Anuradha Vittachi, Kanchana Abhayapala Memorial Lecture, Sri Lanka, December 2002
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Message from the Village
I am very honoured to be asked to speak this evening. I would like particularly to thank Charika Marasinghe, a director of the legal services section of Sarvodaya Shramadana, for the invitation. Like Charika, Kanchana Abhayapala, in whose memory this annual lecture is held, was a lawyer who worked for human rights – and the law, when it is practised with integrity for the good of humanity, as Charika does, and as Kanchana Abhayapala did, is a profession that deserves the greatest respect. But only when it is practised like this: not when it is practised in ways that widen the gap between those with too much power and wealth, and those who have too little. Not for nothing does the statue of justice have a blindfold over her eyes. It is there to remind us that every human being is supposed to be equal before the law. Whether you are male or female, literate or illiterate, rich or poor – none of these considerations should count. But of course they do. The whole of our society is riddled with judgements - which, when you unpick them, turn out to be based on a curious idea: that if you are light-skinned, or famous, or good-looking, or rich, or male, or any combination of the above, you must somehow be superior as a human being to someone who is not. I have never understood this. And it seems that Kanchana Abhayapala did not either. Instead he was a young man who gave all the time he could to support impoverished villagers with their legal problems – until he gave his life itself. There are some things, of course, that are more important than life, and standing up for justice, for equality and truth are among these; though I would not wish it on anyone to have to confront this choice. So, if I admire justice so much, why am I not a lawyer myself? Why work in the media instead? It is because the law and the media have – at their best – something crucial in common. Lawyers gather in reams of information, which they call 'evidence'. Media people similarly spend their time gathering in reams of information, which they call 'news'. The lawyers lay their information out as transparently and accountably as possible, and they analyse it conscientiously to get to the truth of 'what really happened' - and good journalists lay out their information and analyse it for exactly the same reason. Lawyers do all this in the public interest”. So do journalists. At least that’s what journalists and lawyers do when they act according to the original ideals of their profession. Sadly, too many contravene these ideals. Recently I heard a newspaper editor defending his right to publish the details of a local football player’s adulterous affair – on the grounds that it was “in the public interest”. How on earth did he manage to make such a sordid and trivial bit of sleaze count as being “in the public interest”? Well, he did it by defining “the public interest” as “anything the public is interested in”! When my brothers and I were growing up in Sri Lanka, we were presented with two family role models: my grandfather, Mr MWH De Silva, a judge and later Solicitor General, and my father, Tarzie Vittachi, editor of the Ceylon Observer and winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace for Courageous Journalism. One of my brothers followed in my grandfather’s footsteps and duly became a lawyer. My other three brothers and I took the media route: one is a TV news editor, one uses the media to entertain, one is a reporter, and I took the social media route. Later, my father became a senior figure at the UN. Here, too, he pressed for the impotence of good information. For how can you make good decisions if you base them on bad information? And good information mean getting information from the people at the grassroots, the people who lived at the sharp end of the UN’s work – the people with real first-hand evidence. For example, one of the first things my father did when he joined the UN was to challenge a project called “Message to the Village”, where experts from the North were planning to go to villages in the South to tell women there that they really ought to stop demanding to have so many babies and start to practice birth control. My father asked if anyone had had the common sense - and common decency! - to ask the village women what they thought about all this. Apparently not. The experts had simply assumed that the women wanted to have eight, nine or 10 children. So my father hired a new team – to get the message from the village. And the women this team spoke to actually said they wanted fewer children. The trouble was their husbands insisted on siring a child per year to prove their virility to the other men. And the clinics wouldn’t give the women contraceptives without their husbands’ permission – and the husbands refused go. So the experts' diagnosis had been completely wrong. It was the husbands they needed to talk to, not the wives! They had come to their mistaken verdict by building their case not on evidence but their elitist prejudices, which assumed that rural women were stupid and thoughtless. After all, they were