Hot News 2005

May 05

NANSMIT stated that stopped working within the scope of the Project to Support Central Asian Media Outlets

The National Association of Independent Mass Media issued a statement, informing it had declined to further continue taking part in a Project to Support Central Asian Media Outlets, funded by Swiss Agency for Cooperation (SDC), and cooperating with the executive agency – CIMERA (Geneva, Switzerland).

- we appreciate our donor and partner organizations’ staff for making efforts to pursue goals of the Project to Support Central Asian Media Outlets, which were to ensure access to information and increase quality of information being provided by regional media outlets, head of the NANSMIT Nuriddin Karshiboyev said. Reasons for this decision were: the major partner, CIMERA stepped from the main policy we had decided on together with partners and donors, and failed to fulfill its obligations to local partners. Because of that reasons we failed to progress in terms of implementing the project.

Project documents specify the role of the executive agency in the project, in particular, they say: “CIMERA and its media partners shall exchange skills on purpose to increase their potential.” The project policy provides for: “by the end of Phase IV professional unions will take some responsibilities of CIMERA, such as analyzing and evaluating the media situation, by involving partners, and coordinating the actions at different levels, including coordination within the region on behalf of all media outlets.”  

In fact during 2004, which is the second year of the Phase IV of the project, CIMERA ignored the above principles in the course of the project implementation, it didn’t support local partners, and additionally tried to compete with the Association in terms of developing. Furthermore CIMERA takes steps to develop its own bodies within Central Asia, rather than tries to support development of the project partners. The NANSMIT supports competition in the media sphere, however it believes more appropriate for the competition is to be healthy. The principles – competition and partnership are controversial.  

We made several attempts to orient the project toward its goals through negotiations with the project management and CIMERA, however all of them were unsuccessful, he said. This decision doesn’t imply that the Association would stop dealing with the access to information issues and increasing quality of information for local media outlets. Despite this situation , the NANSMIT continues working to ensure the equal conditions for all to access information of public interest and achieves some successes.

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