USING MEDIA TO EMPOWER PEOPLE

Radio Benevolencija Humanitarian Tools Foundation is a Dutch NGO that uses broadcast campaigns, events and grassroots activities to encourage people to become active bystanders against incitement to hate violence. Its campaigns endeavor to use the accumulated experience of victims of ethnocentric violence who have empowered themselves and reached a peace with their former tormentors. The organization employs academic research to create edutainment radio and TV drama series, documentaries, discussion programs and related activities in order to teach the audience to counter manipulative pressures that move humans to commit physical and mental harm. A prototype of such a campaign is the organization's Great Lakes Reconciliation Radio, a regional project that has been in operation in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burundi since 2003.


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The organization takes as its role model La Benevolencija Sarajevo, a local organization that played a unique humanitarian role during the Bosnian war (1992-1995). Set up by remnants of the city's Jewish population, which assumed a neutral stance during the conflict, La Benevolencija's members acted as interlocutors between the three warring parties. Uniquely, they learned to use their status to help others in situations similar to their own age-old history of persecution. During the siege of Sarajevo, they managed to supply up to 40% of the city's medicine and smuggled approximately 3,000 refugees of all ethnicities - Muslims, Serbs and Croats - out of the city as "Jews." In due time, the organization became an ethnic mix and was regarded as a symbol for empathy - a group of former victims who learned to empower themselves and help others do the same, acting against the hatred fanning ethnic aggression.

Radio Benevolencija is strictly non-ethnic, non-denominational and non-governmental. It promotes an agenda of sanity, empathy and mutual help among minorities and individuals who are the target of hate speech, as well as among societies that have suffered its consequences.