Paula Slier
Russia Today
Hi everyone, it's a pleasure to be here. My Chinese is not that great, and I found myself yesterday with jet lag and everything, trying to say thank you at a restaurant and trying to say xiexie, but they landed up bringing me the sheesha which is the hubbly bubbly. So I'm gonna have to practice a little bit on my pronunciation. It's a pleasure to be here.
I've been with RT since it started back in 2005. I am originally from South Africa, and I've had people come up to me and say you don't sound Russian. That's because I'm not. I have a typical South African accent. I was running the RT office in the Middle East for the last 18 years, and I moved back to South Africa after not living there for 18 years. For those of you who've been away from a home and then you move back home 2 decades later, it's always a little bit of a…it's almost like coming back to a different country sometimes. A little bit more later about RT and what we're doing in Africa, because I've been sent back to set up RT Africa. At the moment we have our headquarters in South Africa, and we have stringers and contributors in 33 African countries.
I wanted to divide my presentation into 3 sections. The topic is “International Media Reporting on Africa: The Perceptions and the Challenges.” So, I thought let me start with the challenges of reporting in Africa. Remember, I'm coming from now 2 decades of reporting in the Middle East. I've covered Hassan spoke about the Arab Spring. I was in Egypt during the Arab Spring. We actually called it the “Twitter Revolution,” because exactly as he said, it was the 1st time that social media was making such a difference. From covering the Arab Spring, from covering all the wars of the last 2 decades whether it be Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, now to come to Africa, and make a comparison between what's it like to be a journalist on the frontline in the Middle East compared with being a journalist in Africa and I want you to share with you some of the challenges that we are having.
I then wanted to talk about Africa's perception of the world. It's a changing Africa. And as I traveled the continent now and as I meet with Africans, they are looking at the world increasingly different and I thought there could be something that could be useful for us to talk about.
Then I'll finish off with a little bit about RT and my experiences trying to set up a new channel in Africa with a Russian perspective of the world and some of the things I've experienced in the last 7-8 months I’ve been there.
One of the biggest mistakes that people make when it comes to Africa is thinking that Africa is one country. It's not one country. It's 54 countries, and each and every country has its own very different challenges. I see people nodding here and smiling. I think it's a common mistake that people do make.
My perception is that Africa is becoming more and more controlled. For us in the media, it means that the media landscape in Africa is becoming increasingly controlled, which means that it's more and more difficult to work in Africa as journalist. It's more and more difficult to do objective journalism in Africa, and even more so if you are the foreign media. So for foreign journalists, it's really challenging to get in and out of a country to report in a country, particularly if you don't support the government of the day, which means that many of us are using local reporters. These challenges for local reporters, I mean as a foreign correspondent most of my life, we would do what we called parachute journalism: parachute into a country, report on what was happening, and then I'd leave. I personally didn't really have to face the repercussions of my reports. When you use a local journalist who is reporting on their own situation and they report against the government, they have to face the repercussions of that.
The other side of that is when you work with local journalists, they bring their own bias into a story, and you have to be careful, if it's a personal perspective of the news, if they trying to protect themselves because they live there or what is actually at play. We were RT Africa, the only press crew to be allowed into the Central African Republic a couple of months ago. There’d be no other foreign crew except for 3 foreign journalists who had arrived in the Central African Republic were driving from the airport and were assassinated. The only reason we were able to go was because we had been invited by the government of the Central African Republic.
Another example, the Democratic Republic of Congo， for those of you who are familiar with it, you have there a situation with the M23 rebels in conflict with the government. Now, logistically trying to get a reporter in and out of a country where there's a conflict, getting your accreditation denied, having to get permissions, having to work with local crews, is a hell of a challenge.
Somalia. Here's a bit of information, if any of you play trivial pursuit. What is the most least visited country in the world? It's Somalia. Only 100 people went they last year and not one of them were journalists. We were also the only foreign journalist crew allowed into Somalia about 2 months ago. And that was also at the request of the Somali government. Now the concern in Somalia is the Al-Shabab terrorist group and when I went to the government office to get my accreditation and my permissions you could easily identify the Al-Shabab militants walking on the streets with the AK47s. When we went into the camps where people have no food, the humanitarian camps, it wasn't difficult to recognize who was Al-Shabab in the camp to see them on their cellphones alerting others.
Now we were fortunate that we were not attacked. Part of the reason was obviously because we had a strong security presence with us provided by the government and government security. But it was mostly because we were doing a story on the humanitarian situation in Somalia. It's not in the interest of Al-Shabab to attack journalists who are working on that kind of agenda. Had we been doing a story on safety and security in Somalia, we would have been a prime target for them.
One of the things that struck me in Somalia, the perception I always had of Somalia is that it's a country of perhaps pirates. It's a country that's very very dangerous. And it was dangerous. But I left with all the Somalis that I met there, one of the nicest cultures I've embraced, honest, passionate, nice people, and it's not the impression you get unfortunately from the media or from the backers of the media.
