Traditional Afghan music alternates with important social messages and journalistic transmissions that talk about health, agriculture, but also about how populations can and must start counting on the Government and the local forces that are engaged, with the help of Italian soldiers , to make the country autonomous and able to resist the threat of insurgents.
The diverse world that opens up for the Afghan people through the waves of Radio Bayan West, on the frequency of the 88,5 FM, projects the listener in a different dimension, in which there is no way out of violence and poverty through knowledge and the culture.
Radio Bayan, whose name means "to communicate", is a means that the ISAF coalition has created to try, with the persuasiveness of the words explained and reasoned, to build a climate of pacification in Afghanistan. Obviously every message is as effective as it gets closer to the recipient, so Radio Bayan transmits in the dari and pashto languages the news that is expertly mixed with the music most appreciated by the Afghans. That of their lands.
There is no room for Western music, while there is room for what Westerners, specifically Italians, transmit with the help of local journalists who cover the territory as sent. From Camp Arena, Herat, the radio has available, to launch his words that tell of growth, development and courage, the time slots from 7 to 10 and from 16 to 19, when from the main office in Kabul the line is left West editorial office.
The project moves in the wake of those started a few years ago in Kosovo and Somalia, when Italian contingents thought of the radio as an instrument to "dialogue" with the population and involve it in the transition from armed conflict to the search for possible stability.
Radio director, whose technical part is edited by the 28 ° Pavia Pavia regiment, is the captain Alessandro Faraò, who comes from that regiment.
"Radio is an economic medium, which is present in many villages, unlike television. It's the ideal way to convey messages in poor realities and, anyway, in some cases where this is also missing, often we ourselves have provided kits that include a radiola through which to listen to our broadcasts ", explains the captain.
Miniradio are in fact given away to those families who have no way of obtaining any of the media that are present on the communication market. Thus, the territory is widely covered and one can try to "make culture".
"Very much followed are the programs on health or concerning young people. But there is also a way to talk about the situation of women, to tell stories for children that show them the dangers that run in some cases, "says Faraò.
One of these dangers is undoubtedly to make the game "wrong", going to collect unexploded ordnance or other potentially lethal objects that unfortunately in Afghanistan are certainly not lacking. When it is feared that not even the radio can be effective or that it should be integrated with other means, we resort to the "leaflet airdrop", the launch by airplanes of flyers that can thus reach even the most inaccessible areas.
"In the flyers dominate the images. Illiteracy is still widespread in peripheral areas, so an image can say more than many written words ", continues the director of radio Bayan.
Our soldiers, through drawings and photos, try to protect the little ones and their parents from the danger of improvised devices, from that of drugs, whose sale has grown in step with domestic consumption and not only, as is often thought, with that outside the country, from the danger of being deceived and blackmailed by insurgents who are always looking for young sap to feed the ranks of "fighters" who oppose stabilization.
Messages of enormous value, therefore, that if transmitted in the right way can help an entire country to get out of the obscurantism to which it has been condemned for too long.
Daniela Lombardi
(photo of the author)
