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MONROVIA, Liberia — In June, the U.N. Mission in Liberia, known by its acronym UNMIL, wound up 13 years of peacekeeping. The mission played a crucial role in ending a 14-year civil war that destroyed this West African nation, spilled into neighboring Sierra Leone, and left as many as 300,000 people dead in the two countries between 1989 and 2003. UNMIL helped guarantee the 2003 peace agreement that saw the three main factions lay down their arms and sent warlord-turned-President Charles Taylor into exile in Nigeria.But in the years since the 2003 peace deal, UNMIL has left its own trail of destruction. The second-biggest mission in the world at the time it was deployed, UNMIL was a massive force responsible for all aspects of security in Liberia. Its budget dwarfed the spending of the Liberian government for its first five years. (For the 2004-2005 fiscal year, for example, UNMIL’s budget was roughly $760 million compared with the Liberian government’s budget of $61 million.) Not surprisingly, the U.N. mission distorted the economy, crowded out the private sector, and in some cases hampered the recovery of whole industries after the war.Few aspects of Liberian society have suffered more under UNMIL than the media, which is critical for any young democracy but all the more so for one emerging from civil war. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.N. mission itself, and other donors have spent more than $10 million since 2003 to develop a robust independent media market capable of holding Liberia’s leaders accountable — only to watch UNMIL turn around and build a media behemoth that monopolized the country’s talent, resources, and audience, making it impossible for smaller outlets to compete. UNMIL Radio, the U.N. mission’s flagship media outfit, has a budget of $1.4 million this year — more than the annual revenue of the country’s commercial media combined. We are not aware of a media market in any other democratic country where one player so dominates all others in terms of revenue and resources.And there’s a massive misrepresentation at the heart of UNMIL Radio’s presence in Liberia. Although it now masquerades as an independent media outlet, operating in the same radio space as other news providers and delivering a product that looks like that of other news providers, the U.N. shows little interest or aptitude for the hard, dirty work of independent journalism. It claims to set a standard for journalism in the country but then fails to deliver on the industry’s most important responsibility — holding leaders, not just Liberia’s but the U.N.’s own, to account.To be sure, UNMIL Radio was born of an admirable goal: to bring reliable information to a public that had been fed little besides propaganda from all sides during the war. UNMIL built a station and a much needed network of transmitters, reaching 95 percent of Liberians, many of whom previously had no access to media of any kind. But as the postwar recovery gathered steam and threats to peace diminished, UNMIL Radio didn’t scale back its operation to make room for local media outlets. With its slick, expensive production and talented cast of reporters and broadcasters, it continues to attract by far the largest audience of any outlet in Liberia.
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Topic: How The UN Silenced Liberia's Press (Read 522 times)
