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	Pressing Your Case: Nonviolent Movements and the Media by International Center on Nonviolent Conflict   Organizers and strategists of nonviolent movements often struggle in dealing with the mainstream news media. Some consider it their enemy, because coverage can be patchy or inaccurate. Others unrealistically expect the media to advocate for their causes.   Yet few resources for activists have provided a reliable explanation of how an effective relationship between a movement and the media might look, and how movement participants can best approach the mainstream media in order to generate interest.   The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) has helped develop “Pressing Your Case: Nonviolent Movements and the Media,” an educational video series to explore ways that nonviolent campaigns and movements can better relate to world media.   It features four sessions, hosted by internationally known news anchor Riz Khan, in collaboration with Howard Barrell, a journalist and activist during the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, who is now a senior lecturer in journalism at Cardiff University. This series discusses best practices in enhancing the value of media coverage that campaigns receive.   “Pressing Your Case” interviews many activists, resistance leaders and scholars, including the Nobel Peace Prize laureates Aung San Suu Kyi and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the distinguished scholar of peace and conflict studies Dr. Mary Elizabeth King. Throughout the series, interviewees provide their own stories and expertise which together offer original and highly useful information.   In the first session, activists learn how they can affect coverage by developing a media strategy – by identifying the media landscape, the movement’s audience and constituencies, the types of media that work best to reach a given audience, and the content of the core message.   This session also explains the distinctions between state media, public service media, commercial media, and social media. The message to activists is clear: Getting the media’s attention is your problem, not theirs.   The second session provides a detailed explanation of a movement’s potential audiences and the best ways to reach them. This includes a more nuanced look at messaging, creating a visual identity, and evoking the human drama present in many effective stories. In this session activists learn that it is often best to deal with bad publicity straight away -- and learn how to do so.   The third session lays out the elements of a good story. Activists learn that for their purposes a good story usually focuses on a central character, often delivers a clear, positive message, and connects to what is already in the news. This session also provides tips for activists on how to become a good source and how to give effective interviews.   The fourth session encourages organizers and activists to create their own media and provide self-coverage for their movements, wherever possible, including the use of new technologies. In considering the risks and advantages of self-coverage, activists learn how it can produce substantive and riveting stories and increase their chances of reaching domestic, diaspora, and global audiences.   If activists want the help of the media, they need to understand how journalists work and how they develop and present their stories. “Pressing Your Case” is a unique tool in helping to orient and guide activists and campaign leaders in how to understand and deal with the mainstream media.   http://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/index.php/learning-and-resources/3732 Visit the related web page
	Myanmar’s Apartheid by Nicholas Kristof New York Times Sittwe, Myanmar   May 2014   Minura Begum has been in labor for almost 24 hours, and the baby is stuck. Worse, it’s turned around, one tiny foot already emerging into the world in a difficult breech delivery that threatens the lives of mother and child alike.   Twenty-three years old and delivering her first child, Minura desperately needs a doctor. But the Myanmar government has confined her, along with 150,000 others, to a quasi-concentration camp outside town here, and it blocks aid workers from entering to provide medical help. She’s on her own.   Welcome to Myanmar, where tremendous democratic progress is being swamped by crimes against humanity toward the Rohingya, a much-resented Muslim minority in this Buddhist country. Budding democracy seems to aggravate the persecution, for ethnic cleansing of an unpopular minority appears to be a popular vote-getting strategy.   There are more than one million Rohingya in Rakhine State in the northwest of Myanmar. They are distinct from the local Buddhists both by darker skin and by their Islamic faith. For decades, Myanmar’s military rulers have tried systematically to erase the Rohingya’s existence with oppression, periodic mass expulsions and denials of their identity.   “There are no people called Rohingya in Myanmar,” U Win Myaing, a spokesman for Rakhine State, told me. He said that most are simply illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.   This narrative is absurd, as well as racist. A document as far back as 1799 refers to the Rohingya population here, and an 1826 report estimates that 30 percent of the population of this region was Muslim.   Since clashes in 2012 claimed more than 200 lives — including children hacked with machetes — the authorities have confined Rohingya to internment camps or their own villages. They are stripped of citizenship and cannot freely go to the market, to schools, to university, to hospitals.   Tens of thousands have made desperate attempts to flee by boat, with many drowning along the way.   This year, the Myanmar authorities have cracked down even harder, making the situation worse. First, the government expelled Doctors Without Borders, which had been providing health care for the Rohingya. Then orchestrated mobs attacked the offices of humanitarian organizations, forcing them out.   Some kinds of aid are resuming, but not health care. That’s a sterile way of putting it. I wish readers could see the terrified eyes of Shamshida Begum, 22, a mom whose 1-year-old daughter, Noor, burned with fever.   Shamshida said that at home the thermometer had registered 107 degrees. Even after damp cloths had been placed on Noor to lower her temperature, the thermometer, when I saw it, still read 105 degrees. What kind of a government denies humanitarians from providing medical care to a toddler?   Noor survived, but some don’t. We visited the grief-stricken family of a 35-year-old man named Ba Sein, who died after his tuberculosis went untreated.   “He died because he couldn’t get medicine,” said his widow, Habiba, as friends made a bamboo coffin outside. Now she worries about her four small children who, like other children in the camp, haven’t been vaccinated. The camp is an epidemic waiting to happen.   Minura, the woman with a breech delivery, survived a 28-hour labor and hemorrhaging, but lost her baby. The infant girl was buried in an unmarked grave — one of a large number of achingly small graves on the outskirts of the camp.   “Because I am Rohingya, I cannot get health care and I cannot be a father,” Minura’s husband, Zakir Ahmed, a mason, said bitterly after the burial.   The United States has spoken up, but far too mildly; Europe and Asia have tried to look the other way. We should work in particular with Japan, Britain, Malaysia and the United Nations to pressure Myanmar to restore humanitarian access and medical care.   President Obama, who visited Myanmar and is much admired here, should flatly declare that what is happening here is unconscionable. Obama has lately noted that his foreign policy options are limited, and that military interventions often backfire. True enough, but in Myanmar he has political capital that he has not fully used.   As a university student, Obama denounced apartheid in South Africa. As president, he should stand up to an even more appalling apartheid — one in Myanmar that deprives members of one ethnic group even of health care.   Myanmar seeks American investment and approval. We must make clear that it will get neither unless it treats Rohingya as human beings.   http://www.ictj.org/news/abuses-threaten-myanmar-transition-democracy-peace-ictj-report http://uscampaignforburma.org/ http://www.amnesty.org/en/for-media/press-releases/myanmar-authorities-must-end-relentless-persecution-activist-2014-09-10 http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=14910&LangID=E Visit the related web page
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