2.3:
CHALLENGES AND LESSONS
The
primary challenge of any Public Information Division is to create support for
the Mission Mandate among both the population being served and the external
world. The primary challenge for the Video Unit in this context should be to
produce quality Video Product which helps achieve these goals. These were our
goals when Mario Zamorano and Kevin Kennedy were our directors.
However,
after the departure of Kevin Kennedy, our primary challenge became to produce
quality video product in spite of incompetent and even sometimes destructive
supervision – supervision which had no interest in hearing our professional
opinions on any matter, creative or professional.
Under these
conditions, protecting the integrity ot the Video Unit became my top priority.
During this period, I used every
means available to avoid personal confrontations, even under extreme
provocation. Over the years, I have
learned that such confrontations seldom produce desired outcomes, and often
makes things worse.
Aside from a few decades of professional production experience around
the world, what enabled me to survive in MONUC was my training as a yudansha in
aikido, also known the art of peace, which I have been practicing for 20 years
now. In Kinshasa, I helped the Chief of Staff of the Japanese Embassy,
Fujita-San, to create a dojo with Congolese students, and this free time
activity helped me understand the Congolese people better than any official UN
program. Furthermore, I am not aware of any UN training program which helps
staff deal with some of the complex
internal politics of the organization, which can be a serious distraction. Therefore,
I would encourage anyone of any age seriously interested in becoming a real
peacekeeper to explore aikido. Peace begins in our own hearts and minds,
and is reflected in the way we treat others. If we peacekeepers cannot work
together, we can hardly expect the populations we serve to do so.
When I felt the climate in the division was becoming truly unbearable, I
also turned to the Ombudsman for advice and support. For most of my tenure, the
Ombudsman was Gang Li, and he taught me a great deal about the UN system while
advising me on how to best defuse combustible situations. I felt I could be
perfectly frank with him: it was like having the luxury of a good lawyer for
guidance and counsel. My previous mission, UNTAET, had no Ombudsman, and the
difference was remarkable. I feel the office of the Ombudsman is an
invaluable addition to Peacekeeping Missions, with the caveat that the
Ombudsman must be completely independent from the mission, and that all
communication with the Ombudsman must be kept confidential.
Other major challenges involved our dependence on other divisions.
For
example, on a technical level, Video Unit had a challenging relationship with
CITS. We were completely dependent upon
CITS for all internet services, and, despite the efforts of every PID Director,
we rarely ever received the support we needed to do our jobs properly.
The sole exception was UNIFEED, Thanks to the program File Catalyst,
combined with the hard work and dedication of our Video IT experts Titus
Nyukuri and Kevin Jordan, we were usually able to send short video clips to
UNIFEED, the UN website on a regular basis,
FTP has
been the industry standard for electronic transmission of video material for
several years now, but we were never able to get it functional in MONUC or
MONUSCO, in spite of many a conference and many an unkept promise. We
recommended a privately paid, dedicated line for
FTP
transmission from Goma to Kinshasa on several occasions, only to be told it was
against
UN rules.
Frankly, had we adhered to all UN rules, we never would have been able to do
anything.
As a result, we were forced to
send tapes by hand from Goma to Kinshasa several times a week, putting us in
violation of MOVCON rules. I authorized this practice – with the tacit
understanding of the Chief of Transport, once he understood our predicament.
Likewise, the CITS ban on YouTube made it impossible for UN staff to see
our weekly programs on our YouTube channel. As a result, we had to send our
programs by Intranet to our colleagues, and there were always problems. Many in
the sectors could not open the files, so naturally they directed their
complaints to me, and I, in turn, attempted to direct them to the CITS
Helpdesk. I felt it was important that our colleagues had some contact with
what was going on in the rest of the mission, so this was definitely a
worthwhile effort.
Our YouTube and Facebook channels remained essential to the effort to
get our message out to the external world, and we turned to CITS for assistance
to make it possible to upload our programs from our offices. However, we never
could find a time-efficient way to upload programs on our UN computers, so we
did all of the uploading at home on our private servers, at our own expense. It
was worth every penny.
However, a dedicated line for
some $300. a month with a private server was a option that would have solved
both the FTP problem and the uploading of material, but that was one that was
never approved, due to so-called “ UN rules” that I never really saw or
understood.
