Illustration © Gunduz Agayev – RFE/RL Azadliq Radiosu

“In War,” as the saying goes, “truth is the first casualty.” 

While the source of that quote is often contested, what isn’t is that it applies to every single war fought in living memory and probably before. As almost everyone knows, it was definitely the case during last year’s fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh. Misinformation and disinformation spread like wildfire, press reports were limited to official information and/or rumour, and it was clear that decades of conflict-sensitive journalism workshops in the region had pretty much amounted to nothing. 

That’s hardly surprising, of course. Ten years ago, for example, I remember a lecturer at the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs (GIPA) in Tbilisi telling me that during a class for Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian MA Journalism students, one exercise was to objectively cover a fictitious war between “Country A” and “Country B.”

“Which country am I?” asked one of the students, apparently confused by the whole point of the exercise. 

More recently, earlier this year, even Deutsche Welle took a critical look at their own work in this area and concluded that such trainings generally don’t work. In the sanitised and controlled environment of a training room, theory is easy, the organisation noted, but in the real world, and especially when conflict turns violent, it’s another matter entirely.

So with that in mind, I was particularly interested in Caucasus Edition’s recent Zoom discussion between young Armenian and Azerbaijani journalists and academics monitoring the online world in particular. Straight off the bat, RFE/RL journalist Aren Melikyan summed up the situation perfectly.

“There is no single truth here,” he said. “[…] The majority of mass media didn’t give people [an] alternative truth. They were recreating the main narratives and stereotypes [and] were becoming part of the same problem, and all the hatred the media was full of definitely had its influence on the societies.”

Sadly, no amount of international donor money will change this. If a journalist believes in the importance of professionalism and objectivity, at least to a certain degree, they will work to those standards – editors, advertisers, and donors permitting – but if they don’t, then the whole idea of training is pointless from the outset. Well, aside from the rosy press releases that will inevitably be written afterwards and the usually always glowing Monitoring and Evaluation reports accepted without question by the donors.

Is it any wonder that nothing changes?

“Without more accurate and unbiased information free from negative rhetoric and stereotypes,” noted a 2010 report by the Caucasus Research Resource Centres (CRRC), “Armenians and Azerbaijanis will continue to see themselves as enemies without common ground. This is a role the media has and continues to play with regards to the conflict over Nagorno Karabakh.” 

The CRRC report also noted that most people generally seek out news and information that simply reinforces their confirmation biases and existing stereotypes and prejudices. That situation continues to exist today, over a decade later, and then there’s the issue of social media.

During the 2020 war, and just as we saw with Trump and Brexit, social media moved in to fill an information vacuum ever increasing in size thanks to a declining trust in the media. That space, of course, wasn’t defined by high quality reports and commentary, but hate speech and misinformation and/or disinformation as well as coordinated campaigns of harassment and intimidation targeting any dissenting voices or journalists and analysts that took a more objective stance.

And even those journalists from Armenia and Azerbaijan that have met and worked together through a multitude of cross-border projects failed to use even those contacts to more accurately report on the war. Again, this isn’t a surprise. Even a decade earlier I remember an RFE/RL Yerevan Bureau journalist asking if I could connect them with their counterparts in the then RFE/RL Baku Bureau. Please note, I don’t work for RFE/RL so it was shocking to discover that no direct albeit internal links for communication existed. 

But it wasn’t just the media that failed during last year’s fighting. Of as much concern was also how most peacebuilding organisations were largely silent. Used to issuing lengthy reports that hardly reach outside narrow academic circles specifically focused on the Karabakh conflict, perhaps they were caught off guard by a new online environment centred around short tweets of less than 280 characters, a few seconds of TikTok video, Instagram photos usually with some militaristic commentary, and graphical memes.

Yet, anyone who has used social media should have known that this was coming. Moreover, those same organisations should have been aware of the communications output of extremist and violent extremist groups, understanding that ethno-nationalists would follow suit soon enough. Certainly, the dogs of war were quick to utilise platforms such as Telegram to sow panic, chaos, and hatred. They understood that social media is as much, if not more, about psychology and emotion than it is about facts.

