By IPS Correspondents
KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 24 2005 (IPS)

Hopes for a Non-aligned News Network (NNN) have been rekindled at a ministerial meeting of non-aligned countries here, this week, but the hurdles it faces are very different from those existing when the idea was first floated, in the heady days before the collapse of the Soviet empire.

Today, advantages include leapfrogging technology, such as the Internet, greater wealth among non-aligned countries and a better perceived need for a multi-polar world with independent voices, especially after the disastrous war in Iraq.

Politically, there is now Tuesday’s ‘Kuala Lumpur Declaration on NAM Information and Communication Collaboration”- which eerily echoes the old call for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO)-that has already formed the platform for the creation of the NNN, with funding and support from Malaysia and its sophisticated Bernama news agency.

Bernama will host the NNN at its headquarters here, while Malaysia, current chair of the 114-member, Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) has pledged an undisclosed sum of money to help get it off the ground.

“Each country should have the right and freedom to tell its own story from its own perspective, and to have the means to do so,” said Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi, in a keynote address delivered to the two-day conference, attended by 70 member countries.

Themed “Advancing Information and Communication Collaboration Towards a more Dynamic NAM”, the conference was convened nine years after the fifth meeting of information ministers in Abuja, Nigeria in 1996.

Malaysia hosted the 13th Conference of Heads of State or Government of the Non-Aligned Countries in 2003. It sees the NNN project as a contribution to revitalising the movement, since the break up of the Soviet Union created an identity crisis for a grouping set up in the 1950s as a bulwark against pressures from the then bipolar world.

The setting up of the NNN will involve the installation of a server and other start-up facilities, which the Malaysian government will bear. Bernama’s features and foreign news services, which has some experience in handling such websites and multilateral news exchange arrangements, will help to start this off, even offering the use of its digitised photo department, which has built up a database of over two million photos.

“Resources of many smaller news organisations can be shared and pooled together, creating a viable news source alternative to the mainstream giants,’’ the declaration said.

The declaration included much of the rhetoric of the 1970s and early 1980s, at the height of the campaign by the NAM at the United Nations Educational Scientific and Educational Organisation (UNESCO) for a NWICO, which was effectively crippled by the withdrawal of the United States and Britain from the U.N. agency in 1984, depriving it of a third of its budget.

Once the NNN website is up and running, any accredited news agency or newspaper from NAM countries can upload stories and pictures to the website on a 24-hour basis, and they can also download and print any stories from others available on the site, with due credit given to its source.

When it is running on full steam, the website is expected to have up to 300 stories a day available for publication.

Bernama will appoint, for the NNN, a news director with at least 20 years experience, three regional editors and a board of directors chosen from NAM countries.

While disparities in news and information flow between the North and the South may now be worse than during the cold war days, NAM members are confident that NWICO has a better chance of success today, because many developing countries now have the capacity to create a more balanced flow once there is political will among member nations.

Indeed, this is exactly what Malaysia is proposing, in offering to host and fund much of the infrastructure of the NNN, which will spearhead this new move towards a NWICO, using the Internet for dissemination of news.

“It will be a news network focused on our countries from our own eyes,’’ said Abdul Kadir Shiekh Fadzir, Information Minister of Malaysia, adding, “we can’t be blaming the West all the time. Sometimes the truth may be hurtful for us, but, we need to be a credible news agency, so ultimately even the West will come to us to get credible news about us from our own perspective”.

An earlier attempt to create a Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool (NANAP), begun by India in the 1980s and later taken over by Iran, went dormant in the 1990s, as focus shifted from the need of the West to contain communism to containing rising Islamic fundamentalism. .

Morteza Granghadt, Asia-Pacific Editor of the Islamic Republic News Agency of Iran, told IPS that in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many NAM members lost interest in an alternative news agency.

But, now, seeing how the “western media wages war against developing countries using the media”, they have come to realise that news flow cannot be left to under the control of a handful of powerful Western countries, he said. “NNN is a good example of how we could use new information technology to respond to this threat”.

Information Ministers and delegates from several countries expressed similar views.

‘’Disinformation is silent and continuous terrorism,” argued Ernesto Lopez Dominguez, president of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television. “It qualifies as mental genocide, as it deprives audiences from ideas and arguments on key issues for their own existence”.

Disinformation could cause alienation and identify an alleged enemy, and “under that deceit, atrocious acts, such as extermination and plunder of land, plots or coup d-etats, subversion, interference in internal affairs of states and wars and conquests” can be conducted, he added.

This view was endorsed by Syria’s Information Minister Mahdi Dakhlallah, who said that with all the negative reports about his country in the Western media, “we will not be surprised if Syria is blamed for causing the tsunami in Asia, earthquake in Pakistan and even the bird flu”.

Asked about the need to sensitise editors in developing country newsrooms on the importance of giving alternative viewpoints to that of Western news agencies more space in their newspapers, Fadzir said that the NNN project would be looking at organising regional seminars and symposiums to this end.

“We need to have a paradigm shift,” argued South Africa’s Minister of Communications Ivy Matsepe, who believes that tertiary educational institutions in NAM countries need to look closer at their curriculum, so that future journalists will have a less West-centric mindset in the way they judge news values. “This is crucial to the success of a project like NNN,” she said.

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