not rich, or male, or fashionably pale-skinned…. But the women weren’t stupid or thoughtless: the real issue was that their husbands had so much power over them. And instead of helping to solve this problem of unequal power relations, the experts were about to add another layer of patronage and domination to their already patronised and dominated existences, until my father stopped them. In a depressing parallel, too much of the mainstream media acts in this same patronisingly topdown way, with an expert, professional elite disseminating their own pictures of reality - throwing them down from the top of their ivory towers - to be consumed by us passive citizens, waiting humbly on the cobblestones below. They tell us what they choose we should hear – not necessarily what we want to, or need to, know. But everything changes when we citizens refuse to submit to this kind of domination any more, and get access to the information we need ourselves. Here is a truly amazing example from northwest India: Some years ago, a grant was allocated from India’s rural development fund to build and staff a set of schools in the Narmada Valley, an impoverished area of northern India. Money from this fund is audited with detailed records of how much was spent on raw materials, how much on builders, how much on the salaries of teachers and so on. But when one of our daughters visited this region, the puzzling thing was, there wasn’t a single one of these schools to be seen. Where were they? Was there some kind of timewarp into which these schools had vanished? The truth was a lot less romantic. The schools hadn’t disappeared, they had never appeared. There never were builders or teachers or pupils. It was all a big scam. It was the money that had vanished – allegedly into the pockets of everyone down the chain of command. By the time the last link of the chain reached the village, there was no money left. This incident, scandalous as it is, is not the exception but the rule. The late Rajiv Gandhi, former PM of India, is reported to have admitted that only 15% of the rural development funds actually went where they were supposed to go. Not only schools but also bridges, roads, houses – all kinds of public works that exist in the audits are mere fictions. But where we, the world’s media, kicking up a huge stink about this? At some point, we, the media have to take this issue of corruption seriously. Because we are not just talking about any old lump of money going missing. The rural development fund vanished in a country that houses nearly half the world’s destitute children. It’s their money that’s being stolen. The poorest children in the world are having their chance of getting just one or two of their basic needs, their basic human rights, met – and even this is stolen from them; and we do nothing? We turn a blind eye to truths that matter. At most, we in the northern media who control most of what the world’s citizens hear, say 'what a pity it is that there is so little money in poor countries so they cannot afford to do more to fulfil these children’s basic needs'. But the money was there; it just went into the wrong pockets. In fact, if we acted as one world, as one human race, we could fulfil all the basic needs of all the children around the world, according to the UN – for a mere $80 billion dollars. To get this figure in perspective, let us remind ourselves that the West – not the whole world, just the West – spends at least that, conservatively estimated, just on private sector bribes every year. In one year, the West’s businesses bribe away all the money we need to wipe out global poverty for all the children in the world! Isn’t that an extraordinary thought? It makes my mind reel. And things are getting worse. Raghavan Srinivasan, chief procurement advisor to the World Bank says, “Corruption has been going up geometrically”. How do we sleep at night? Some poor deluded people decided to stop waiting for us – and got on with speaking up for themselves. Aruna Roy, winner of the year 2000 Magsaysay Prize, is a member of a peasants’ and workers’ co-operative. She earns 60 rupees a day, just like everyone else in the co-operative, so she understands from experience the reality of a villager’s life. “As a former civil servant,” she told me, “I know that the civil service is corrupt; the police force is corrupt; the judiciary is corrupt.” When the co-operative suspected that their area was suffering from one of these vanishing edifices, in this case a vanishing bridge, they decided to find out for themselves what was going on. They approached the officials who kept the building records – the bills for raw materials, and the employment records, called muster rolls, which recorded how many local people had theoretically been paid to build it. Bizarrely, they were told that these records were not available to the citizens because they fell under the Official Secrets Act – a nice little legacy from the British Raj. So how much you have been paid, for a job you have done is an official secret – to be kept from… you. Now there’s a nice little example of the law being used to block transparency and accountability! The villagers understandably go a little annoyed. After months of pushing against bureaucratic obstruction, they finally managed to see the muster roles – and were outraged to find that, according to these, they had been paid handsome sums that they had never seen, to build edifices that didn’t exist. The cat was out of the bag. So what can we do? I think we have to stop hoping the mega media barons will suddenly be overcome with remorse and turn into good guys. It’s not going to happen. Instead, I think we have to develop a completely new kind of bottom-up media whose whole purpose is to amplify the voices of those who are unheard by the mainstream media. Remember Article 19 of the Declaration of Human Rights? “Everyone,” it says “has the right to seek, receive and impart information… regardless of frontiers”. 