Moroccan security forces charge against a group of Sahrawi women in Laayoune, occupied Western Sahara. Credit: Courtesy of Equipe Media

By Karlos Zurutuza
LAAYOUNE, Occupied Western Sahara, Aug 23 2015 (IPS)

Ahmed Ettanji is looking for a flat in downtown Laayoune, a city 1,100 km south of Rabat. He only wants it for one day but it must have a rooftop terrace overlooking the square that will host the next pro-Sahrawi demonstration.

“Rooftop terraces are essential for us as they are the only places from which we can get a graphic testimony of the brutality we suffer from the Moroccan police,” Ettanji told IPS. This 26-year-old is one the leaders of the Equipe Media, a group of Sahrawi volunteers struggling to break the media blackout enforced by Rabat over the territory.

Ahmed Ettanji and a fellow Equipe Media activist edit video taken at a pro-independence demonstration in Laayoune, occupied Western Sahara. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

“There are no news agencies based here and foreign journalists are denied access, and even deported if caught inside,” stressed Ettanji.

Spanish journalist Luís de Vega is one of several foreign journalists who can confirm the activist´s claim – he was expelled in 2010 after spending eight years based in Rabat and declared persona non grata by the Moroccan authorities.

“The Western Sahara issue is among the most sensitive issues for journalists in Morocco. Those of us who dare to tackle it inevitably face the consequences,” de Vega told IPS over the phone, adding that he was “fully convinced” that his was an exemplary punishment because he was the foreign correspondent who had spent more time in Morocco.

“The Western Sahara issue is among the most sensitive issues for journalists in Morocco. Those of us who dare to tackle it inevitably face the consequences” – Spanish journalist Luís de Vega
This year will mark four decades since this territory the size of Britain was annexed by Morocco after Spain pulled out from its last colony of Western Sahara.

Since the ceasefire signed in 1991 between Morocco and the Polisario Front – the authority that the United Nations recognises as a legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people – Rabat has controlled almost the whole territory, including the entire Atlantic coast. The United Nations still labels Western Sahara as a “territory under an unfinished process of decolonisation”.

Mohamed Mayara, also a member of Equipe Media, is helping Ettanji to find the rooftop terrace. Like most his colleagues, he acknowledges having been arrested and tortured several times. The constant harassment, however, has not prevented him from working enthusiastically, although he admits that there are other limitations than those dealing with any underground activity:

“We set up the first group in 2009 but a majority of us are working on pure instinct. We have no training in media so we are learning journalism on the spot,” said Mayara, a Sahrawi born in the year of the invasion who writes reports and press releases in English and French. His father disappeared in the hands of the Moroccan army two months after he was born, and he says he has known nothing about him ever since.

Sustained crackdown

Today the majority of the Sahrawis live in the refugee camps in Tindouf, in Western Algeria. The members of Equipe Media say they have a “fluid communication” with the Polisario authorities based there. Other than sharing all the material they gather, they also work side by side with Hayat Khatari, the only reporter currently working openly for SADR TV. SADR stands for ‘Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic’.

Hayat Khatari, the only reporter currently working openly for SADR TV in Laayoune. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

Khatari, a 24-year-old journalist, recalls that she started working in 2010, after the Gdeim Izzik protest camp incidents in Laayoune. Originally a peaceful protest camp, Gdeim Izzik resulted in riots that spread to other Sahrawi cities when it was forcefully dismantled after 28 days on Nov. 8.

Western analysts such as Noam Chomsky have argued that the so-called “Arab Spring” did not start in Tunisia as is commonly argued, but rather in Laayoune.

“We have to work really hard and risk a lot to be able to counterbalance the propaganda spread by Rabat about everything happening here,” Khatari told IPS. The young activist added that she was last arrested in December 2014 for covering a pro-independence demonstration in June 2014. Unlike Mahmood al Lhaissan, her predecessor in SADR TV, Khatari was released after a few days in prison.

In a report released in March, Reporters Without Borders records al Lhaissan´s case. The activist was released provisionally on Feb. 25, eight months after his arrest in Laayoune, but he is still facing trial on charges of participating in an “armed gathering,” obstructing a public thoroughfare, attacking officials while they were on duty, and damaging public property.

