Abstract
Ahead of a new report on threats to Syrian media,
Some of the team at SouriaLi, alongside guests, in Amman, Jordan, 2015
CREDIT: SouriaLi
The apartment in Damascus was the first place where they could bring together many of the staff of the new radio station.
“We wanted SouriaLi to be an example of how we would like Syria [to be] in the future,” said Caroline Ayoub, one of four co-founders of the station, who helped set it up while in exile. Ayoub said they wished to demonstrate Syria’s diverse identity yet remind people of their common culture, too. They also felt there was too much reliance on international media for information about their own country.
“Expressing one’s voice and identity for us was the main goal of the revolution. And having this voice continue is essential,” said Ayoub, who fled to Marseille after being imprisoned for a month in 2012 for distributing Easter eggs with words from the Bible, as well as the Koran (authorities accused her of terrorist activity).
SouriaLi, which translates as “Syria is Mine” and which has a 24-hour live stream, podcasts, video content and an app, is not competing with real-time hard news. Instead, the station reflects issues in Syria through debates and talk shows – regularly live with audience interaction on WhatsApp and Skype – plus dramas and storytelling.
They have their work cut out for them. The Committee to Protect Journalists report, due out in November, will acknowledge that the situation for Syrian journalists is worsening and expects to move Syria from third to second worst nation in its global index.
SouriaLi collates its information from journalists, cross-referenced with other sources. Having staff who were originally from a broad geographical spread across the country, though mostly now in exile, means their network of contacts in Syria is “vast”, according to Iyad Kallas, another co-founder and programming director. He added that they always examined a source’s background and how information was gathered in order to ascertain credibility.
Its weekly series Jadayel (Braids) tells women’s stories, such as treatment at a checkpoint, the experience of living in Isis-controlled Raqqa and working in a hospital.
Syrian refugees are seen at the Zaatari refugee camp, on the Jordanian border in May 2017
CREDIT: Alvaro Fuente/NurPhoto/Getty
“For us this is very important, because you are giving the voice [to] women. Most of the time those women came from a very oppressed or conservative society,” Ayoub said.
At one time the station had 11 people working inside Syria, with others working outside. Today, though, there is just one staff member left in the country, many of them having been imprisoned before leaving Syria, some for opposing the government and others for delivering aid. Most of those not arrested, including Kalaji, who has lived in Berlin since 2013, left the country. Ayoub described SouriaLi as “exiled media because we are exiled for the time being”.
There is now a total of 27 staff, including volunteers, working for the station from 14 countries, from the Middle East through to Europe and North America.
Reinforcing Syria’s diversity means providing airtime to all its groups’ voices, whether they are Kurdish, Sunni, Shia, Ala-wite, Armenian, Christian or something else. Kalaji produced a series called Fattoush. In it, she took recipes from Syria’s different regions and groups, discussing ethnicities and marginalised issues at the same time as food.
SouriaLi aims to feature a range of views, though pro-regime figures rarely accept an invitation. Still, it offers all sides the opportunity to express themselves. “We really believe that media, a radio station, a platform, should be for all Syrians,” said Ayoub.
Their broadcasts attract a wide audience, with more than 450,000 people following SouriaLi on Facebook. The station previously broadcast on FM signals in 12 areas in Syria, with partners on the ground providing the transmission. The Assad regime would always ban the broadcasts in regions it dominated, though, and different opposition fighting groups, including Jabhat al-Nusra (then linked to al-Qaeda, now renamed Jab-hat Fateh al-Sham), tried to control Souria-Li’s content. That included demands to stop certain programming and music, such as Kurdish content, or to broadcast the Koran. The station also received threats from Isis.
SouriaLi refused to be dictated to by the government or its opponents, and ended its FM transmissions in mid-2016. “So we chose to stop,” said Ayoub. “We said: ‘Syria is not [only] Syria inside the border anymore. Syria is Syrians anywhere’. We have millions of Syrians outside in Europe. They all need the hope, the information we are transmitting, so we shifted our focus.”
The radio station went solely online. Its website is available to people in Syria, either where there is no censorship or through VPNs. There’s also a version aimed at bypassing censors with just the live radio on it.
Kallas, who left Syria in 2012 for France, said it could move to online-only now as “Syria is a virtual country”, with listeners spread around the globe.
SouriaLi estimates that about 40% of its online audience is in Syria, 40% are diaspora Syrians and 18% are Arabic-speaking audiences, mainly in Iraq and Egypt.
Staff morale is one of the biggest challenges, according to Kallas and Ayoub. “Before 2011 there wasn’t really ‘media’ or ‘journalism’ in Syria,” Kalaji said. Now, she is more hopeful. “I am free to choose the topics, how to deal with them, how to present them. And this is very important to me as a person and a journalist.” And when conditions permit she wants to do that back in Syria.
Ayoub said: “I believe a country [such as] Syria needs thousands and thousands of media projects, many platforms for people to express themselves and to debate. “Because without debate, without freedom of expression, no free country will exist. And this, of course, applies to Syria.”