Small World News

The latest project from Small World News, Alive in Afghanistan, is receiving a lot of attention in the media and around the blogosphere. Here’s a selection of the coverage we’ve found.

The LA Times has this:

Alive in Afghanistan is a multimedia reporting project that solicits reports by way of SMS, e-mail and Twitter from ordinary Afghanis and posts them alongside reports by professional journalists from the Pajhwok Afghan News agency.

Verified reports were then posted on an interactive map, allowing users to access the latest reports of polling center closings, explosions, rocket attacks and intimidation.

Although, as the founders of the site readily admit, only a minority of Afghanis know how to use the site and have access to it, it’s still a great resource for real-time election news from Afghanistan.

From the BBC

Citizens can report disturbances, defamation and vote tampering, or incidents where everything “went well”.

Their reports feature alongside those of full-time Afghan journalists to ensure the election and reporting of it is as “free and fair” as possible.

“We hope to enable people to report on what is going on in the country,” explained Brian Conley, who helped set up the project.

“In the rural areas there are not going to be monitors, and it is questionable how much international media coverage there will be in these areas.”

Additional text and video reports will be added by a network of 80 reporters from the Afghan Pajhwok news agency, he said.

From the Associated Press

A Web site called “Alive in Afghanistan” gave Afghans the chance to report violence or polling irregularities via Twitter, e-mail, SMS or the Web that were recorded on an interactive map. More than 100 reports came in during the day to the site, run by a nonprofit group that has done similar projects in Iraq and Gaza.

“Armed Taliban keep voters away from 14 polling stations in Ghormach district of Faryab province” was one of the messages at 8 a.m., followed by “No girls voting at one of the big female stations in Kandahar city,” five minutes later.

The project mirrors the type of eyewitness online reports that got attention during the Iranian election, and which could thwart official Afghan attempts to control negative reports.

And the infamous server-choking segment from Rachel Maddow, from which we thankfully recovered.

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[Editor's Note: Our colleague Alex Strick will be collaborating with the new Small World News, providing support for our Afghanistan coverage leading up to the election and onward. This is his latest blog post.]

For outsiders, Kandahar was never really somewhere you could fall in love with.  You know the kind of thing I mean: places people went to honeymoon, places with a certain ineluctable quality to them… Back in the seventies, when Kandahar was a popular stopover city on the hippy trail to Kabul and India, one such traveller even described it as ‘a gentle oasis’.

These days, Kandahar is the city of nobody’s dreams.

Pace Farnaza Fassihi, living in Kandahar is like being under virtual house arrest.  Most days I stay at home, travel somewhere only when I have something specific to do there – a meeting, something I want to see – and am forced to enjoy Kandahar at a distance.  True, I’m lucky enough to have a great balcony view over the town and all the way down to where the desert starts.

This also isn’t to say I don’t get out at all.  Arghandab is a regular stop for a picnic or a swim on the weekends, and within the city most travel is more or less going to be ok.  Nevertheless, caution pays dividends (as stencilled letters on one taxi here informed me); the two big risks for foreigners in the city are kidnapping and being in the wrong place at the wrong time when a bomb goes off.

This happens increasingly often.  Those who follow my twitter postings – an easier way to get news out when there isn’t enough information to justify a full blog post – will have noticed the upward trend this past year in pictures of post-explosion clouds of debris, or holes in the ground where IEDs were laid.

Occasionally a troupe of journalists make their way into the city, but only for three or four days, and almost always working on a specific story; no more time to leisurely get to know Kandahar, no time for picnics…

When did it turn sour?  2006 was probably the turning point for the province, with all out battles in the districts and all sorts of mess within the city.  To the average observer abroad,  Kandahar must seem rather stable.  Reports from the city describing the atmosphere and downward spiral are scarce to be found, and generally it takes the death of a foreign soldier or at least a dozen Afghan casualties to qualify for a Kandahar dateline.

I compile a list of violent incidents in the greater Kandahar area from open source and local sources each day.  A year ago, that list would hardly ever exceed one page.  Nowadays, it’s not unusual to reach three pages: a list of bombs, murders, executions, attacks and threats.  It’s enough work keeping up with all of that, but then there’s all the personal stories of how people get through their days.

It’s nearly impossible to get a decent sense of what’s going on in the districts.  The international media stick exclusively (with some reason, albeit qualified) to embeds to get a sense of southern Afghanistan.  I heard rumours the other day that a well-known American journalist is thinking of repeating the success of a book that he wrote reporting in Baghdad: this time he’s doing one on Kandahar, though this time exclusively from time spent doing embeds…

Local journalism – despite the best efforts of a dedicated group – is reactive for the most part, responding to some bomb blast or assassination rather than actively generating content or a sense of what it means live in Kandahar.

In fact, the only way to get a sense of life in the districts is to step into the shoes – albeit briefly – of those that live there.  You want to find out how safe the roads are between the city and the districts: step into a taxi and run the gauntlet for yourself.  I’ll be writing more about my attempts to get a sense of what’s going on in the western district of Maiwand in the coming weeks, but this is the kind of thing that you have to submit yourself to if you really want to get an accurate handle on what is going on and how things are for people living there.

