Our media at times of war

As I see it
Adil Al Baz

Since the time the Janjaweed entered Madani, I would not like to say fallen to the Janjaweed, I have never stopped thinking about state of our media and its coverage of this incident, painful as it is by all means, but of course it is an ephemeral and understandable happening within the context of the war. Madani will be brought back to the flock sooner than you think. The war that countries and armies are now waging against Sudan has not received the due coverage it deserves from us as journalists. We have left the entire population prey to rumors spread by the social media, and we have not had any reliable sources to tell us what was going-on on the ground, despite the presence of a significant number of journalists in the Medani to which the Janjaweed. Janjaweed troops entered. Therefore, puzzling questions surfaced and confronted us, the type of question for which we could not find a satisfying answer that explain what had happened exactly
The first question is about the position of the army and the attitude towards it. The second relates to the societal situation that followed the army’s withdrawal.
The question that has not been answered until now is why has the army pulled out and how and to what destination? If we had a responsible press coverage, we would have obtained this information right from the start, but what is noticeable is that the journalists who are supposed to undertake this task have themselves turned into promoters of rumors whose source is mostly the social media and the internet, and some of the information is withdrawn from the Janjaweed newsrooms. In the absence of reliable sources, the news was conflicting and mixed, which sparked a state of fear and panic among the various sectors of the population. It was possible for the journalists on the site to broadcast pictures, news, and interviews with members of the withdrawing army or what remained of the army and those volunteers who have been mobilized in Madani to tell a genuine news story about what happened, but they didn’t.
This vacuum and this uncertainty have led to an extension of the state of fear that everyone had to cast doubt about the army, and this undermined the confidence which the army had enjoyed all along since the outbreak of this war. This is the most serious development that accompanied the events in Madani, because no matter what the situation, including the takeover of towns and that of military positions, people remained confident in the army and its capabilities in the end to achieve victory, even if it took a long time to do so. The line that undermined trust between the people and the army was the media line that the Janjaweed media rooms played upon, and it was clear that this was the first goal of the entry into Medani, which was to depict the army as if it were incapable of protecting cities and was not fighting the way it should have done, which denotes the possibility of its total surrender in any city. This, of course, is pure fabrication, and the entry of the Janjaweed into any city does not mean the end of the war or a surrender to their barbarism. The army withdrew from Nyala and went to Babanousa from where it is still fighting and repulsing back the Janjaweed. The goal is to undermine the base of confidence, and the primary tool in process of destabilization is the newsrooms that are actually designed to undermine the people’s confidence in their army. Similarly, there has been a lack of adequate coverage of what happened socially in Medani… The limited incursion of the Janjaweed forces into the city was accompanied by a media uproar that spread panic among the residents, despite the limited number of Janjaweed forces that arrived in the city at that time, cloaked in fear and despite the fact that no actual fighting took place in the city. These fears led to waves of displacement out of the city, and this is all but a natural attitude. The mal reputation of the Janjaweed is that as soon as they entered a city, they destroyed it and ruined life therein. There was no way to calm people’s fears by journalists who would relate the facts about what had actually taken place and thus there was no information about the conditions of the displaced, and to tell their tragic stories in a way that highlights the ugliness of what the Janjaweed were committing against the people who originally came to Medani as displaced people, as most of those who hastened to flee were already displaced.
The strange thing is that when the distant cities fell, our information about what happened in Nyala and El Geneina was much better than what happened in Madani, and we received local and international press coverage that was closer to reality. We saw pictures, videos, and documented local and international reports, and the coverage of CNN, the Guardian, and the New York Times drew attention when they presented the picture of the genocide taking place before the world

It is known that our local media did not have much experience in covering wars that extended from the 1950s to the current Janjaweed war, because those wars were taking place in remote places and far from the center of the press, which was all based in Khartoum. Therefore, when the war broke out in the heart of Khartoum, all journalists were without experience in how to cover this cursed war. Reliable news was absent, and the people became plundered by conflicting rumors and what was disseminated by newsrooms with hidden agenda. This is a historical flaw in our journalistic work, and after what happened, journalists must receive extensive training on how to cover conflict.
(There is a book published by the Al Jazeera Institute on Journalism at wartime that is worth reading, the book is available on the Internet, for free.)

Now, the press is supposed to play its role not only in exposing the lies of the Janjaweed, but also in get up and be up to par with the situation of reinforcing confidence in the army and remedying its shortcomings, v and demonstrating the strong stand of the people behind their army, because defeat is not the fall of a city, defeat is the destruction of the faith and confidence people have in the fighters and the failure of the fighters to regain their dignity and the dignity of their homeland. When the soldiers and army leaders see that the people backing them, chanting “One people, one army”, it makes them more confident in victory and serve as impetus to them to continue their sacrifices to seek victory for the people and to achieve their goals despite all the setbacks that have occurred and will occur here and there.
What is required of the responsible media is to defeat the enemy’s tactics, not only by refuting the rumors, but also by strengthening the fighters by providing them with more confidence in their capabilities, thus striking the enemy’s plans as the first blow. This role was absent from the press and journalists due to the absence of responsible coverage and answers to questions: Why and how? This role is not a luxury, but rather part of the battle that is being fought in the land now, on the ground, as it is being fought on the pages of newspapers and the internet.