INDEPENDENT MEDIA CENTRE KURDISTAN

Radiomaker Joris van de Kerkhof arrived in Iraqi Kurdistan for the third time to conduct a workshop for IMCK in making radio. This time the participants of Media bo Khalq, the post graduate training of IMCK in Irbil, are his students. Van de Kerkhof will train them on the basics of radio making, to give them a better choice of what they like in journalism. Another reason for the training, which brings both the print and TV group of the course together, is that journalists more and more have to be multi medial. The training started on October 11 and will end on October 14, and takes place in the training rooms of Media bo Khalq in the Hotel Safeer in Irbil.

The TV-group of IMCK's post graduate training Media bo Khalq/Media for People started a training on TV news. Dutch TV-maker Karin Greep started with the group on Monday 28 September 2009, together with lead trainer Xdir Domle. Greep will teach them what news is, how to find it and how to report it. Her four day training will end in making newsitems by all members of the group. The training is taking place in the traininghall for TV of Media bo Khalq in Irbil. Karin Greep has been working in journalism for almost 25 years, first radio and the past 7 years in TV news programs on Dutch TV.

A British diplomatic delegation visited the students at the Media bo Khalq course in Irbil on Tuesday afternoon September 1, 2009. The deputy head of mission in Baghdad, Jon Wilks, and the British consul general in the Kurdish region of Iraq, Jeremy Macadie, allowed the students to interview them for more than an hour. Great Britain has granted IMCK part of the funding necessary to run the post graduate course for Iraqi Arabs and Kurds in Irbil. The training runs for 8 months and started in August 1, 2009.

Sixteen journalists and correspondents from different papers and press agencies in Iraq gathered in the Melia Mansour in Baghdad for an IMCK-training on making a news reportage. The workshop started on August 15, 2009. In four days the journalists will be taught what news is, how to use sources, how to conduct a succesful interview and how to make a news reportage. The short news feature is a form of journalism not often used in Iraq. For IMCK this is the first training in the Iraqi capital Baghdad. Before now Iraqi journalists from the South came up to the Kurdish region to be trained, but IMCK wants to be able to reach more journalists. Senior trainer Judit Neurink is testing the waters to see if the situation in Baghdad has improved enough. She is working with co-trainer Kholoud al-Amiry, and translator Ahmed Jibouri who came with her from the IMCK office in Irbil. The training is a joint activity with Simi, the Iraqi Irex-daughter working for Independent Media in Iraq.

IMCK -trainers are getting ready for starting the post graduate course in journalism, Media bo Khalq , on August 1, 2009. Xdir Domle , Ako Muhamed , Mazen al - Taer and Salam Ibrahim will train 30 participants from all over Iraq to become independent journalists. Canadian TV-maker Don North takes them through the details of TV-making and how to share this knowledge with the students that will join the training in Irbil . Media bo Khalk (Media for People) will be officially opened on August 1 in Irbil by a number of Kurdish and international officials.

The Kurdish press agency AK in Irbil was the venue of a 5-day training IMCK started on June 15. Trainer Maaike Veen was back at AK to train groups of editors and correspondents. She trained AK already in the preparatory phase in 2008, before the start last summer. AK has since grown to be one of the more successful press agencies in Kurdistan. It now publishes in Kurdish, Arabic, English, Farsi and Turkish ( http://www.aknews.com/ ). Its news is published in media all over the world.

With parliamentary elections planned for July 25, IMCK is organising 6 workshops of a day on how to report before and during elections. Dutch trainer Nynke La Porte started on Saturday June 6 at Hawler newspaper in Irbil. La Porte is a Dutch journalist, who reported on at least 3 elections in the Netherlands. She is making a comparison with Dutch elections which were dominated by a new party, which was even predicted to become the biggest party in the Netherlands. In Kurdistan new parties have emerged, most importantly the Change List, which is predicted to take many votes. Hawler is a daily newpaper which prints 25.000 copies a day and is distributed for free in the whole of the Kurdish region. Other media to be trained will be Barzan, Zagros TV, Kurdsat TV, Awene and Rojnama.

