Journalists familiarize themselves with peace’s maintaining program in Ghana

During the summer academy program, organized by the International institute for Journalism (Iij) in Accra, Ghana, journalists who attended the program paid a visit to Koffi Annan International Keeping Training Centre (Kaiptc). Their aim is to get notions from soldiers about their duties to keep and to maintain peace in Africa. This initiative is becoming a challenge since journalists have to cover conflicts in order to inform their audiences about what is going on in the society.

Many countries nowadays are facing various problems that affect their stability. In order not to give a free way to such situation to last or to avoid them, the KAIPTC is set to train soldiers that are ready to intervene in places where need will be. How a citizen can get a clear understanding about the mission and the objective assigned to soldiers sent to war theatre? That is the motive which leads journalists to meet the course director of the peacekeeping studies department of the KAIPTC, Colonel Dieter Schneider, last September, 30 in the premises of the centre.
In the presentation of the centre, Schneider went into detail about how the centre is structured and emphasis on their mission which is to develop and to deliver international peace maintaining. Before, during and after their missions, the peace maintaining troops need also to rely upon media so to vehicle their mission. From this point, journalists come to help soldiers to bring on air or on their various papers the importance of the peace maintaining program and necessity for everyone to leave in peace, that means to put an end to hostilities.
But in order to fulfill well their jobs, journalists meet sometimes some kinds of resistances from belligerents and even from the side of some peace maintaining corps.
According to Schneider, these problems are due sometimes to the misconception of what is going on in the ground or may be the journalist is not working to push the peace ahead. From that point, it can happen that, from peace support operation, another problem with many consequences can raise. So there is a need for both, peace soldiers and journalists, to get a clear understanding of their mission when they are sent to a conflict area and how they must collaborate so to disarm fighters and to install peace in the concerned society.

In all, the exchanges that Schneider had with the journalists help a lot so to understand first soldiers’ mentality and what they want from the press when they are sent by their media house to report on a conflict.
In their side, journalist manifested great enthusiasms to hear the senior officer who had a lot of experiences in his domain. As a wish, media professionals ask to be involved in courses program so to get further details about peace’s maintaining program in order to work hand in hand with peace soldiers when comes the time to cover conflict.