In the same report, Reporters Without Borders also denounces the deportation in February of French journalists Jean-Louis Perez and Pierre Chautard, who were reporting for France 3 on the economic and social situation in Morocco.

Before seizing their video recordings and putting them on a flight to Paris, the authorities arrested them at the headquarters of Moroccan Association of Human Rights (AMDH), one of the country’s leading human rights NGOs, which the interior ministry has accused of “undermining the actions of the security forces”.

Likewise, other major organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have repeatedly denounced human rights abuses suffered by the Sahrawi people at the hands of Morocco over the last decades.

Despite several phone calls and e-mails, the Moroccan authorities did not respond to IPS’s requests for comments on these and other human rights violations allegedly committed in Western Sahara.

Back in downtown Laayoune, Equipe Media activists seemed to have found what they were looking for. The owner of the central apartment is a Sahrawi family. It could have not been otherwise.

“We would never ask a Moroccan such a thing,” said Ettanji from the rooftop terrace overlooking the spot where the upcoming protest would take place.

Edited by Phil Harris   

By Pablo Piacentini
ROME, Sep 22 2014 (IPS)

The idea of creating Inter Press Service (IPS) arose in the early 1960s in response to awareness that a vacuum existed in the world of journalism, which had two basic aspects.

Firstly, there was a marked imbalance in international information sources. World news production was concentrated in the largest industrialised countries and dominated by a few powerful agencies and syndicates in the global North.

By contrast, there was a lack of information about developing countries in the South and elsewhere; there was hardly any information about their political, economic and social realities, except when natural disasters occurred, and what little was reported was culturally prejudiced against these countries. In other words, not much of an image and a poor image at that.A journalist specialised in development issues must be able to look at and analyse information and reality from the “other side.” In spite of globalisation and the revolution in communications, this “other side” continues to be unknown and disregarded, and occupies a marginal position in the international information universe

Secondly, there was an overall shortage of analysis and explanation of the processes behind news events and a lack of in-depth journalistic genres such as features, opinion articles and investigative journalism among the agencies.

Agencies published mainly ‘spot’ news, that is, brief pieces with the bare news facts and little background. Clearly this type of journalism did not lend itself to covering development-related issues.

When reporting an epidemic or a catastrophe in a Third World country, spot news items merely describe the facts and disseminate broadcast striking images. What they generally do not do is make an effort to answer questions such as why diseases that have disappeared or are well under control in the North should cause such terrible regional pandemics in less developed countries, or why a major earthquake in Los Angeles or Japan should cause much less damage and fewer deaths than a smaller earthquake in Haiti.

Superficiality and bias still predominate in international journalism.

While it is true that contextualised analytical information started to appear in the op-ed (“opposite the editorial page”) section of Anglo-Saxon newspapers, the analysis and commentary they offered concentrated on the countries of the North and their interests.

Today the number of op-eds that appear is much greater than in the 1960s, but the predominant focus continues to be on the North.

This type of top-down, North-centred journalism served the interests of industrialised countries, prolonging and extending their global domination and the subordination of non-industrialised countries that export commodities with little or no added value.

This unequal structure of global information affected developing countries negatively. For example, because of the image created by scanty and distorted information, it was unlikely that the owners of expanding businesses in a Northern country would decide to set up a factory in a country of the South.

After all, they knew little or nothing about these countries and, given the type of reporting about them that they were accustomed to, assumed that they were uncivilised and dangerous, with unreliable judicial systems, lack of infrastructure, and so on.

Obviously, few took the risk, and investments were most frequently North-North, reinforcing development in developed countries and underdevelopment in underdeveloped countries.

Pablo Piacentini

In the 1960s, those of us who created IPS set ourselves the goal of working to correct the biased, unequal and distorted image of the world projected by international agencies in those days.

Political geography and economics were certainly quite different then. Countries like Brazil, which is now an emerging power, used to be offhandedly dismissed with the quip: “It’s the country of the future – and always will be.”

At the time, decolonisation was under way in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Latin America was politically independent but economically dependent. The Non-Aligned Movement was created in 1961.

IPS never set out to present a “positive” image of the countries of the South by glossing over or turning a blind eye to the very real problems, such as corruption. Instead, we wished to present an objective view, integrating information about the South, its viewpoints and interests, into the global information media.

