The BBC’s Somali Service ‎‎

EDITORIAL

The Somali population in the Horn of Africa region has depended on the BBC’s Somali programme for news information for decades. As the only news media with a capacity to be accessible to most Somalis no matter where they are in the Horn, the BBC’s has gained an enormous influence in shaping the political opinion of Somalis with regard to local or international issues.

A case in point is the way that the BBC had covered the recent fighting in Mogadishu which pitted a group of powerful warlords against an alliance formed by the city’s Islamic courts.

In the months before the Islamists were able to score a final victory against their foes, the BBC has through its Somali news broadcasts kept portraying the warlords as the bad guys while presenting the Islamic courts militia and their leaders as the good guys. While it was true that the warlords were nothing but a bunch of bloodthirsty gangsters interested only in extorting their own people to death, that was no justification for the BBC’s portrayal of the leaders of the Islamist militia as saints.

Most neutral Somalis would agree that the Somali Service’s advocacy for the Islamists’ cause was actually one of the main factors that contributed to the speedy victory won by the courts’ militia.

A closer look at how the BBC’s Somali programme handled those events, would reveal a constant violation of the basic rules of balanced reporting. In every vox pop conducted on the issue, at least 95% of those asked about their opinion voiced praise and support for the Islamic courts. The outcome was often presented as though the overwhelming majority of Somalis favored the courts. While the BBC showed no hesitation to express contempt in its editorial contents for the warlords, it deliberately avoided to mention the implication of some of the Islamic Courts leaders in the killings committed against a number of aid workers in Somaliland .

It can be argued of course that in the final analysis the unpopular warlords were destined to be defeated by the Islamists. It can also be said that the courts have restored peace to Mogadishu for the first time in 15 years. But such arguments can not be an excuse for the BBC’s wrong-doing in deceiving its listeners by having presented one side of an important story.

Since the last 2 decades, partisan reporting has unfortunately become one of the regular features of the Somali programme’s broadcasting. During the 1980s, Somalia ’s former dictator Siyad Barre bought the collaboration of most of the Somali staff of the BBC either through intimidation or cultivation of clan ties. Barre, a master in the art of deception and disinformation and a gifted orator himself, was aware of the powerful impact that the Somali language news broadcasts from the BBC could have on an oral society as the Somali one. He wanted the Somali program to suppress news about his atrocities against the civilian population in Somaliland which at the time was witnessing a popular armed rebellion.

For a whole decade the BBC gave southern Somalis a distorted information on what was going on up in the north. The BBC’s biased reporting on those events and the conspiracy of silence on the gross human rights violations that were taking place, have in a way helped prolong the suffering of the Somaliland people.

Following the defeat of Siyad Barre, Somaliland embarked on the difficult task of national reconciliation and rebuilding a new democratic state out of the ashes of destruction and death. The BBC’s Somali Service played little attention to that gigantic effort. Instead, Southern editors at the helm of the radio programme have made it their daily business to harass Somalilanders over the airwaves by using the prefix “the so-called” before the historical name of their country “ Somaliland ” (they didn’t do the same with Puntland, a region previously known as “Majeerteenia”).

With the onset of the Arta conference the BBC has again indulged in campaigning journalism. The Somali Service has suddenly become a mouthpiece for Djiboutian president Ismail Omer Geleh who engineered the conference to install his business partner Abdul Qasim Salad as Somalia ’s next nominal president. The Transitional National Government of Somalia headed by Salad was formed in August 2000. A number of the BBC’s Somali staffs were granted Djiboutian passports.

However the fact remains that despite its reputation for biased reporting, the Somali programme’s out-reach services remain an unchallengeable and the only source of news information for most Somalis.

With the unlikelihood of the development of an equally powerful local broadcasting service Somalis are expected to continue tuning to this London-based radio news programme. But the fundamental issue is that at this age of religious extremism, it would be strongly dangerous to allow the BBC’s broadcasts in Somali to remain vulnerable to abuse by its own staff.

The BBC leaders are urgently needed to take the necessary steps for the restoration of the Journalistic integrity and neutrality of the Somali Service. Also, they have to consider helping Somalis develop an alternative local media.

Source: Somaliland Times

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