FDFM Radio Targets Fiji With New Shortwave Broadcast

FDFM Radio Targets Fiji With New Shortwave Broadcast

WELLINGTON (Radio Heritage Foundation / Pacific Media Watch): The Australian-based Fiji Freedom & Democracy Movement has launched a weekly one hour shortwave radio programme in Fijian targeted at Fiji, says the Radio Heritage Foundation.

Broadcast at 8.30pm on Mondays [Fiji time] the program features news,
information, interviews and music designed to reach local Fijian
listeners and promote the FDFM vision of the restoration of a
democratic Free Fiji under the 1997 constitution.

The shortwave radio broadcast is heard on 11565 kHz and the first
broadcast this week was widely heard in Fiji, Australia, New Zealand,
Japan, USA, Sweden, Finland and Germany. It apparently originates
from a leased time privately owned transmitter located in the USA.

Local radio media in Fiji must operate under regulations including
news censorship by the military government which came to power in a
series of coups and which has, at times, closed down the local FM
relay stations of both the BBC and Radio Australia.

Since the 1970s radio stations and programmes opposing Pacific
governments have broadcast from a number of Melanesian states such as
Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, the autonomous region of Bougainville, and
now Fiji.

Whether indigenous Fijian listeners have modern shortwave receivers
capable of hearing FDFM Radio is questionable, as they already have
access to a large variety of state and private local FM radio
stations broadcasting popular programs in Fijian.

The Fiji Freedom & Democracy Movement is the same organisation that
said it planned to broadcast from a pirate radio ship off the Fijian
coast in 2010. It has clearly found that paying a few dollars to rent a
shortwave transmitter thousands of kilometers away from Fiji for an
hour each week is far less expensive.

ENDS

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