CMI
training. As far as is known, no further training sessions of this kind have been conducted or funded by IMS and their partners. Organising for media development The next phase of IMS engagement appears to be focused on broader matters of media development. A project document, co-authored with Article 19, aims at generally promoting “Freedom of expression and civil society impact on media development in Afghanistan”. The purpose is “providing a forum for professional exchanges leading to the articulation of common goals” by “an international programme of advocacy and technical support”, the common goals being, inter alia, “a self-regulatory system and a code of ethics”, presumably something along the lines of a press council/complaints commission administered by respected members of the profession. More specifically (or less generally), objectives include (1) advocacy aimed at reforms of media policy and laws in consonance with freedom of expression; (2) the setting of a network for media development and policy and (3) a media council for the afore-mentioned self-regulatory code. The project is to last for one year and to be implemented by IMS and Article 19. The second objective foresees a roundtable of about 15 and a more fully- fledged conference within the overall frame of about 4 months, which is supposed to lead into a Media Council and the drafting of a code of ethics for the professio n. The budget for the entire exercise was estimated at over £120.000, of which about 60 per cent was to be funded from British sources and the remainder from Danish MFA. The IMS Annual Report for 2001 – 2002 tells us (p. 33) that IMS/Article 19 did not secure funding from Danish sources and that the “core” of the project will be implemented by Article 19, presumably from British sources. Which “non-core” parts fell out, we do not know. How the project has fared, we have not found out as yet, except to note that there is now an Afghan Media and Culture Centre. According to information received from Article 19, the project has also managed to put together an association or a forum for advancing the legal and organisational objectives. Overall, IMS finds that the Afghanistan intervention “created an opportunity for IMS to engage in organisational synchronization and information sharing” and the project proposal was timely as there was no other international organisation addressing directly the issue of “the ne ed for strong involvement of the Afghan media community in the shaping of a post-Taliban media environment”. That point might be debatable as there certainly were a number of international organisations involved in media development (as listed in the joint IMS/Article 19 proposal) and secondly, without a number of actors on the scene, there would, it might be thought, be less of a need for “organisational synchronization”. IMS did contribute some minor funding to AINA and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, but only at a fraction of the costs of the assessments. The minutes of the IMS Board meeting of April 22 – 23 2002 record that DKK 489.391 has been spent on IMS interventions in Afghanistan/Pakistan which is considerably above the ceiling of DKK 200.000 for IMS interventions. This is, according to the minutes, justified by “the special situation caused by 11’th September 2001”, meaning presumably the war in Afghanistan. A large part of the expenditure went for the joint Baltic Media Centre/Radio Afghanistan project, more precisely the cost of the assessment for this specific intervention. The breakdown of the expenditure indicates that about one-third of total expenditure was spent on this 60