'Everyone.' The first time I read these words I was deeply moved. 'Everyone has the right to seek, receive and impart information… regardless of frontiers.' These prophetic words were written in 1948. But who amongst us can afford to start a newspaper that focuses on citizens' stories reporting on the crushing of their human rights? Or run a TV station where we can commission programmes about the creation of poverty? Or manage a publishing house producing books dictated by the non-literate poor? It is not feasible through conventional media. And yet there is way. Now, half a century on, the promise of universal access can at last be fulfilled – with the dawn of the digital age. We can use the flexibility and cheapness of new digital media tools – like the Internet or the new lightweight handheld video-cameras or mobile phones – to get the message from the village, not just deliver the message to the village. And that is what we have been trying to do for the past eight years at OneWorld. We began in a modest way in 1994-95, by persuading NGOs like Amnesty and Oxfam to let us create this new-fangled thing called a 'website' for them. These NGOs worked among the poor or marginalized communities - and now they could report their stories on their brand new websites at far lower cost than before, when they had had to print on paper and pay postage and packing to get each individual item delivered. But a problem remained. How would readers find these websites? The Internet was exploding in size: one estimate was that a new website was being created every four seconds. So at the same time, at OneWorld we created a single gateway through which the reader would enter and then be led to all these stories, a great compendium of them, which we grouped by theme and country and by topicality so that the reader could find their way around easily to the articles interested them. Now OneWorld.net carries some two million full-text documents, originated by some 1,500 NGO partners and partner networks around the world working in text, as well as over 600 radio members and now some 1,000 video contributors. All this multimedia information is shared for free, as a public service offered in several languages and in different editions produced in 10 OneWorld centres around the world. Despite all this, at OneWorld we still weren’t happy. All these NGO stories, though a great improvement on the relentless dripfeed of stories about celebrities and their latest love affairs, were still giving us grassroots information at second hand. They gave Oxfam’s version of events, or Unicef's - and however intelligent and reliable that was, it was still not the authentic voice of the people who were at the sharp end. That was our ultimate goal, to enable the people at the grassroots to share their thoughts and experiences directly. In 1999, only three short years ago, a BBC broadcaster asked me what my dream was for OneWorld. I said: 'Getting grassroots voices online' - and she looked at me as if I were crazy. If I had added, 'especially the voices of village women”, she definitely would have had me locked up. She produced a stream of scornful statistics to prove her point. Only 5% of the world’s people had access to the Internet, almost all of them in the North. 70% of the world’s people had never even heard of the Net. Where people in the South did have access to the Net they tended to be middle-class elites who lived in cities. 80% of the web was in English. Poor people didn’t usually speak English and millions of them were non-literate, even in their own languages. The content on the Net was largely irrelevant. And of course most of the barriers facing impoverished men were even higher for impoverished women. So the broadcaster was, obviously, absolutely right. Thank goodness we didn’t listen to her. For there is an astonishing amount of evidence to show that things are changing fast. In Pondicherry, for example I met a young woman aged 24 called Pakkiialouchme. A woman! And a Dalit woman! Not the sort of person the BBC broadcaster would have expected to see. Every morning she goes to the local telecentre to collect data from a US Navy website on local wave heights, because these wave heights can foretell storms approaching the coast from far out at sea. The webmaster had in turn got the data from the Navy’s space satellite. Then Pakkialouchme translates the gist of the news into Tamil and reads it into an audio file – which is picked up in the nearby fishing village