Media has a large role to play in referendum, say journalists

By Bonifacio Taban Kuich

December 14,2010 (JUBA) – US media organization Voice of America (VOA) held a town hall meeting on Tuesday at Nyakuron Cultural Center in Juba, to address the challenges the media will face covering south Sudan’s independence referendum in January.

Four panelists told the meeting that the result of the referendum result be respected. South Sudan was granted the option to secede after the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which ended decades of war.

One panel member, Mahjoub Mohamed Salih, from Al Ayam newspaper, said that fighting to press freedom in Sudan faced many challenges. The journalist believes that the media has a duty to inform society regardless of their ethnic or political background.

Salih told Sudan Tribune on Tuesday that north and south Sudan are on the whole approaching the referendum in very different ways with the south focusing on separation and the north arguing that unity is in the interest of both parties of the CPA.

He said what both Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party and former rebels the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement who have governed Southern Sudan since 2005 should recognize the result whether for unity, or what seems more likely, the independence of the south.

Salih said that it was important for media houses to encourage a peaceful process and reach rural areas in local language to inform people of the process, results and consequences.

The United Nation’s has called for state and government radio to include awareness campaigns about the referendum in their scheduling as the January 9 plebiscite approaches.

Lillian Rizig, a civil society leader, said that their role is to prepare the public for the vote across Sudan. She mentions lack of funds is a challenge to their work in spreading awareness of the referendum.

She said that not enough women had been included in the referendum’s decision making and implementing bodies such as the Southern Sudan Referendum Commission in Khartoum and the Southern Sudan Referendum Bureau in Juba.

(ST)