Busting the Sri Lankan Community Radio Myth

The myth of Sri Lankan community radio
Written for Panos London publication on ICT and development, published Dec 2003
By Nalaka Gunawardene

Even though Sri Lanka's majority Sinhalese believe they are descendents of a lion, the creature is not found anywhere in the island's dwindling forests. The gulf between hype and reality is even wider when it comes to community radio, which some people believe is thriving in Sri Lanka. In fact, it has never been allowed or nurtured in a media culture that is still heavily government regulated, and exceedingly urban-centric.

Then what about the network of Mahaweli Community Radio stations that has received so much coverage in the popular and academic media? They are no more - and no less - than rural transmissions of the entirely state-owned and state-managed Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC). For sure, the stations are located in remote areas, involve local people in programme production and broadcast to a predominantly rural audience. But listeners have no say in running the stations which are managed by a tight bureaucracy in the capital Colombo, and whose rigid guidelines fully control content: strictly no politics, and nothing remotely against the government in office.

This is not what the rest of the world knows as community radio. AMARC, the international community radio association based in Montreal, Canada, defines community radio as having three aspects: non-profit making, community participation and community ownership and control.

Community radio is characterised by access, public participation in production and decision-making and by listener-financing. The intention is that management of the station is in the hands of those who use and listen to it. This has never been the case in Sri Lanka, which has only two kinds of radio: state owned channels and private channels (both now operating on a commercial basis).

The only exceptions were illegally operated by militants engaged in armed conflict against the state. The Marxist Janata Vimukthi Peramuna (People's Liberation Front) had Rana Handa in the 1980s which had wide following - then the party rejoined the democratic process, entered Parliament and abandoned their adventures in broadcasting. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) - now talking peace with the government after two decades of confrontation - ran Voice of Tigers which made a mockery of Colombo's broadcast rules. In November 2002, as part of the peace-making process, the government granted a license for LTTE to continue its broadcasts legally, a move that has since been contested in courts by other citizen groups.

But that's the first - and so far only - time the state has ever accommodated such a request. Four successive governments have shied away from granting a single broadcast license to non-profit, non-governmental and cooperative groups. Several have been keen to benefit from the 'liberalisation' of the broadcast sector since 1992 but it has never been a whole-hearted deregulation process. Broadcast licensing has lacked transparency, accountability and consistency and the electro magnetic spectrum - a public property - has been plundered at the whim and fancy of officials and politicians.

Although there has never been any explanation for disallowing community groups the license to broadcast, officials have privately cited fears of media misuse for anti -social or political purposes. This in a land where some media companies are openly aligned with political parties, incite racial violence or oppose the current peace process with such impunity! The smokescreen of state-owned 'community radio' has been used effectively by the bureaucrats hand-in-glove with commercial interests to cover up all these sins. By uncritically believing this manufactured myth and then multiplying it in their own circles, the international media, development community and particularly agencies like UNESCO have blocked the opportunity for Sri Lankans to evolve grassroots based media that are owned, managed and sustained by the local people.

"Colombo Calling" was the station call in the early days of radio broadcasting in colonial Ceylon - one of the first countries in Asia to embrace the medium. Eight decades later, there is a cacophony of channels crowding the airwaves, but Colombo is still calling all the shots. A few token rural transmissions of the state cannot redress this huge imbalance no matter how they are dressed up. The first step towards truly community media is to shatter this myth, recognise the vacuum and agitate for the real liberation of the airwaves. We will then have to work hard on setting up and managing truly community media owned by the people and for the people.

written on: 17 May 2003

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