of Veerapathinam and blasted out through a series of loudspeakers planted along the shore. Every afternoon, when the fishermen are sitting along the beach checking and mending their nets they listen to Pakkialouchme’s voice to help them decide whether it is safe to go out next morning or not. These fishermen can’t read or write, not even in their own language, never mind in English. They couldn’t afford a computer in a hundred years. They haven’t got time to go to computer training classes. But nonetheless they are getting the benefit of the world’s most expensive, state-of-the-art space satellite technology, in their own language, and at a time and place suited to them. And all this is happening because someone was thinking imaginatively out of the box, new-media network-style, joining up a curious human network (from a naval webmaster to a Dalit girl in Pondicherry) and an even more curious network of technologies (from a satellite to a row of loudspeakers). I asked one of the NGO managers whether Pakkialouchme’s efforts had made any measurable difference to the lives of the villagers. “Well,” he said, mildly, “in the past there were five to ten deaths each year from drowning. Since she has been doing this work, there have been no more deaths.” Most of us would be glad to be able to say we had done that much in the whole of our lives. And it is worth remembering that fishing is the only source of income for these families. When one of the fishermen dies, the whole family is destitute. So if each family had just five people in it she may have saved a hundred lives from ruin in those two years. OneWorld is now building on these NGO-run telecentres through s new project called the Open Knowledge Network, whose purpose is to create a network of local networks like this, so that more and more people at the grassroots can share their experience and information. It’s not just in the NGO sector that things are changing. Governments are moving fast. · In July 2000, India’s Prime Minister Mr Vajpayee called a meeting of all of his state ministers and asked them to make plans to connect every village in India to the Net. · In the same month, the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations met in Okinawa, Japan, at their annual G8 Summit, where they set up a task force on bridging the digital divide called the Digital Opportunity Taskforce – or DOTforce for short. Its findings have been accepted by the leaders and the work has begun in a harmonious spirit and without controversy (that’s probably why you haven’t heard about it!). · By spring 2002 China had become the then second most connected country in the world, with twice as many users as the UK. Within three years it is expected that a staggering quarter of a billion home users will be online – and Chinese is expected to become the most used language on the net by 2007. · In South Korea, the government pledged that every schoolchild would have access by the spring 2001. By spring 2003, as many as 70% of South Koreans have highspeed broadband access - in their homes. So the idea of universal access has already left the realm of fantasy and arrived in the realm of reality. Part of the success is down to the technology being designed with a wider market in kind. The computer, for example, is now being rethought from scratch to be more grassroots-friendly. The best-known example is the Simputer made in South East Asia. · It can be used with icons rather than words for non-literate users. · It works on rechargeable batteries, so you don’t need electricity. · It doesn’t give you more features than you usually need. A conventional laptop will give you hundreds of features, 99% of which most of us will never use. But a basic Simputer, which performs most of the functions a basic user needs can cost around $200 . · Even so, it is too expensive for most rural families. But a whole community can club together and share one unit, with each villager having an individual smartcard for privacy – and these cards cost just $1 each. · Most important of all, it allows you to work offline most of the time, paying online charges only when you synchronise it with the internet, perhaps once a day for a couple of moments. By the way, I am not selling Simputers! And there are other alternatives around now that may work out even better. The point I am trying to make is that you don’t have to wring your hands and say, 'Oh, poor people will never be able to afford to use this new computer technology!' - as though technology comes in a fixed form and you have to laboriously adjust the people to fit it. No – you have to start the other way around, start with the people and adjust the technology to fit people’s needs and characteristics. Another villager-friendly ICD (short for Information and Communication for Development) is the cell-phone. These phones get round the problem of literacy and of language – after all, you can speak on the phone in whatever language you like. Media techies don’t need to understand the conversation to facilitate it. And that’s really the key to the future. The media’s job may not be to act as gate-keepers - as the arbiters of what is allowed to be communicated: our new job is to mediate, to assist, to