International conference

Building understanding is a first step towards increasing trust between regions and nations in a world facing fresh challenges since September 11, 2001. By common consent, the media has a pivotal role to play.

The tantalising question at the first conference of the Eurasian Media Forum was: Could Kazakhstan, through which passed the once great Silk Road linking Orient and Occident, now help to construct a new bridge of cooperation and mutual understanding between East and West?
Contentious issues, strong passions, entrenched positions and forceful arguments were hallmarks of the gathering, where topics ranged from the geopolitics of Eurasia to regional and international media coverage of religion and fundamentalism.

About 200 practising journalists, political figures, academics and other experts from around 50 nations attended the forum, an organisation envisaged by its organisers in Kazakhstan as being without political, economic or ideological allegiances.

The Forum’s stated aims are to examine the concept of Eurasia, promote development of its mass media, facilitate a professional exchange of views on the fresh challenges to the media since September 11, 2001, and, ultimately, to build a continuing dialogue between East and West.

«The idea of establishing the Eurasian Media Forum has been in the air for some time,» said Dariga Nazarbayeva, chair of the board of directors of Kazakhstan’s Khabar Broadcasting Agency and a prime mover behind the Forum.

«This issue of journalistic language during the epoch of international globalisation, language which is equally comprehensible and not insulting to representatives of all nations, has become especially vital today,» she said.

Almaty, then Alma Ata, was the scene in October 1992 of a UNESCO conference on the media and pluralism. It concluded with an agenda for change that inspired hope for quick progress towards a new era of journalistic freedom, mainly in former Soviet states.

«This declaration is no less urgent today than it was 10 years ago. Dialogue between East and West is not possible without the media, and the absence of dialogue creates tension,» Henrikas Iouchkiavitchious, advisor to UNESCO’s director general, told the Eurasian Media Forum.

The Eurasian Media Forum conference was opened by Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev and addressed by Iranian President Mohammad Khatami. Both acknowledged that the media was a powerful and influential tool to help resolve problems in the world.

The first challenge emerged swiftly, from Aidan White, general secretary of the Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists (IFJ). He referred to the UNESCO declaration, adding that the region still had «some of the world’s worst ratings in terms of abuse of journalists’ rights.»
The forum also highlighted other basic differences on understanding what the media stands for and how its role is viewed.

Is there, for example, a need for a clear-cut code of ’traffic rules’ for the media? Or will regulation destroy its freedom and function, as perceived mainly in the West?

Progress has been made in the past decade on breaking down some barriers but it is clear that much remains to be done if a generalised freedom is to translate into a truly free press.