By PLS
As I was working with colleague PHK to craft a response to the recent 2005 Report of the Advisory Committee on Cultural Diplomacy, I found myself thinking about Public Diplomacy tools that had been foolishly discontinued as the budget axe cut deeper and deeper. Every time a tried and true program had to be eliminated, it was like killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.
Once upon a time USIA published a number of magazines that were admired throughout the world. Each was targeted for a very well defined audience, but all were intelligently edited, beautifully composed and printed on quality paper. One of the most widely admired was designed for Africa. Another addressed highly educated English-speaking elites everywhere. The one I want to talk about was published in Arabic. It was called Al Majal and I used it extensively in countries that were primarily Muslim, even if the everyday language wasn’t Arabic. It also turned out to be useful in countries that had considerable Muslim enclaves or minorities, like Tanzania and Nigeria and Sri Lanka.
Here’s how the old magazine publishing venture worked. USIA editors selected articles/photos/cartoons from the full range of magazines and journals published in the US, then called on a team of five very tough USIA negotiators to buy the rights, always for a very good price. The magazines were printed in the Philippines or elsewhere abroad, to keep costs down, after which they were shipped to posts and distributed, free, to carefully selected contacts. These magazines, which singly and collectively represented the best of American culture, were so good that embassy contacts would get very upset if they missed an issue–or weren’t on the list.
People actually clamoring for PD materials!
It can’t get better than that!
But they were axed none the less.
How did I use Al Majal? It began in the early 1980s, in Indonesia’s third largest city, Medan, North Sumatra, where I was Branch Public Affairs Officer, and in Aceh, of recent tsunami fame, which was part of my territory. Indonesia is unified by having as a national language a Malay variant known as Bahasa Indonesia, but Indonesians use English to interface with the world. In addition, I discovered, there are many non-government-funded Islamic schools or pesanteran where Arabic is taught. Naturally I wanted to meet the principals and administrators of these pesanteran, and Al Majal was a graciously appropriate presentation item. If I brought a dozen or more, all the better.
And then, formalities over, some distinguished Islamist educator and I would sit around drinking tea, eating sweets and talking about everything in the world (in spirited Indonesian), a conversation which might very well include a bit of theological debate, an appreciation of Indonesian (especially Sumatran) cuisine and a light but well considered refutation on my part of the more egregious criticisms of US society by social conservatives.
“Look here,” I’d say, of an article about wholesome family life.
“Or this,” pointing to a story on volunteerism or democracy in action.
And so on. (Fortunately, since I don’t speak or read Arabic, every issue of Al Majal came with a cheat sheet in English.)
Eventually I’d be offered a second cup of tea, the Indonesian signal for the end of an appointment. Departing, I’d put my hand on my heart (to indicate I knew the taboos about touching women) and my contact would almost always insist on shaking hands (to be a good host).
Thus, with the help of Al Majal, people previously considered inaccessible to US overtures became my friends, and when the next issue came out, I’d go back for another high-spirited talk over tea, usually with even more copies in hand.
Meanwhile, I alerted my colleagues in the political section to an interesting phenomenon. Also lurking in the halls of North Sumatran pesantran, also trying to have an influence, were non-Indonesian teachers in long white costumes with checkered scarves carefully arranged on their heads. Already, you see, Saudi wealth derived from American oil purchases (that nasty blowback problem) were funding Wahabi missionary work in Indonesia and elsewhere. Already Saudi salafists (a term Bon Laden likes) were putting pressure on the exemplars of the milder forms of Islam practiced even in Sumatra and Aceh. (I’d also noted that many of the new mosques being built in the area didn’t look like the graceful, pagoda-like traditional mosques of Sumatra. They were copies of the austere concrete structures going up in the Gulf. More Saudi money. More Saudi influence.)
This was the early 1980s, but the handwriting was on the wall. Saudi funding would increase. But USIA would cease publishing Al Majal, a product to be proud of, a product that worked.
Al Majal was doomed by the post Cold War beancounters who fell for the end-of-history line and by those who still don’t understand that commercially produced popular culture is no substitute for well crafted, well targeted PD products that tell a very different, more representative story about American life. The purpose of commercial information media is to make a profit by appealing to the largest possible audience–or to a carefully defined niche audience. Either way, the resulting programs may be wildly popular in the US, or even abroad, but they’re popular, usually, because they incorporate some fantasy of heroism or romance that has nothing to do with reality. They’re over-sexed. They exaggerate violence. It’s ironic, but the greater the popularity of US fantasy media abroad the more need there is for skillfully made compensatory media.
Now, all these years after some genius decided that reaching Arabic speakers in Arabic wasn’t worth the price, we’re floundering around the Muslim world desperately playing catch up. Maybe it didn’t have to be that way. Maybe if we’d invested more in sophisticated PD tools and intelligent conversation, we wouldn’t be wasting lives as well as money in Iraq. That’s too simplistic, of course, but it’s worth a thought or two.
By the way, Al Majal could be revived quite economically by editing it electronically and publishing it, having added some post-prepared material for extra appeal, with local printers. That bears thinking about, too.