I’ve always advocated that journalists ought to be writing more about Kandahar, and writing more from outside military bases or press conferences.  Despite the danger, southern Afghanistan is an incredibly important locus of what’s going on in the country right now — with the elections, with the Taliban, with Pakistan, with the US military, with NATO forces — and it seems morally indefensible to my mind not to be paying close attention to all these causes and effects jumbling up against each other.

The population in the city and the outer villages brace themselves against all these manifestations of violence.  A common saying these days upon parting company is, ‘I’ll see you soon, if we’re still alive.’  Educated Kandaharis are scared; many leave for Kabul, or abroad if they are lucky (or rich) enough to have visas for foreign travel.

Tribal elders remain mute, or also depart for Kabul.  The elders or religious figures of authority (mullahs and so on) in the districts are forced to tread a firmly non-committal line, not annoying NATO, not annoying the Afghan government, not annoying the Taliban, not annoying the drug dealers…

Election gossip is all the rage these days, even in some of the worse-off districts.  The posters of provincial council candidates are all over town, and ‘the bazaar is warm’ (as the local saying goes) for the (illegal) purchase and exchange of voter cards.  As one prominent local figure put it to me yesterday: “The election has to happen, one way or another.  The foreigners have spent so much money in our country already.  They’re paying another $130 million for this round of elections.  What would they say if we couldn’t at least give them some elections?”

So the elections will take place.  It’s a good opportunity to shuffle the cards and jiggle the networks of power all over the country, but nobody — at least not anybody living here — has any illusion that these elections will be free or fair.

[Apologies for the tone of today's post, but it's difficult to be optimistic when the situation is so bad.]

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[Editor's Note: Small World News is currently undergoing an exciting transition. Soon correspondents from around the globe will be producing new stories on a regular basis. We are actively seeking new international correspondents, so please get in touch if you have suggestions or wish to join our team. What follows is the first column from our Nigerian correspondent, Rotimi Olawale. As we undergo this transition, any feedback will be appreciated.]

At face value, Mohammed Yusuf, the 39 year old leader of the boko Haram sect looked nothing like the average educated muslim scholar and cleric. From his picture, he looked like the neighbour next door, devoid of the characteristsics of an average scholar – a long white beard and a turban – Mohammed Yusuf trained, groomed and led more than 3000 young men across four states in Northen Nigeria to unleash terror, violence and killings which led to deaths totalling more than 800 in just 2 weeks.

Boko Haram, meaning “western education is a sin” in the hausa language, was founded in 2002 by Mohammed Yusuf with the objective ‘eradication of western education and the introduction of the Sharia law in all the 36 states of the Nigerian federation’.

According to newspaper reports, earlier in November 2008, Mohammed Yusuf and some of his followers were arrested by the police for public incitement through preaching and were dragged to abuja for trial. Two months later in January, they were granted bail after they were handed over to the police for prosecution.

The violence which started in Maiduguri, the Borno state Capital with an attack on the Borno state police command, religious centres and government building quickly spread to other Northern states of Yobe, Bauchi, and Kano.

Government responded by ordering a full frontal joint response from a combined team of military and police called Operation. The police, already bitter from the fact that the attack started right in their state headquarters left no stone unturned in smoking out the perpetrators.

At the end of the day, 800 lives were lost, mostly members of the islamic militant group and a score of innocent people including women and children who were caught in the cross fire.

However on July 30, Government announced the capture and later the death of Mohammed Yusuf, the sect’s leader, which has led many observers, including several international analysts to allege that he was killed extra-judicially. Many Nigerians don’t mind, extra-judicially or not, at least for the first time, the perpertrators of violence has been brought to justice, jungle justice or real justice, so they argued.

However, beyond the arguments of wether Mohammed was killed extra-judicially, there are still several questions that are left unanswered. For instance, how did the Boko Haram sect lay their hands on sophisiticated weapons? Could it have been bought from the militants in the Niger Delta? How did they plan, group and stock-pile arms without attracting Government’s intelligence system? Why was the group not placed under surveillance after they had been charged to court last year for public incitement in a region that is volatile and susceptible to such?

Beyond these questions also, is the need to find lasting solutions to ethnic and religious violence that at every interval springs up from the Northern region. The causative factors are easily identifiable. The northern region is the least educated region in the entire country, the poverty level is also higher and combined with the high unemployment rate in Nigeria, you have a region that has a pool of poor, uneducated and unemployed youth roaming the streets on a daily basis. How would these kids not be susceptible to brain-washing and incitements, especially when the person delivering the message can meet their basic human needs – food, clothing, shelter and cash.

The Boko Haram tragedy is likely going to repeat itself over and over again if the government of the 19 Northern states do not harmonise development strategies especially as regards education, tackling youth unemployment, dealing with religious crisis and gathering intelligence reports amongst others. If Nigeria would become the 20th largest economy by 2020; one of the fundamental things to eradicate is ethnic and religious crises. The time to act is now!

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