Info graphics can help the reader and viewer to understand information better. They show numbers and statistics in a graphic way. Info graphics make (news)papers and TV bulletins more interesting and informative. That is why IMCK started, in cooperation with Irex, a 8 day workshop in Irbil on info graphics. On May 24 Dutch trainer Karin Timmerman opened the workshop for 13 Kurdish designers and journalists, who are very 'computer literate'. She works with them on Adobe Illustrator. Participants come from newspapers, sites and TV stations all over Iraqi Kurdistan. The training takes place at the computer room of Irex in Irbil. Timmerman is working as a graphic designer at the Dutch daily Trouw. Her co-trainer/translator is Kurdish journalist Ako Muhamed.

IMCK-trainers on March 8th started in Irbil on a 7 day training with editors and makers of internet sites. Fifteen makers joined Marco Visser (from the website of the Dutch paper Trouw) and co-trainer Ako Mohamed at the building of Irex, to be taught about how to make sites that are more interesting for the public and are not competing with the (mother) newspaper. They also talked about technical aspects of making sites, and of ways to make sites more attractive for advertisers. The training was made possible by funding by the Dutch ngo Hivos.

After succesfully ending his radio workshop in Sulay-maniya (all eight participants received a certificate), Dutch radiomaker Joris van de Kerkhof started on January 25th on a second workshop, now in Irbil. Radiomakers from different radiostations in the Kurdish capital joined him at the facilities of Radio Zagros to learn in 5 days how to report for radio. The workshop was organised by IMCK together with the Kurdistan Organisation for Civil Development, and will end at January 29.

Editors in chief of six newspapers in Sulaymaniya met at the IMCK to discuss possibilities of working together on different subjects, and meeting on a more regular bases. During the meeting on January 8 2009 the editors of Awena, Kurdistani Nwe, Hawlati, Lveen, Rojnama and Komal decided on organizing a meeting with colleagues from Irbil and Duhok, to discuss the possibility of working together.

The workshop on transparency of government, given by Dutch lawyer Frank van Haren, ended in Irbil on December 21 with certificates for 29 participants. Van Haren did two workshops of 4 days each, one for journalists and one for lawyers and politicians. He ended his stay in Irbil with an evening with Kurdish judges. All participants were very enthusiastic about the content of the workshop. Van Haren expects to come back to Kurdistan to give the same workshop in Duhok later in 2009.

,,We need a credible media'', said the Kurdish prime minister Nerchirvan Barzani at the opening of the new Kurdish newsagency AK. ,,Independent media have to strenghten democracy.'' It was for the first time the Kurdish PM showed his strong support for independent media in the north of Iraq. He criticized the role of media that let themselves be manipulated to deform information. Kurdistan needs an independent newsagency to inform the people, and to show the world what is happening there, was his message. In the past Kurds have suffered from media that distorted the facts. ,,That's why it took so long in the 80's for news on the genocide in Kurdistan to reach the world.'' AK is an independent Kurdish newsagency, that operates in Kurdish, Arabic and English from Irbil, the capital of the Kurdish region of Iraq. The IMCK has helped AK by offering training to the staff since June 2008.

Thirteen Kurdish journalists started November 15 in Irbil on a three day training on text editing. The training was organised by IMCK together Kurdistan Journalist Syndicate in Irbil and the Kurdish Organisation for Civil Development. The training will teach experience journalists how to edit the texts of their colleagues, before they are printed. This should help to make Kurdish newspapers more attractive and stories and newsitems more reliable. The participants are from different print media in Irbil, both partymedia and (semi-) independent. The trainers are Judit Neurink (director IMCK and senior trainer) and Khidr Domle (freelance journalist and trainer for IMCK).

Eddy van Wessel, the international photographer from Holland, is back in Kurdistan. He will be doing a workshop for his Kurdish colleagues in Irbil on telling a story in a picture. The best pictures from the last workshop he did in Sulaymaniya (in June 2008) can still be seen in the training hall of the IMCK. The workshop in Irbil (from November 6-10) has been organised by IMCK in coordination with Media Work Development Organization.

The Independent Media Centre in Kurdistan was founded in May 2008 and is supported by the Dutch ngo’s Press Now and Democracy and Media. Funding is both Dutch, international and Kurdish. Its main office is in Sulaymaniya, but the centre also has offices in Duhok and Irbil. Press Now started training civil journalism in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2004, and has since trained a few hundred journalists from different media (radio, TV, print). The Media Centre will extend the work started by Press Now, giving equal time and energy to journalists from different backgrounds - political, social, religious and ethnic.