Radio service in Sudan (Courtesy Sudan Press Service)

While Oumar may not fit the mold of a typical humanitarian aid worker, she provides a crucial humanitarian service by ensuring access to information. Radio Absoun fills the news void in eastern Chad with humanitarian reports fostering community dialogue and directly affecting the survival of its listeners. The station also bridges the divide between the Darfuri refugees and their local hosts, providing listeners who have long been marginalized with a chance to participate in shaping Sudan’s future.

The Need for News

Internews, the nonprofit organization that launched Radio Absoun, is one of several groups dedicated to media development as a means of promoting free expression and open communication in this region wrought with misunderstanding.

When violence erupted in the western region of Darfur in 2003, Sudan was recovering from another conflict: the 21- year civil war between the North and the South. Sudan reached a formal resolution of the bloody North-South conflict in 2005 with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which granted southern Sudan six years of semi-autonomy and the promise of full independence, pending a 2011 referendum. But peace is far from secured.

Eltigani Ateem, former governor of Darfur, cautioned that the CPA cannot guarantee peace while the violence in Darfur continues. The resolution of both conflicts, he believes, depends on information access. “The peace negotiations have been impeded for a long time because of the lack of transparent information,” he told the Globalist.

Many join Ateem in emphasizing the importance of media as a catalyst for peace in war-torn Darfur. Moyiga Nduru, director and sole employee of the News Agency of Southern Sudan, said, “If properly used, media assistance programs could force Khartoum, through pressure from civil society organizations and the public, to resolve the Darfur conflict.”

By injecting truth into a body of oppressive media and enlightening audiences who have been deprived of information, independent media programs may secure an end to the conflict in Darfur.

The Risk of Reporting

Such work comes with risk, both for reporters like Oumar and for those who support independent programming.

Troy Etulain is a senior advisor for Independent Media Development at USAID , the largest donor for media devel- opment programs like Internews. Etulain told the Globalist, “We do media development because we see it as an essential part of democracy and the role government plays in keeping citizens accountable, keeping citizens informed.”

Etulain lost a colleague to the cause. John Granville, an American diplomat working for USAID on a project to deliver hundreds of thousands of hand-cranked radios to southern Sudan, was shot and killed by gunmen in Khartoum on January 1. Granville had said that while he knew his job was dangerous, there was nothing he would rather be doing.

Yet, believing as Granville did in the importance of information availability to uncover the Darfur crisis and engender community dialogue on the peace process, professionals from human rights organizations, press foundations, and government agencies continue to risk their lives to fund and implement media development programs throughout Sudan. They concentrate on the radio.

Airwaves and Obstacles

Given Sudan’s low literacy rate and lack of infrastructure, radio programming is the population’s primary source of information. In order to reach as much of the Sudanese population as possible, media development programs focus their attention on the airwaves—so, however, does the government.

In northern Sudan, propaganda is profuse and government censorship is exercised without restraint. The state-controlled media leaves out the voices of marginalized minorities; in fact, the only non-state domestic broadcasters are innocuous music stations. Moyiga Nduru of the News Agency of Southern Sudan explained, “The relationship between the Government of National Unity in Khartoum and the media in northern Sudan is poor. Newspapers are censored and journalists are harassed, intimidated and detained arbitrarily.”

Jeremy Groce, chief of party and radio programming adviser at Sudan Radio Service, knows this too well: one of his own reporters was beaten and thrown in prison for a story he reported in northern Sudan.

But in the South, the media situation is still unfolding. “If you are in southern Sudan, you can push the envelope a little more,” Groce said. “But in rural areas you are more at the mercy of local authorities who are not so democratic.”

Independent media must combat the information void that has long existed in southern Sudan. At the end of the civil war, two government-run broadcast outlets made up the entire mass media for the region.

While the situation has since improved, Terry Thielen, Country Director of Internews Sudan, explained that programming in the South is still not as consistent or far-reaching as she had hoped. “Oversight and supervision is next to impossible in southern Sudan given our logistical and personnel constraints.”