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Arnold Zeitlin: First I must begin by saying that as the only bearded individual on the panel, I feel I occupy a peculiar position. I'm not a Muslim; however, this beard was raised in Muslim Pakistan 25 years ago, and I've kept it ever since. I grew it during a period of illness when I was in bed, and when I emerged I had this foliage. A friend, when he first saw it, said to me: ah, you've become a Sufi. And than Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who by than was the prime minister of Bangladesh, saw it—this was after his time in jail in Pakistan—and he crept up behind me at a garden party in Dhaka and poked me hard in the ribs, and when I jumped he leaned over and said, I see you have grown a beard, but you have not changed your complexion.

This illustrates the fact that religion is infused in almost anything you do in South Asia—I found it too in Nigeria, where you have tensions between the Muslim north and the Christian and pagan south. You had ethnic difficulties that erupted in the civil war between different tribal groups. In the Philippines I found another a civil war based on religion, on differences between Christians and Muslims, which exists to this day, and this was almost 30 years ago. So I have been forced by circumstances to deal with religion in almost every kind of reporting I have done. And I have tried to report as I see it, taking into consideration the fact that we are reporting for an audience abroad in many secular nations where religion is not as prominent in one's thinking. You have to explain, you cannot deny the religious or ethnic differences that cause this particular incident or that particular incident. I believe someone in Indonesia has a remarkable solution to this problem of reporting. I'm told there is a newspaper in Indonesia that publishes one edition for Christians and another edition for Muslims. I think that's a remarkable effort. I don't know how well it works.

But my concern on this panel and being here in Singapore is that often societies deny religion or ethnicity as part of the problem of violence, political differences and so forth and so on. And often there are efforts in a society and in government to try to impose denial on the reporting of this news. Unfortunately this leads to the imposition of controls, not only on reporting on religion or ethnicity, but on everything. I think we have an example here in Singapore, where controls of the press and the way people report are justified by saying where you have a very diverse population, you don't want to arouse differences. You don't solve these differences by denying, you solve these differences by, I think, trying to talk them out, and learning that they exist and learning how they and learning how they can be somehow resolved. So I'm here simply to make a plea that yes, journalists have to be sensitive, but they also have to tell the story and the implications of what they report are for society to deal with. The journalist cannot be a gatekeeper of morality or consequence. His job, her job, is to tell the story in as accurate and best a manner as he or she can.

Wooldridge: Thank you very much indeed. Prem Prakash also has a perspective on all these issues that goes back over many years. His Delhi-based company Asian News International (ANI) has its roots in the company that he founded back in 1954. He is a cameraman, documentary maker, and now today, leading commentator as well, and his name is synonymous with so many of the watershed events in South Asia and indeed in the rest of Asia over this long period. The next videotape please. [Clip] From his own archive I brought that clip of the destruction of the Babri Mosque in the north Indian town of Ayodha in December 1992. That was one of the events in this region in recent times that brought religion and politics together in a particularly traumatic way, in violence in which many people died. It remains an emotive issue in Indian politics until this day and probably will for some time in the future.

Your material comes from different countries; every day it appears on screens right across the world, it's part of people's news diet across the world and helps to form people's impression about South Asia. What are your views of the sensitivities around reporting communalism, as it is often called in South Asia, sectarianism if you like, and indeed religion?

Prem Prakash: South Asia is a very volatile area and it is an area which is inhabited by an equally volatile people. What you saw there is part of that volatility. The partition of India in 1947 was expected to sort out that religious problem by creating a separate state. But what happened in that partition was that, in the long human history—apart from being a journalist my subject is history, and I was a child at that time and I witnessed it—I don't think that mankind has witnessed the kind of violence, the kind of torture that human beings inflicted on each other. That was the part of independence of both India and Pakistan, and to date there isn't an explanation of why that happened, and it continues to hurt even today. It didn't solve the problems.

In this incident of the Babri Mosque, my company suffered a very heavy loss. I was lucky that my people came out alive, in the kind of violence that was suffered in those days. [The cameramen] were not carrying these small cameras, they were carrying cameras about this size, very expensive. You couldn't even find a little piece of this camera. People pulled down the entire structure, and that structure wasn't being used as a mosque, but clearly there were elements of both sides who were out to do something. It continues to hurt even today. Now, there is a colonial background, which the government of India follows, which even we as journalists in India follow as a code, which is that don't identify. We talk about groups, just say the clash took place between two groups. Now I say colonial background because until recently in Britain, which has been the home of one of the longest communal battles, that between Catholics and the Protestants, mass media was not even allowed to broadcast the voice of any of the separatists. It's a different version that we follow in India, but it still hasn't helped. My concern remains how you cover these incidents, because as Mike pointed out at the introduction, with the international media and satellite television, everything is being covered and watched, and how would you then keep it away? And with the volatile situations that we have in the South Asian region, one action causes chain reactions many other places.

Wooldridge: Thanks very much indeed. Next we go to Mano Wikramanayake, who is with Mahajara TV, MTV, in Sri Lanka. It's put out using three languages on an island that has seen far more than its share of conflict. Tell us about the experience of trying to be an independent voice in Sri Lanka.

Wikramanayake: Sri Lanka has been independent for about the past 54 years now and throughout this independence we've had sporadic violence, but it really got bad in 1983 when we had rioting throughout the island. And since then it's been nearly eighteen years of ongoing war in the northeast of the country. It is a result of a cynical government and a press which I believe didn't understand its responsibility and fanned the flames of racial hatred. And this problem has affected us in many ways. In 1983, when it happened, we were six years into an economic boom, we saw the liberalization of the economy in 1977, and we had eight percent real GDP growth for six years. And one week in July 1983 this whole thing was reversed. Foreign investment went away, professionals fled the island, and we went back to where we were in the beginning of the 1970s.

