Journalists attend workshop on conflict reporting

A two-week training course on the media’s role in conflict transformation and peace building for selected journalists in West Africa opened in Accra on Tuesday.

Journalists would be taught how to report on conflict issues to enhance conflict resolution and transformation in the sub region.

The training course is being organised by the German International Cooperation (GIZ) in collaboration with the Ghana International Press Centre (GIPC).

Participants were selected from the Gambia, Senegal, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Benin, Togo and Ghana.

Opening the workshop, the Country Director of GIZ, Mr Siegrefried Lefeler, said the GIZ could not support development in Africa without helping to empower its media to live up to the task of being professional and an asset to development.

He said the GIZ has over the years supported the African media through such training programmes on several topics aimed at sharpening the knowledge of the media practitioners in playing their role effectively.

Mr Lefeler urged the participants to take advantage and build their capacities to be more critical in their respective country’s development.

Mr Wolfram Zunzer, a GIZ Conflict Resolution Expert, said last year alone, 35 violent conflicts were reported over the world in which about 1,000 people were killed.

He said about 40 per cent of resolved conflicts in parts of the world turned violent in five years later.

Mr Zunzer said conflict management was very critical to ensuring that conflicts did not escalate into violent situations where lives would be killed.

Mr Bright Blewu, General Secretary, Ghana Journalists Association (GJA), said many elections in Africa had been characterized with conflicts that had turned violent.

He noted that some of the conflicts could be attributed to the unprofessional manner with which the media had handled the reportage and thanked the GIZ for the support in training journalists over the years in the sub region.

Mr Blewu said, elections always come with conflicts but the professional manner in which those conflicts would be reported counted a lot.

He urged the participants to take the training serious and become agents of conflict resolution and transformation other than agents for destruction.

The participants would be taken through topics such as concept and notions of conflicts transformation, key dimensions of peace building, introduction to communication and dialogue and the role of Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) in West African Security Strategies.**