Again, this is nothing new. The same tactics were already well known during the Trump presidency and the anti-EU Brexit campaign in the UK.

And that isn’t the only problem. Another is that while online news sites have been funded to cover the conflict, they have still not been able to reach a sizeable audience. In many cases we’re talking hundreds rather than thousands, let alone tens of thousands, of views and most of the content is anyway consumed by English-speakers, including those not based in the region or even from it. Consumption of materials in Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Russian on these sites can be even lower.

Social media strategies remain non-existent, and content-generation for a mainly visually driven online environment remains at a bare minimum at best or is totally absent at worst. Facebook ‘likes’ and shares are insignificant, largely down to none of these actors ever engaging with a potential audience, and while the platforms have evolved, approaches to the dissemination of content have not. In fact, even saying they were stuck in the 2000s would be giving them the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the 1990s?

Ultimately, in this day and age, most media consumers do not seek out sources. Instead, information comes to them, whether through algorithms, organic peer to peer sharing, or a combination of both. This is so obvious that it’s inexplicable why donor-driven projects have not adapted accordingly. It’s not as if any of this is new, after all.

Indeed, five or six years ago I met with the European Union delegation in Tbilisi and pointed this out to them, also warning that social media was likely to be hijacked by nationalists sooner or later. To my pleasant surprise, they were receptive to this and even asked me to draw up a list of recommendations, which I did. However, they warned, it was ultimately up to those organisations subcontracted by the EU to run their Nagorno Karabakh project. Their response was predictably depressing. 

“Social Media is not rocket science,” I was told, and that was that. Forget the fact that most successful social media campaigns have strategies based on a combination of behavioural science, psychology, an understanding of emotions, and platform-specific, often custom-generated content while also budgeting for an actual social media team. Instead, those unfamiliar with social media thought that simply creating a Facebook page and opening a Twitter account was all that they needed to do.

Sadly, many media organisations in the region think the same. Which brings me finally to the end statement made in the Caucasus Edition Zoom discussion. 

“[…] Only about 10 years ago when social media became really a major thing, the conversation was exactly the opposite,” said Imagine Dialogue co-founder Phil Gamaghelyan. “We were all extremely positive thinking this is it. Information got democratised and this is going to help us break through the borders and all the isolation that Armenians and Azerbaijanis have and we’ll have a whole new era of peace. Now we are 180 degrees the other end […].”

Well, I take exception to this because some of us did warn that this would happen. Evgeny Morozov did so in 2011,  albeit in the larger context of the Internet, and as someone who first pioneered the use of social media in connecting Armenians and Azerbaijanis online, I also did that very same year and have consistently done so in the decade since. In fact, when I was the Caucasus Editor of Global Voices, all the articles I wrote on the role of social media in conflict resolution in the early 2010s always ended with that warning.

“[…] building on its coverage of citizen media during the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, Global Voices has since established its own special coverage page, Caucasus Conflict Voices, summarizing some of the new conversations taking place between Armenian and Azerbaijani bloggers. true, they might still be a minority, with the use of such tools still in its infancy, but until recently such communication never existed at all. It now remains to be seen whether these developments continue or if those opposed to peace will also utilize them to drown out such voices.”

 

Overcoming negative stereotypes in the South Caucasus, World Bank Development Report 2011, Onnik James Krikorian.

But it probably doesn’t matter. 

The whole idea of a bottom-up peace process has failed and I don’t suppose anyone expects it to work any better this time round. If the situation is to improve then there will have to be a top-down process as well, and likely even taking centre stage. Indeed, the lack of any political will at the top in the past has been one of the main reasons why neither societies were ever prepared for peace and why the media naturally reflected the prevailing mood in both Armenia and Azerbaijan.

But, on a brighter note, if there is going to be such a top-down approach now then the broadcast media might finally start to play a more important and productive role. Not only does it have the technical proficiency and capacity to create more compelling content, but it can also reach hundreds of thousands rather than just a handful of individuals stuck in the same online bubbles that they’ve always been, away from and outside the interest of the masses. 

Nevertheless, the Caucasus Edition Zoom discussion was welcome, but it will need to be a lot more self-reflective and self-critical if anything is to improve by then.