Now, our ethnic divide in the country is very visible. Although in real life, in the south of the country it doesn't matter that much. We have seventy percent who are Sinhalese, who are largely Buddhist, about fifteen to seventeen percent who are largely Hindu, and the balance is largely made up of Muslims of various origins: Indian Muslims, Muslims from the Middle East, Muslims from Malaysia. Practice of religions is very visible in these communities. Now after the troubles of 1983, and over I think the next two or three years, things got really bad in the country. The media began to realize that they were also partly responsible in a sense. People became aware that the country couldn't afford another July 1983, we couldn't afford island-wide rioting and civil unrest and the effects it had on society and the direct result on economic growth. I want to show you three news clips, by different channels, of an incident that took place last week in a little town 50 miles east of Colombo, where a very small incident sparked off a major ethnic clash, and look at how the three channels report it. The first one is Maharaja, and we think we are unbiased and nonpartisan in an environment where everybody is backing one side or the other. The second clip is the government channels news bulletin and the third clip is from the channel owned by the brother of the ruler of the opposition. You can see how differently we treated it and what the common trend is. [Clips]

Nobody really mentioned that the clashes were between Muslims and Sinhalese because it's a town that is divided by river and on the east side are Moslems and on the west side are Sinhalese. And the reason why we didn't report this fact—and even though the government imposed emergency regulations, we were reporting this on the radio from the afternoon—but we didn't mention the clash because we knew that if we did and if we showed the pictures we had of mosques being destroyed and so on, this would have generated further clashes that could have spread, and more lives would have been lost.

The question I'd like to leave with you and the panelists today is, should we have reported all the facts, knowing that lives would be lost? Or should we have taken the view we did, and slowly, over the last week, filtered information through?

Wooldridge: Thank you very much indeed for that extremely illuminating example. Our final panelist is Steven Claypole. Our careers actually started along the same path and at just about the same time, then Steven went on to senior TV management in the BBC and via that to his consultancy role today around the world. What we have asked Steven do is to draw together some of the strands from these other contributors here and to talk from his experience, particularly his experience of being a Northern Ireland editor in BBC, about how he believes these sensitive issues should be handled.

Steven Claypole: Thank you, Mike. I should perhaps start with a disclaimer, and that is that I wouldn't presume at this point to speak for the BBC, but I can speak of the BBC and I can speak of my experiences through a three-year period in Northern Ireland as the chief editor there of news and current affairs. Many of the issues that have been raised by the panelists today were issues that confronted the BBC thirty years ago. Back in those days, the BBC was accustomed to sending smart chaps from Oxford and Cambridge wearing safari suits to different parts of the world to report on other people's upheavals and catastrophes. And the emphasis is on chaps; there are no women correspondents in those days. And suddenly in the UK there was a very serious conflict in Northern Ireland, a huge problem that until the recent events in the ex-Yugoslavia was probably the most serious conflict in Europe. There might be arguments that the problems in Spain with the Basque separatists were comparable, but for a long-running, very serious conflict there was really no equal throughout Europe.

My belief, looking back historically over the role of the BBC, is that the BBC thirty years ago was part of the problem. The BBC had instructions from various quarters not to disturb the calm that followed the official IRA campaign in Ireland in the 1950s. There was an understanding that certain things would be overlooked or paraphrased or codified. There was for example no coverage of Gaelic football, which is a hugely popular sport among the Catholic communities, and certainly there were political issues that never got covered. And suddenly, because of educational reforms that had been pushed through some years earlier, there was a highly educated group of people from the Roman Catholic tradition who came through the universities, and they joined the upheavals students of 1968 that started in Paris, and that was the beginning of the current conflict. The BBC's position and role did not help the situation when things started to go badly wrong.

At the other end of the scale, the BBC has certainly been part of what could be a solution in Northern Ireland. It's been able to operate in such a way that the politicians have been able to carry out some dialogue; part of the negotiations have gone on not just through the BBC but also through Ulster television and Sky News and international broadcasters. What went in between is, I think, something the BBC can be very proud of. It did respond very rapidly to the events back in 1968 and 1969. The policies which were evolved, the ethos which was created have really shaped and formed the BBC's journalism today.

Now, the most shocking thing for BBC executives in the 1960s, the thing which occupied most of the policymakers, was that for the first time the BBC was broadcasting within the community, in fact broadcasting within two communities, because of the two cultures, the two traditions in the north. It was also broadcasting to that community or those communities from London, and it was also broadcasting on the entire situation to the world through the BBC World Service. Very quickly the senior policymakers and thinkers decided quite sensibly that there had to be a one-BBC approach, that you could not have different parts of the BBC reporting things in different ways or putting notably different emphasis on the coverage.

I was very struck that in the discussion we had yesterday afternoon about the Philippines that the BBC is now in a position worldwide where it not only reports a situation in international locations or datelines for domestic audience, it's also reporting into the community. The pictures and the reportage from the BBC on the Philippines is seen on the ten o'clock news, but it's also seen by significant numbers of people in the Philippines and in countries surrounding the Philippines. So the one-BBC policy has to apply more than it ever did. It is absolutely essential to the survival of the BBC's reputation in Northern Ireland. There were huge problems with the BBC because first of all it had the name "British" in its title of course, so it was seen in certain quarters as being part of the British government or the British establishment. And on the other end of the scale the Protestant tradition felt that the BBC, being a British institution, should uphold the constitution of the union. So these are some of the issues, and I think they are very similar to the issues that have been aired by the panelists in the last few minutes. TBS

continued:

"The Coverage of Communalism, Race and Religion"

A News World Asia panel discussion