By Mohamed Jaward Nyallay
The Media Reform Coordinating Group (MRCG) has completed training for journalists across the country on reporting on transitional justice issues. A total of 50 journalists were brought together from across the regions last week for the training that was concluded on Friday 12th June.
In Freetown, 10 participants each from radio, print, television and online platforms from the Western Area Urban and Rural were trained. A similar training session was also conducted for journalists in the South, East, North and North West regions of the country within the period.
The training is part of a project funded by the Africa Transitional Justice Legacy Fund based in Ghana.
Chairman of MRCG, Dr Francis Sowa, said the training was a way of capacitating journalists to highlight some of the transitional justice issues that might be going on in the Sierra Leonean society.
Speaking on the essence of the training, Sowa said a baseline survey showed that more than 50% of journalists demanded for more training on the subject, and just around 49% said they were reporting on transitional justice within the right framework.
“We want to increase the discussions on transitional justice issues, because what is happening now seems like we have forgotten everything we have gone through when we were transitioning from war to peace,” Sowa told journalists after the training.
“Our major concern as MRCG is that the media is not highlighting issues of transitional justice. Most of the things that caused the war are still happening in front of us all,” he added.
Mr Sowa went on to say that even when some of these stories are told sometimes by the media, it’s not done within the right framework. He called for much attention to be paid to Sierra Leone’s post-war Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, which documented the factors that led to the country’s 11-year brutal war.
Jeneba Conteh, a reporter with the Freetown based newspaper, Concord Times, was one of the participants at Friday’s training in Freetown. She told Politico that before now she didn’t quite understand how to tie some of the transitional justice issues to the TRC report.
“I learnt a lot today. I never knew how to connect my reports to the TRC report. It was very difficult.” she said, adding: “After this training I will want to focus more on gender based issues. I will also focus on the justice system; for example the juvenile court.”
Journalists who were part of each of the trainings were asked to brainstorm on possible transitional justice issues in the country and proffer solutions for them.
MRCG received a US$25, 000 (Le 250 million) grant for this project, which officials say they used to conduct the base line study, train journalists across the country and develop a manual for transitional justice reporting.
The media development organizations said after the training a small group of journalists would be selected for mentoring and coaching. These journalists will continue to work with MRCG on the subject for the next six months and do stories to be aired and published on different media outlets.
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