This implied a different approach to looking at the world and doing journalism. It meant looking at it from the viewpoint of the realities of the South and its social and economic problems.

Let me give an example which has a direct link to development.

The media tend to dwell on what they present as the negative consequences of commodity price rises: they cause inflation, are costly for consumers and their families, and distort the world economy. Clearly, this is the viewpoint of the industrialised countries that import cheap raw materials and transform them into manufactured goods as the basis for expanding their businesses and competing in the global marketplace.

It is true that steep and sudden price increases for some commodities can create problems in the international economy, as well as affect the population of some poor countries that have to import these raw materials.

But generalised and constant complaints about commodities price increases fail to take into account the statistically proven secular trend towards a decline in commodity prices (with the exception of oil since 1973) compared with those of manufactured goods.

IPS’s editorial policy is to provide news and analyses that show how, in the absence of fair prices and proper remuneration for their commodities, and unless more value is added to agricultural and mineral products, poor countries reliant on commodity exports cannot overcome underdevelopment and poverty.

Many communications researchers have recognised IPS’s contribution to developing a more analytical and appropriate journalism for focusing on and understanding economic, social and political processes, as well as contributing to greater knowledge of the problems faced by countries of the South.

Journalists addressing development issues need, in the first place, to undertake critical analysis of the content of news circulating in the information arena.

Then they must analyse economic and social issues from the “other point of view”, that of marginalised and oppressed people, and of poor countries unable to lift themselves out of underdevelopment because of unfavourable terms of trade, agricultural protectionism, and so on.

They must understand how and why some emerging countries are succeeding in overcoming underdevelopment, and what role can be played by international cooperation.

They also need to examine whether the countries of the North and the international institutions they control are imposing conditions on bilateral or multilateral agreements that actually perpetuate unequal development.

World economic geography and politics may have changed greatly since the 1960s, and new information technologies may have revolutionised the media of today, but these remain some important areas in which imbalanced and discriminatory news treatment is evident.

In conclusion, a journalist specialised in development issues must be able to look at and analyse information and reality from the “other side.” In spite of globalisation and the revolution in communications, this “other side” continues to be unknown and disregarded, and occupies a marginal position in the international information universe.

An appreciation of the true dimensions of the above issues, the contrast between them and the information and analysis we are fed daily by the predominant media virtually all over the world – not only in the North, but also many by media in the South – leads to the obvious conclusion that there is a crying need for unbiased global journalism to help correct North-South imbalance.

To this arduous task and still far-off goal, IPS has devoted its wholehearted efforts over the past half century.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

By Chakravarthi Raghavan
GENEVA, Jul 22 2014 (IPS)

The world of today is considerably different from the one at the end of the Second World War; there are no more any colonies, though there are still some ‘dependent’ territories.

In the 1950s and 1960s, as the decolonisation process unfolded, in most of the newly independent countries leaders emerged who had simply fought against foreign rule, without much thought on their post-independence economic and social objectives and policies.

Some naively thought that with political independence and power, economic well-being would be automatic.

Chakravarthi Raghavan

By the late 1950s, the former colonies, and those early leaders within them who yearned for better conditions for their peoples, realised that something more than political independence was needed, and began looking at the international economic environment, organisations and institutions.

In the immediate post-war years, the focus of efforts to fashion new international economic institutions (arising out of U.S.-U.K. wartime commercial policy agreements) was on international moves for reconstruction and development in war-ravaged Europe.

As a result, in the sectors of money and finance, the Bretton Woods institutions [the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) or World Bank], were established – even ahead of agreeing on the United Nations Charter and its principle of sovereign equality of states (one nation, one vote in U.N. bodies) – on the basis of the ‘one-dollar one-vote’ principle.“Within the Bretton Woods institutions, there was no direct focus on promoting ‘development’ of the former colonies; what little happened was at best a side-effect of the lending policies of these institutions and the few crumbs that fell off the table here and there, often to further Cold War interests”

In pursuing their wartime commercial policy agreements, the United Kingdom and the United States submitted proposals in 1946 to the U.N. Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) for the establishment of an international trade body, an International Trade Organization (ITO).

