By Sophie Sharadze and Ani Meladze
“Do not feed the flame, tell the truth” – that is the main purpose of the Media Dialogue network. This year, the organizers decided to focus on the topics conflict sensitivity and research. With respect to their goal, their team decided to start working from Tbilisi, Georgia, one of the post-soviet countries in the Caucasus region. The opening conference was held in Caucasus University, on 20th of September.
Before the conference started, participants from Armenia, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Poland and Germany were greeted by the representator of international relations and projects department of Caucasus University and were provided with a small campus tour.
After a warm welcome of Wolfgang Ressmann, chairman of the Association of Citizen Media of Germany, media trainers from Germany introduced themselves and gave the participants an opportunity to join either the video or the blog group to produce a video report or write and publish articles about the corresponding topics.
At the beginning of the conference Wolfgang Ressmann, introduced the main ideas of the Media Dialogue project. As he mentioned, good journalism is very necessary in times of fake news and propaganda, so media play an important role in reporting, writing and telling people the truth. Another main point is giving the chance to report about the problems in society, because making projects can lead on having a big impact on conflict situations.
The next representator was Irena Melua, who is responsible for the international relations in Caucasus University. She highlighted the importance of the project and recalled the first time when Georgia took part in Media Dialogue.
Yevhen Tsymbalenko represented the Institute of Journalism of the Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv. As Mr. Tsymbalenko stated taking part in the project was a righteous experience. Kateryna Sokolova, who also works at the Institute of Journalism, represents the occupied region of Ukraine. She encouraged participants who also come from occupied territories to share their story with her, so she can collect them. She also mentioned the importance of paying attention to social problems and human rights issues.
After that, Volodymyr Danyluk, chairman of the Forum of Ukrainian Journalists, talked about the role of freedom of speech, journalists’ rights but also traditional media. He further said: “First it was Moldova, where the conflict is still going on and territory is still taken by Russia. Then there was 2008 when Russia occupied a part of Georgia. In 2014 we lost a piece of Ukraine. Last year the regime of Lukashenko turned into authoritarian.”
Serhiy Tomilenko, the chairman of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine, recalled the history of occupation and encouraged everyone to fight against these troubles.
The next speaker was Mkrtich Tonoyan, president of the AKOS Cultural NGO. Along with explaining the structure of the project, Mr. Tonoyan said that he would be more than happy to greet the participants in Armenia in the second part of this project stage and that there are some interesting workshops planned as well.
Then Bella Harutyunyan, manager of Gyumri Technology Center, held her speech and encouraged the participants to get actively involved in the process of creating interesting content for the social platform of the Media Dialogue project.
The last speaker was Vladimir Harutyunyan, an expert in conflicts and the history of war. Mr. Harutyunyan’s dedication to learn and share his expertise in war made him join the project Media Dialogue for conflict Censitivity and Research.
