667: Wartime Radio
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Prologue: Prologue
This text is a transcript of a radio program about a self-organised radio station in Syria during the conflicts, called Radio Fresh.
Some parts of the text have been removed.
Dana Ballout
He says the response is very simple. Have you heard anything on Radio Fresh that sounds like we're supporting the Americans? We're always trying to prod them on the radio, with our banners. We have opinions about them, and we don't hide them. Raed's vision of democracy meant everyone in Kafrenbel had an equal say in what was happening, including women.
He wanted their voices on the radio too. Although that was such a daring idea for Kafrenbel, even his friend Hadi wondered whether it was possible.
Hadi Abdullah
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Interpreter
And I was like, how? He was like, "Easy. You find women, we hire them, we train them."
Dana Ballout
This was bold, because almost no women in the village worked outside the home. They took care of the kids and the homes. That was it. And it was bold because of who was running Kafrenbel at the time. Raed was always offending the local leaders, including just about everyone who was in charge of Kafrenbel over the last eight years.
First, the Free Syrian Army was offended by a banner, so they came to the radio station and kidnapped two guys. Next, ISIS attacked the station in 2013. A couple weeks later, they shot Raed multiple times, almost killing him. But when Raed was deciding to put women on the air in 2015, two years after Radio Fresh had started, Kafrenbel was run by a new extremist Islamist group, Nusra, al-Qaeda's branch in Syria. Raed knew they wouldn't like this, but he went for it anyway.
Hiba Abboud
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Dana Ballout
That's Hiba Abboud introducing the afternoon newscast. She's now the director of the women's division of Radio Fresh. She talked to me from the women's office over Skype.
Hiba Abboud
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Interpreter
I never imagined that I would hear my own voice, or that I would be a reporter. Never.
Dana Ballout
Hiba was a young newlywed who had just moved to town when she heard that Radio Fresh was recruiting women to go on air. She'd been listening to the radio and was curious what it was like to make it. So she, along with 20 other women, went to the first training. They did icebreakers, spent three days on voice technique.
Hiba Abboud
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Interpreter
I don't know if you know this one, but when you put your pen in your mouth, this is a way to open up your voice.
Dana Ballout
I did not know this one. Neither did most of the people at This American Life.
Interpreter
And how to be as a presenter, and how to take breaths from your belly.
Dana Ballout
Hiba passed the training and began working at the station, made news shows, programs about women's rights, interviews with local women who had lost their husbands in the war. By the time Raed put Hiba and the other women on the air in 2015, the Islamists in charge of Kafrenbel, Nusra, already hated Radio Fresh.
The station poked fun at them in all sorts of ways. For being illiterate, hypocritical. One satire depicted their religious police rushing people to the mosque without actually understanding the rules of prayer. Nusra assigned people to listen to Radio Fresh in shifts. They issued regular warnings and threats to the station whenever they heard something they didn't like.
Now Radio Fresh got a lot of warnings for having women on air. Nusra considered their voices shameful, a form of nakedness. Finally, in January 2016, Nusra had had enough. They burst in one morning to shut the station down, broke down the door, faces covered, carrying machine guns. They took everything-- laptops, the transmitter, Hadi's hookah, flash drives. Hiba and the other women watched the Nusra guys ransack the main station from another building, the women's office just up the hill.
Hiba Abboud
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Interpreter
And we looked out the window when we heard a lot of noise. So us girls, we just started gathering everything and hiding it. Because we said, you know, they were going to come to us next.
Dana Ballout
They quickly rearranged the office to make it look more like a home.
Hiba Abboud
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Interpreter
So we were preparing lies, you know, just in case that came in and they started questioning us. And you know, we were going to say like, "Oh, we're just girls here hanging out at her house, and we're just having breakfast together. A morning coffee or a mate.
Dana Ballout
Nusra's other big demand was for Radio Fresh to take women off the air completely. Raed had a creative fix for this one too. Again, here's Hiba.
Hiba Abboud
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Interpreter
So we were having a meeting, and he came and he told us that they wanted to transform our voices. You know, now we were going to use something to change our voices from female voices to male, and that you wouldn't be able to tell that it was a female in the first place.
Hiba Abboud
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Interpreter
So when we first heard what our voices sounded like, we were laughing. And it was so strange, because we were like, really? This is what people are going to listen to? But after a while, it just became normal, and it literally got to the point where I could tell you which girl was which voice.
[CHUCKLING]
Dana Ballout
But these days, Hiba just feels annoyed at the voice. And because the voice is so hard to listen to, Radio Fresh reduced how long women speak on the air to a fraction of what it was. By this past fall, the Assad regime had retaken swaths of the country. And in many other places, including Kafrenbel, extremists like Nusra were gaining power. People like Raed, people who didn't want Assad or the extremists, they barely held any ground.