IWPR trains new generation of journalists

The London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) has set up training courses in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Arbil to teach locals the basics of objective news reporting. Selected for their writing and analytical capacities from among 80 applicants, the 20 participants in the second course IWPR has run in Iraq's Kurdish north are learning about interviewing and writing techniques and the ethics of journalism. When the two weeks' training ends, they will be encouraged to continue working for IWPR as freelance reporters. Working in close collaboration with IWPR editors, they can look forward to a $50 payment per article published on the Institute's website. "The best thing about this course is that it is practical," Nejiba Mohamed, who is studying journalism at Arbil's Technical Institute, told IRIN. "At college, the teaching is so theoretical you might as well stay at home and read it in a book." Young, and with no previous experience of journalism, Mohamed is typical of the people attending IWPR courses. Other students include a tax accountant and a health centre employee. Encouraging participants from a wide range of backgrounds is part of IWPR's policy. "When we began working in Baghdad last year, we aimed our training sessions at journalists with four or five years' experience," Hiwa Osman, the IWPR editor who runs the Arbil course, told IRIN. "We found ourselves spending longer de-Baathifying them [a reference to Saddam Hussein's Baath party] than teaching them anything about reporting." Forced out of Baghdad for security reasons, Osman and his colleagues continue to collaborate with working journalists. He has worked in several local Kurdish newspapers as "training editor" - teaching editors and following their work for a week. But IWPR's main aim now is to train a generation of new journalists untainted by the bad habits of the former Iraqi regime. Out of reach of Saddam Hussein's authority since 1991, Iraqi Kurdistan does have the beginnings of a truly independent press. But there is still a long way to go, IWPR students say. "Kurdish newspapers are the mouthpiece of the parties, not the people," explained Abdul Ghafar, editor of a local magazine. "Our journalists work on remote control," added journalism student Zina Eymen. "They're like puppets on a string." Hiwa Osman agreed. "Kurdish journalism was born out of an unholy mixture of two trends - revolutionary propaganda and city-based journalism subservient to the regime in Baghdad", he explained. "Those trends have continued until today." It is to counter this that he spends so much time inculcating the values of that most austere of disciplines - agency-style news reporting. Students spend nearly two hours piecing together lead paragraphs from essential pieces of information. Then they transform themselves into editors, extracting essential information from long-winded paragraphs Osman gives them. Work on interview technique is no less ground-breaking. IWPR trainers are fighting against a widespread tendency among Kurdish journalists to see interviews as hand-to-hand combat and to print them as proof of victory. "When I asked one local journalist why he always published interviews word for word as question and answers, he told me it was the only way he had of showing his readers how brave he had been," said Osman. Supported by a wide variety of donors, including the UK's Department for International Development (DFID), IWPR runs similar programmes in over a dozen countries in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Africa. For Osman, though, Iraq has particular reasons for needing well-trained local journalists. "The most common complaint Iraqis make about coverage of their country is that it is shaped by outside factors," he said. "Western reporting is still shaped by divisions into pro and anti-war camps, and al-Jazeera and other Arab TV stations talk about Iraq as though it was a purely Sunni Arab country," Osman added. "By teaching these people, IWPR's idea is that they will be able to make their own voices, and their own priorities, heard by the outside world."