and power of the media in a modern society is awesome. Once an information -- right or wrong, manufactured or factual -- goes out to the public, it creates its own rhythm. One can retreat, amend or correct it but you cannot nullify it. A word, spoken written or heard, has its own magic and life.

One may say, it is the consequences of freedom of speech. But there has never been and never would be any form of absolute freedom of expression. It is always linked with responsibility and common sense.

The distinguished journalist and scholar Edmund Lambeth formulated four principles to serve as the foundation for ethics in journalism. These basic principles journalists should serve as inspiration and the basis of media ethics:

o Truth telling must always be paramount;

o freedom for journalistic independence must be maintained;

o justice must combine fairness in reporting as well as exposing of injustices;

o journalists should always address the issue of humanity, and should not be guilty of committing direct, intentional harm to others and they should, wherever possible, prevent suffering.

There will always be many ethnic, cultural and religious problems. However, journalists have to show awareness and sensitivity to avoid being an unwitting instrument of conflict escalation.

Defending religious identity without the extremes of "cultural minimalism" or violent conflict is possible, provided that the non-Muslim, as well as the media in Muslim-dominated countries, accept the condition of democracy and the reality of pluralism.

The thinking journalist's great contribution lies in helping political leaders to re-examine the path via which a modern society gets its pluralistic nature. It should be advanced towards a flexible and open society. Journalists will then become vanguards in society where journalism will not focus on race, culture, religion and color -- but on fellowship of human beings.