facilitate an interchange, to serve the people. Actually, isn’t that what it always was? It is thought that this voice-based technology will point the way forward in Africa, rather than the web or email. Another important voice-based ICD is radio, which reaches 95% of the world’s people; but radio has traditionally been used in a one-way, topdown style. It doesn’t have to be like that. When I was in Lusaka some years ago I told Emily Sikazwe, head of Women for Change, how much I wished there were solar powered radios, and some way of gathering women together to listen to them. “Is this the sort of thing you mean?” Emily said and pulled out a brand new box from under her desk. It had just arrived – a $60 solar powered radio. She added that Mothers’ Listening Clubs had already been founded in Zambia and in many other countries too. It was all happening already, even in some of the very poorest parts of the South… whatever the doubts of that pessimistic BBC broadcaster, the seeds of change had already been planted and were sprouting fast. These mothers began by just listening, passively, to other people’s voices – but soon they were finding ways to be active as producers, transmitting their own views and their own agenda. I understand that these Mothers’ Clubs have now begun to make a real impact e.g. producing new health facilities… real practical changes, and changes selected according to the admirable priorities of women, who are aware of what really matters to their families and their communities. I want to use my remaining time to say something about video. Video is one of the most potent forms of ICDs that exist – and don’t dismiss me sweepingly, like one rich young corporate American did last month, by saying that 'video is far too high-tech for poor people'. Video is fast becoming relevant and accessible to millions of villagers. First, simply as viewers. In India, for example, cable TV is becoming commonplace. I wish I had with me the photo we took of a mud hut in a Dalit village with its coconut thatched roof. Because there is a tremendous amount of capacity left unused, and the cable operators are hungry for people who want to use up some of that spare capacity. Secondly, and far more revolutionarily, villagers can now be more than passive consumers of other people’s video. They can become video producers! Say, for example, you are a non-literate village woman walking along the road with a small camcorder lent to you by a local NGO, and you see a streetchild being beaten up by a policeman. It’s not that uncommon a sight – but this time you can do something unusual about it. You can quietly film what is going on and then send it via the net from your local NGO office to a central video databank online, where it immediately becomes evidence about a childrights abuse that is blasted out all over the world. I told a media analyst about this the other day and he went into shock. He kept crying out: “This is HUGE. This is revolutionary! This is Rodney King for everyone!” And it is. I was present in Lima, Peru when it was in a similar state of shock and turmoil – after a piece of home-made video was screened on TV showing Vladimiro Montesinas, the then-President’s right-hand man, with a senior official handing over a fistful of money. Within hours, Montesinas and President Fujimori had fled the country, and the whole country was being cleaned out like the Aegean stables. And yet… I was puzzled. I asked various Peruvian colleagues, did Peruvians not already know that Montesinas was corrupt? Yes, they said, of course they knew. So why were they so shocked now? Why were they only taking action now? They stared at me blankly, without an answer. I can only suppose that seeing the act in black and white – literally – on the screen, as a piece of clear evidence, meant that the viewers could no longer hold on to some fog of denial. And maybe the fact that this corruption was no longer just a private suspicion, but something everyone knew that everyone knew made a difference. It now had the status of a communally shared reality. That's a rather special case. But people in villages can also use these micro-movies in everyday, practical ways – by using them to record and display odd behaviour in a sick animal, say, and inviting remote diagnoses from far-away research institutes. Or they can record knowledge about locally-bred plant varieties, especially if they want to ensure that its intellectual property value is protected for the local community and not stolen by multinational companies. The possibilities have barely begun to be explored. But of course the real potential for improving the life chances of rural people cannot begin to be understood adequately until we widen the frame - to include much broader political and economic forces. The people's land may be taken away from them by unscrupulous moneylenders or landowners; their children may be forced into bonded labour. How can ICDs help here too? I remember when Worldview International Foundation (whose HQ is here in Colombo) video-trained a group of children who had been child slaves that had managed to escape from their owner. They helped these children to make a film reconstructing their process of awakening and