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| Updated: 16-Oct-2003 | NATO Speeches |
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At the NATO 16 Oct. 2003 |
Remarks by
Mr Alan Davis, Director of Operations,
I'd like to start by congratulating the person who convened this particular panel. It's crucial I think, when discussing public diplomacy..,..to focus attention on the local as well as the international audience. It seems obvious enough............ Engaging the local audience
is a pre-condition for Even so....time and again ....it seems that local engagement.....the challenge of how to get local buy in...... This is either ignored.......Or else it's introduced as an afterthought when boots are already on the ground. The problem is......... if you approach communications as an issue of only secondary importance...........you end up wasting valuable time in engaging the local population. As a result your window of opportunity will be closing. In so doing, you will have actually worked against what presumably is your primary goal........ .which is to exit soonest with a sustainable peace in place. So what I want to talk about then with regard to public diplomacy....... is how to engage and convince local stakeholders that such an outside intervention is fully in their interests....
The easiest way of doing that, I think, is by engaging with the best of the local media. I come at this subject of public diplomacy -not as any particular expert -but as a simple international journalist and media development generalist who joined IWPR back in 1994 to start up the programme work. As some of you will know already......... IWPR is a media development organisation that develops local professionalism and capacity in conflict and transitional zones. In many of these places there are information vacuums. .......A key part of our work in these places then .... .is to help produce real time information as part of the ongoing training process. In Afghanistan, for example where there was one such vacuum,.......the project is training a whole new generation of local journalists who are publishing stories in the local media. These stories too are picked up and reworked for radio such is the demand for information. And I'm delighted to point out that 18 months after we arrived..........much of our training is being done by local Afghan trainers themselves. That's not bad considering that until quite recently, these guys were refugees in Peshawar. So what I would like to do then, is to set down a 8 basic rules to try and follow when developing a local communications policy. The first is very simple. Rule number 1 is to set yourself a clear objective. Right from the start......if your communications' policy doesn't support and fit into the overall mission objective -then something is badly wrong. The overall objective is presumably to exit soonest with a sustainable peace in place......... ..if so, the communications strategy has to support this plan. A clear objective may then be to fully engage with the local population through the media. Rule Number 2 is quite simply. Do vour homework.... Obvious enough perhaps. But this means really getting to grips with the country or region concerned. Understand the dynamics at play and how the society works. No learning is wasted. It means talking to the international aid and other organisations that may have been working there for years. You need to rope in outside expertise. You also need to listen to authentic voices from the ground who may be overseas -not just to the Ahmed Cha-la- bis.....but to everybody. There's always a host of reliable information if you know where to look. The fact is.......the more you understand........the better informed your policy will be. The secret here is 'no surprises' Likewise, the more you know about the media situation and the media players, the better. Rule Number 3 is to have an open door policy. Communicate, consult and listen to others........ A communications
policy is not a If it is any good, the more people who know about it, discuss it and support it, the better...... You might set up an external NATO local communications or media advisory council...... Continually be testing your ideas out on them. Rule Number 4 Having set the objectives and the overall communications policy.....you need to engage the players who will help you win support for your force. What you mustn't do is try and deliver it yourself. The military shouldn't be trying to take on a direct journalistic role themselves as it rarely ever works -unless it is to report on basic humanitarian issues Instead you should be engaging with groups like ourselves. You should engage with the local players and the networks you'll have already identified from your homework.. The next rule just underlines this. Rule Number 6 is: Do not attempt to run your communications policy as a military campaign In a military campaign, you can suffer occasional defeats and still recover..... In communications, it doesn't work that way...... You loose the confidence of the local people ......you loose their trust and respect -and it will be very difficult to win it back. This takes us on to The Alistair Campbell Rule. Rule Number 7 is do not attempt to control..... If you have done your homework.,,... if you have done your planning and found your partners... ..well then there should be no need for draconian control. Where you do exert control, it suggests a lack of confidence It also works against your very objective which is to exit soonest.... having left behind a sustainable peace. Rule Number 8 is that when your forces do get on the ground, your own PR and press liaison team have to be fully accessible and committed to outreach... These people should be using local languages and putting out local language press releases from day one. Those of us who remember the 11 am press briefings at the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo after Dayton will remember that these weren't even translated into Bosnian for over a year. Likewise, in Afghanistan last year, we had to go up and bang on the door of ISAF communications team to get them to come out and speak to the Afghan journalists we were training. The last rule is a simple summation of all the others You need to engage in order to disengage. You need to invest on the ground for the simple reason of self-interest. If you don't, you are going to have a problem. So, how many of these rules were really followed in Iraq? (Shrug) If we are frank, not too many..... Why so? Of course, it was never going to be easy......but without a serious plan......... without doing any homework...without consultation and without local buy in -the Coalition forces have made a hard job that much harder. If anything.......the Pentagon's media campaign has been more secretive than its military campaign..... We are also working on the ground in Bagdhad and it has to be said that there is absolutely no connect between the local journalists and the CPA. Neither side seems too interested in the other -and the window
of opportunity that might have existed 6 months ago is pretty
much closed. I'd like to address the concerns of people in the audience who might be thinking........... 'hmmm, okay.......... so this guy says to invest seriously in the local media –but what's the payback... ...Where are the guarantees here? My answer to this is simple. A good local media outlet will always be wanting to do a lot of stories on what peacekeeping forces are up to. They will be especially hungry in an information vacuum. One only has to look at the BBC's reporting on and with the British forces in Basra This essentially, is public diplomacy for the UK audiences. Even so, nobody is suggesting that the BBC is engaged in propagandizing for the military. What is going on is nothing except for BBC producers and MOD press people collaborating as equals for mutual benefit. The BBC does not sacrifice its objectivity, and the MOD gets its message across. In ending then, I want to return briefly to Afghanistan... ..I want to put on the table the fact that we ourselves get some funding from the a public diplomacy fund. The fund is run by the FCO and MOD -and in taking the money, we did not promise to do anything other than our normal work. It's great testimony to both ministries, that they were happy to trust our approach. As many of you may know, British reconstruction and military teams have been given the Mazaar area in Afghanistan as their area of responsibility. We then have an office in Mazaar, which is helping us to roll out of training and information production into the regions What we will not be doing, is artificially covering every thing that these teams are doing. But if the British teams are engaged in anything that is considered really newsworthy, then our local trainees would cover it... ...They would do so in a balanced and well-rounded way. Likewise...... if there were serious criticisms from locals
about what the teams were As always, the goal is to have local reporters producing the best and most rounded and balanced stories If they are then published by local editors and the local radio networks as is already happening -then this exactly what we want. Of course, local editors are not involved in the propaganda process......nor are the readers or listeners. The republication of these stories then demonstrates that the process of winning hearts and minds by natural means is already happening. At the end of the day then, we are happy to be engaged on this particular public diplomacy project -because ultimately we share the same objective at the UK government in Afghanistan.... And that is to support the recovery process.. 
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