By Peter Goldstein
Project Director, AudienceScapes

March 11, 2010

(Washington, D.C.)--Should radio stations set up by UN peacekeeping missions continue to operate after the missions end? Bill Orme, a consultant and former head of external communications at the UNDP, thinks so. Presenting a paper on the subject at the Center for International Media Assistance, Orme pointed out that peacekeeping-derived stations in many conflict and post-conflict countries become dominant media outlets which are sorely missed when the UN pulls the plug. "There is no real exit or transition strategy" for these stations, he said.

This is particularly true in Africa, where there are currently UN radio operations in Liberia, Ivory Coast, Chad, Sierra Leone, Sudan-Darfur, and DR Congo. In many cases, Orme asserted, "without question, [UN stations] are the dominant radio stations in the country."

Orme advised to keep an eye on Sierra Leone, where an experiment is under way to extend the life of a UN radio operation as it evolves into a public outlet. Orme said the Sierra Leonean legislature passed a law in late 2009 to create a new national broadcasting corporation, which is effectively dissolving the current public broadcaster and initiate oversight of a new station built from the remnants of the UN peacekeeping radio (read more about it in the AudienceScapes Profile of Sierra Leone popular radio stations. You can also read the complete country communication profile for Sierra Leone).

Orme calls on the UN to complement its peacekeeping mandate with a media development mandate of sorts . As stated in his report, "The UN should approach creation of a national broadcasting service as part of the UN's institution-building responsibilities in post-conflict countries," in addition to the post-conflict work it routinely does in electoral systems, human rights and democracy-building.

This raises some interesting issues, notably: should the UN peacekeeping operation's mandates be broadened to encompass media development? Are such decisions being made in the context of a deeper understanding of a given country's media, governance and institution-building needs? More significantly, what guarantee is there that a radio station with a powerful signal handed over to a public entity will not eventually become a propaganda tool for a future government?

Orme was joined by Joshua Marks, Central Africa program officer at the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy, in calling for preservation of the relatively successful Radio Okapi, run in partnership with the Switzerland-based Fondation Hirondelle. "In the next couple of years, it is likely that Okapi could go down the tubes, and turn into something much less by 2011," Marks warned.