ECOSOC convened the U.N. Conference on Trade and Employment to consider the proposals; the Preparatory Committee for the Conference drafted a Charter for the trade body, and it was discussed and approved in 1948 at a U.N. conference in Havana.

Pending ratification of the Havana Charter, the commercial policy chapter of the planned international trade body was fashioned into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and brought into being through the protocol of provisional application, as a multilateral executive agreement to govern trade relations, i.e., governments agreeing to implement their commitments to reduce trade barriers and resume pre-war trading relations through executive actions subject to their domestic laws.

At Havana, during the negotiations on the Charter, Brazil and India had expressed their dissatisfaction, but had reluctantly agreed to the outcome and the provisional GATT.

The U.S. Senate, as a result of corporate lobbying, was however unwilling to allow the United States to be subject to the disciplines of the Havana Charter and did not consent to an ITO Charter; the result was that the provisional GATT remained provisional for 47 years, until the Marrakesh Treaty which brought the World Trade Organization (WTO) into being in 1995.

Within the Bretton Woods institutions, there was no direct focus on promoting “development” of the former colonies; what little happened was at best a side-effect of the lending policies of these institutions and the few crumbs that fell off the table here and there, often to further Cold War interests.

From about the early 1950s, to the extent that it provided any reconstruction and development loans to the developing world, the IBRD acted in the interests of the United States, its largest single shareholder, and favoured the private sector.

For example, early Indian efforts to obtain IBRD loans for the public sector to set up core industries like steel, which needed large infusions of equity capital that the Indian private sector was in no position to provide, were turned down, based purely on the ideological dogma of private-vs-public-enterprise.

It was only much later that a separate window, the International Development Association (IDA), was created at the World Bank to provide soft loans (with low interest and long repayment periods) to low-income countries.

But the IDA did not function as professed and did not provide loans to set up industries or promote development in poorer countries; in actual practice it acted to advance the interests of the developed countries in the Third World.

IDA loans came with conditionalities to promote structural adjustment programmes, such as unilateral trade liberalisation, resulting in deindustrialisation of the poorer African countries. Even worse, IDA loans came with additional conditionalities to cater to the fads and fashions of the day and the concerns of Northern, in particular Washington-based, civil society.

The IDA “donor countries” dominated its governance and used their clout there to sway IDA lending – initially, the IDA obtained funds from the United States and other developed countries, and there were two or three substantial replenishments thereafter.

Subsequently, the funds from loan repayments and the profits of the World Bank (earned by lending at market rates to developing countries) were used to fund IDA, with small new contributions from the “donors” at every replenishment.

Though developing countries borrowing from the IBRD at market rates thus turned out to be the funders of the IDA, they had no voice in IDA governance, and the developed countries, with very little new money, have maintained control over the IDA and IBRD policies, to promote their own policies and the interests of their corporations in developing countries.

On the trade front, in successive rounds of negotiations at the GATT, the group of major developed countries (the United States, Canada, Europe, and later Japan) negotiated among themselves the exchange of tariff concessions, but paid little attention to the developing countries and their requests for tariff reduction in areas of export interest to them.

The only crumbs that fell their way were the result of the multilateralisation of the bilateral concessions exchanged in the rounds, through the application of the “Most Favoured Nation” (MFN) principle. From the Dillon Round on (through the Kennedy and Tokyo Rounds), each saw new discriminatory arrangements against the Third World and its exports.

In the Uruguay Round (1986-94), culminating in the Marrakesh Treaty, the developing countries undertook onerous advance commitments in goods trade, and in new areas such as ‘services’ trade and in intellectual property protection, on the promise of commitment of developed countries to undertake a major reform of their subsidised trade in agriculture and other areas of export interest to developing countries.

These remain in the area of promises while, after the 2013 December  Bali Ministerial Conference, the United States, Europe and the WTO leadership are attempting to put aside as ‘out of date’, all past commitments, while pursuing the ‘trade facilitation’ agreement, involving no concessions from them, but resulting in the equivalent of a 10 percent tariff cut by developing countries.

In much of Africa, this will complete the “deindustrialisation process” and ensure that the Third World will remain “hewers of wood and drawers of water”.  (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

* This text is based on Chakravarthi Raghavan’s recently published book, ‘The THIRD WORLD in the Third Millennium CE’.

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