escape. Can you imagine how powerful a video that must have been? And what these young boys could do, why can’t men and women? Let’s not forget those journalists and broadcasters who have kept their idealism intact. ICDs have made all the difference to those independent-minded media people from other social strata – or even other parts of the world – who are still determined to help villagers get their voices heard and their human rights honoured. I would like to show you a short clip from a movie made by one of our daughters, the one who noticed the lack of schools in Narmada Valley. She had no TV commission and therefore no TV budget – all she had was access to a small, handheld, digital movie camera and a laptop on which she could edit videotapes. So she was able to make a movie by filming, sound recording, lighting, directing, scripting, editing and producing it all by herself and therefore at very low cost. The film is about the Narmada dam project in North West India. India’s dams have already driven at least 16 million people out of their river valleys and left them to die destitute. So this is a film about truth: truth and lies. The official pretence is that their valleys must be flooded and the river diverted to supply drinking water to desperate people in drought-stricken areas further north. In fact, the river is being diverted quite cynically to supply water to the chemical industry and other prosperous city people. The villagers whose lives are under threat are given no say. They can only speak out through the efforts of intermediaries like their local NGO leader, Medha Patkar, the writer Arundhati Roy and the young filmmaker. The star of the film, too, is a woman – not a Bollywood star but a painfully shy, uneducated, non-literate rural woman called Bulgi Sonkariya, one of the many villagers who have decided that since none of the political authorities will listen to them, they will have to sacrifice themselves in the river as the waters rise, so they can at least die in dignity and on their own terms. I want to show a little bit of this film to you because it manages to reach a depth of intimacy that traditionally-made TV films simply cannot. As the filmmaker’s explained: 'I couldn’t possibly have made this film in the conventional way, in a few rushed weeks, with a six-man crew stamping about. There is no way that a woman like Bulgi would have uttered a word to the camera.' Instead she lived with the villagers for three long summers, sharing their lives, ploughing the fields, rolling chapattis, and being arrested with along them during the protests. The first summer, she said, Bulgi was too shy to even come out from behind her sari to speak to her. The second summer, Bulgi peered out but wouldn’t speak when the camera was on. But the third summer she suddenly said: 'What can I do?' All this means that we, the viewers, also have a unique chance to get to know Bulgi. So she is never reduced in our minds to being a TV stereotype of a poor village woman. Instead we feel the quality of her humanity. By the end of the film, the idea of Bulgi drowning with her children feels as devastating as the idea of watching a friend or neighbour drown. This is what real communication is about: it is not just information – facts from the outside – but the creation of an internalised experience that all of us viewers share in common. That communion is how networks of solidarity are born. Here’s the sequence… So let me close by saying this. We know the power of media technology from the coverage of the Twin Towers tragedy in New York. That video-footage, all those instant reports on TV, radio and the web, surely helped to heighten the wave of horror and sympathy that was felt all around the world – from ordinary people to other ordinary people, as brothers and sisters. But who communicates those other terrible human losses that also deserve sympathy? The thousands of innocent lives that are destroyed cynically every day, lives that have been pauperised by people with the power to exploit the vulnerable. There are so many ways now to support the people who live at the sharp end of most of these tragedies. We can use ICDs to help them secure their human rights by helping them to tell their own stories far and wide. And we must do it – because it is these, the most vulnerable people in the world, who have the world’s most important stories to tell. They need to tell their stories for their sake, because it is only after their truths are told, and HEARD, that their healing can begin. And also for OUR sake. In an article about Kanchana Abhayapala in the Sunday Island, Jehan Perera said: 'Perhaps in order to become different we need to be personally affected in a manner that sears the soul.' That, really, is the ultimate purpose of our media technology. Not to transmit facts, but for us - the privileged - who have our hands on the levers of power and yet who live far away from the worst of the suffering, to be 'seared in our souls'. Then and only then will we finally feel that we are all equal, all members of one connected humankind. Anuradha Vittachi, 12th Kanchana Abhayapala Memorial Lecture, Colombo, Sri Lanka, December 2002 |
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