INDEPENDENT MEDIA CENTRE KURDISTAN

At the training hall of the assaish in Sulayma-niya the first workshop of a series started to help the security police to work in a better way with the press. IMCK organised five workshops of a day for different staff at assaish after reports on a number of incidents between assaish and press. For Kurdistan to become a healthy democracy, both assaish and press must know their roles and limits. Trainer is Dutch police trainer Agnes Dinkelman, who worked with police in different parts of the world, most recently in Liberia. She will be assisted in the second part of the days by Kurdish journalist Yahya Barzinji, who tells them about the effect of harsh treatment for journalists. The series will be repeated for the assaish in Erbil. These first nine workshops are a pilot to a bigger project covering most of the assaish staff in Kurdistan.

What is an responsible journalist and why is he/she important for the Kurdish media? More then twenty young people from all over Kurdistan wanted to know the answer to this question. IMCK-director and senior trainer Judit Neurink held a workshop for the group 'young leaders', during a week of workshops organized for them by the Kurdish ministry of Youth and Sport. Press freedom cannot be complete, Neurink told them. A responsible journalist tries to inform the people without causing damage to the subjects he writes about. He works inside the culture and has to always take into account the possible result of what he writes or reports. His role in a democracy is to act as a translator between people and politicians, and to report in an honest and independent way on the society and on politics.

'Civilians have the right to know what parties and politicians want and do. That's what you need the media for'. That was part of the message two Dutch former parliaments members had for their colleagues of KNA, the Kurdish National Assemblee in Irbil. On February 2nd Gerrit Valk (social democrats, PvdA) and Jan Dirk Blaauw (liberals, VVD) started the first of three workshops for KNA-members on the relation between politicians and the press. They talked to them about how to make good use of the press, from their experiences in the Dutch parliament and as trainers in many different countries, and how important this is in a democracy. Their workshop is the first phase of a project by IMCK with the KNA on politics and press. Later in February KNA members will be offered mediatraining to help them get their message across to the civilians. This project has been made possible through a donation out of the American reconstruction fund.

'States should have taxes', says Frank van Haren, trainer on the Transparency of Government workshop in Erbil, 'so the people who pay them have a right and a reason to ask something in return. That makes them more eager to check what the government is doing with their money.' That is one of the central issues Van Haren brought up during the first days of his workshop in Erbil. He is informing 15 journalists from different media Erbil in 4 days about the background of good governance and transparency of government. His main point is what is democracy, and what else is needed but elections to make it work. Later in the week Van Haren will also lead a workshop on the same subject for lawyers and politicians in Erbil. The workshops are organiazed in cooperation with the Erbil Journalists' Syndicate and the Kurdistan Organization for Civil Development (KOCD), and take place at the premises of KOCD.