Indeed, this solution would have been far more cost effective than the
expensive BGAN option proposed by CITS, which would have cost at least $3000 or
more per week, depending upon the number of transmissions. Just for the record, BGAN is
based on sat phones, and only makes sense in a remote location when no other
options are available and time is of the essence.
The final
challenge I will deal with here was the baffling decision by Finance in 2011 to
make it impossible for to hire freelance Congolese presenters, even though we
had plenty of money in our budget to pay freelance Congolese talent, and we had
been doing so for three years without any problems at all. Budget failed to
understand that articulate, attractive and hard working presenters do not grow
on trees, and we had searched for a long time before finding our star Horeb
Bulambo, who became the Congolese face and voice of the mission for many
Congolese. And since he was educated, attractive and charismatic, he did an
excellent job as our front man promoting the MONUSCO mandate from remote locations
around the country. Anyone with any knowledge of television will understand
when I was say that he had been very hard to find. Yet our friends from Budget,
doubtless with some encouragement from some of our PID colleagues who were
jealous of our success, turned a deaf ear to our pleas, effectively killing the
program at a critical time just before
the elections.
This was particularly aggravating to me because I had just been in
meetings in New York with Caroline Petit and Stephane Dujarric of DPI, who
liked MONUSCO REALITES, and were trying to set up a free distribution deal for
the program with Belgian RTBF, which wanted to broadcast the program for free
in Europe, thereby reaching the Congolese diaspora and others . Astonishingly enough, then PID Director
George Ola-Davies gave us no support either with Budget or RTBF, and a very
promising opportunity withered on the vine, along with MONUSCO REALITES. No
explanations were offered. In the world of communications, such professional
negligence is a serious matter, and would be grounds for dismissal in any
professional organization I am familiar with.
Backdoor communications with the Administration had never been my style
– nor did COS or the SRSG ,much to their credit , encourage them - so there was
little I could do at the time.
A related challenge was our relationship with Radio Okapi. As far as I am concerned, Radio Okapi
is the jewel in the crown of MONUC PID, and is the greatest accomplishment I
know of in any DPKO Information operation. Radio Okapi is a real radio station
that has become the most popular and
trusted voice on the DRC airwaves, thanks to a joint effort by MONUC and
the Swiss Fondation Hirondelle. The relationship between PID and Hirondelle has
been stormy, however. Hirondelle
representatives often feel that PID was in the propaganda business,
while Okapi should be doing objective news. By the time I arrived in 2007, there was clearly a lot of bad blood in
the air, and to this day there are many at Radio Okapi who still do not understand
they work for the UN.
Thanks to Radio Okapi chief Jean Jacques Simon (who was professional
enough to work with me in spite of past
differences,) I was able to obtain the services of two Okapi presenters who
wanted to expand into television presenting. We began to use them for MONUC
REALITES, and they gave our
program an intimacy and warmth that had been missing. When it came to paying
them, however, I was told UN rules prohibited them getting any compensation.
Since I needed the presenters to know their lines and be punctual, I made a
private arrangement with the presenters, and my solution worked perfectly. The
female presenters were excellent and we made them look even more
beautiful.
Soon,
other reporters from Okapi wanted to work with us . I was very interested,
since I had been seeking an alternative to Horeb for some time. The Okapi
reporters were educated professionals who could travel and work in the field,
unlike anyone else available. Some collaboration seemed natural, since it would
have promoted Okapi capacity building for the future, and would have eliminated
our dependence on freelancers. What I had in mind was having some reporters
for a week or two every month.
However, when I proposed the possibility of some collaboration with
Okapi to then Director George Ola-Davies, his response was to try to create a
conflict between myself and Radio Okapi
Chef d’Antenne, Amadou Ba. Fortunately, both Amadou and I could see what he was
trying to do; and neither of us had any reason for dispute, so we dodged the
bullet. However, that meant curtains for what should have been an obvious
option of maximizing talent at hand for the benefit of all, especially our
Congolese partners.
Episodes such as this, along with others, made me wonder what on earth
was going on in PID. In the case of George Ola-Davies, it seemed
that at times we were not working for the same organization. More on this in
Part IV.
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