Media Houses Have Crucial Roles to Play in South Sudan
By Daniel Machar Dhieu, Juba, South Sudan
April 9, 2015 (SSB) — Things will be better if both warring parties agree that consciousness of the culture of peace and non-violence is key to the future of this nation, and then the mass media has the potential to play a key role in developing a culture of peace and non-violence.
Unfortunately, the mass media has not been given chance to exercise its potential mandate to the entire population of South Sudan. In other concept it has almost completely been ignored by authorities inside and outside the country due to their daily preaching culture of peace and non-violence to people.
This is the conclusion of many of the organizations who have contributed to the Civil Society during the violence took off in the nation by then and now report to the United Nations who have listed the security arena “blackout” as one of the chief obstacles to their work.
Not only does the authority ignore the culture of peace, but also they support privilege news of the culture of war and violence in the nation.
For me this comes as no surprise. As a result of my experience trying to analyze daily expression of the people of South Sudan toward their own crisis and their perception at large through commends people always as violence concern. To my understanding, our people suggests that the Violence confronts an active resistance in the mass media and related social institutions more than it confronts an inherent ignorance or ‘psychological inertia’ in ordinary people.
The myth that war is part of human nature does not appear to be so much an inherent component of ‘common sense’ so much as it is the end result of a campaign of psychological propaganda that has been promulgated in the mass media in order to justify political policies of militarism. Several types of evidence support this hypothesis.
First, one can point to increasing publicity in recent war in the mass media for the myth that war and violence are intrinsic to human nature. Another kind of evidence comes from some opinions obligation more likely to believe in the myths of the biological inevitability of violence. There was a great deal of racist propaganda during Sudan conflict with SPLM /A rebel till 2005 when the reach compressive peace agreement that ended 21 years of war in Sudan.
Such racist propaganda may be seen as a last-resort effort by those who had a vested interest in South Sudan resources and colonialism to defend these institutions by appealing to the vulnerable belief systems of individual psychology at a time when they could no longer justify the institutions by economic or political arguments.
Does today’s propaganda about the tribal basis of warfare derive from a similar effort by those with a vested interest in militarism and who can no longer justify it on economic and political grounds? If this thesis is valid, then we should expect more rather than less resistance to publicizing the message of the constitutional statement as we succeed in getting more publicity from peripheral sectors of the mass media and educational systems, and as we continue to approach the more resistant and central sectors that are linked either ideologically or financially to the military-industrial complex.
The country constitution free media houses to alert the general public on information they founded with clear source of origin. We are faced with a more difficult task of engaging in a kind of psychological warfare with certain department of the government and related institutions who are engaged in producing the very ignorance that must be challenged.
If anything, the difficulty we face may become greater as time goes on, for the more the political and economic justifications for war are discredited, the more we may expect these sectors to fall back on the psychological justifications for war.
If this is correct, the struggle for culture of peace in the mass media needs to receive top priority and careful strategy. For example, efforts such media should basically do with information alert to general public in systematic way addressing news to the nation with the spirit of Peace and non-violence to the people of the nation.
A Media houses represent person hears in daily activities of government within and outside the nation to see and inform the people about the things and progress of the government on developmental issues. Therefore, media networks are not threat to the government as people uses to say during their daily expression.
The working of media houses such as Juba Monitor, Juba Telegraph, New Times, Citizen Newspaper and televisions is not against the government or threatening any authority in the nation.
The main work and mandate of media houses is connect-ability of the general public and government authority to one channel of common understanding in the country, government may not work well without people the same to the people. Any information to the public is channel to media for easy circulation of information across the country.
Therefore, the media departments act as morning cock to the nation. They wake-up the nation on critical situations and crucial times of the nation.
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