As I say to you, I've spent most of my career covering war in the Middle East. It has been dangerous but when I went to Africa, someone said to me, “Be careful in Africa. Journalists don't get killed. Journalists disappear.” And that is infinitely more alarming than simply being killed and I think part of the reason is that the boundaries in Africa are not always marked.
So for example, when I used to report on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, you know what's happening. This is the Palestinian side and their argument. And this is the Israeli side and their argument. If you look at northern Mozambique today, where there isn't conflict, how many people actually understand what's happening in northern Mozambique? There are 24 different militaries in northern Mozambique today, so journalists and people generally don't know who are the tribes, don't know the social problems, don't know the history of what's happening there.
Did you know that there are 13 conflicts at the moment in Africa, and most of those conflicts are being feuled by the west, and most of them are going under reported. Why they're going under reported? Because it's in the interests of those western powers not to have them reported or to have them reported on in a very, very particular way.
One of the best ways for the foreign media to get conflicts wrong and to perpetuate the agenda of western countries who are behind those conflicts is to say we fighting terrorism, because as soon as you are fighting terrorism, you are legitimately involved in that country. It's a way that people can understand what the conflict is about. And that's what's happening in Mozambique. It's a conflict about 2 tribes. It's a conflict about Mozambicans killing Mozambicans over Mozambican gas. But it never gets reported like that. It gets reported as a conflict about the war on terror.
In Africa, we have the same constraints of media as elsewhere. How do you tell a conflict like Mozambique in 1.5 and 2.5 minutes and even less if you on social media. We have the problem of access. How do you actually reach the conflict?
One of the things that I'm very passionate about is the idea that media fuels conflict. I've always been called a war correspondent, and it makes me stop and think and say what a pity, wouldn't it be nicer to be called a peace correspondent. The whole idea that “if it bleeds, it leads.” In Kenya, for example, you need permission to film everywhere, and the argument used is it's against terrorism. And yeah, sometimes the terrorist want publicity, but not everything that's going on in Africa or generally in the world is against terrorism.
I really believe that the topics that are making headlines in Africa are topics that are important to western narrative and to the western perception of the world. How many of you know that in the next month 21 million people in the Horn of Africa will die from starvation. No one is reporting that enough and not only that will those people die from hunger because of the starvation or because of the famine, but the United Nations has scaled back its food supplies and its resources to the Horn of Africa. And that has already started this month.
I mentioned to you how are Africans seeing the world differently. Africans are being wooed by both the east and the west and up until now the west always had an upper hand. The perceptions of Africans are changing. They are saying we want to be able to pick a side. We no longer want to be dictated too. We want to be able to stand up and we want to be able to lead ourselves. In Mozambique, I did a story about the decolonization of education. How the country is looking at the education in the schools to remove itself from the colonial thinking of the past. There is a history in Africa of western colonialism, which is why when I arrive in a country and I approach government ministers or whoever to talk to them and interview them.
There are 2 pluses for Russia and China. No. 1, Russia never has, were never colonized in Africa. We have no history of colonization, and Russia during the Soviet Union time supported the struggle and liberation movements in Africa. China has extensive economic projects as you know across Africa, and is seen as benefiting the country economically. But the western powers don't have that. The western powers are seen as being involved in Africa for the resources that Africa can have.
By far the wealthiest continent is Africa. And as consumerism increases, so too does the demand on resources. For example, gold is in high demand particularly now is countries want to go back to back in gold and using their own currencies as they move away from the American dollar. BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), the alternative trading platform is strengthening. More and more countries from Africa and Asia want to join BRICS. And that gives you an example of how the Global South is standing together, and how it wants to grow. As I mentioned they want to back their currency with their own commodities. And this means going forward. There will be a decreasing reliance on the American dollar.
If you take a map of Africa and you look where are the minerals. Every spot where there are minerals will be the exact same spot where there is a conflict today. And it's always made sense for the west to keep Africa in conflict, because it makes the country ungovernable and it's easier for them to extract minerals and also keep the journalists away, so no one really knows what's going on. The West is not interested in solving the conflicts of Africa. That's not just my view. It's the view of everybody I have interviewed in Africa. You have resources like cobalt and copper that are used for electric goods. You have diamonds. You have coltan (columbite-tantalite), which is now more in demand because it is used in cell phones as the lithium batteries. You have lithium which is in demand, so Africa is becoming a central focus even more than it ever was.
There was mention earlier of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. It's not a Russia-Ukraine conflict. It's a Ukraine-NATO conflict. And you know what? It's not even a Ukraine-NATO conflict. It's a Ukraine-entire-West conflict. And in Africa more and more countries are standing up and coming forward, and saying in this conflict, we support Russia. The one problem is though that the conflict is ongoing. And countries particularly in Africa, but I would imagine it's the same elsewhere, are afraid to come forward and say that they support Russia for as long as they can still receive material benefit from the United States. So you have a situation where a minister in Somalia said to me “we always support the country that can give us the most amount of money.” Ladies and gentlemen, Africa is a changing colony. There's a lot happening. Thank you so much for having me here today.