Amsterdam  - Can a soap opera educate people and stop ethnic violence? Dutch non-government organization Radio La Benevolencija thinks it can.

The organization produces radio shows and media campaigns in central Africa with the aim of helping locals understand the workings of political propaganda and withstand incitement to ethnic and racial violence.

La Benevolencija also plans to develop activities in the Netherlands, to help the Dutch cope with their own ethnic tensions.

"We are in the business of media education," says George Weiss, founder and director of the Amsterdam-based NGO. "We teach people to recognize incitement so that they can act against it."

Weiss is an Austria-born filmmaker who has been involved in humanitarian projects for decades.

Originally, Radio La Benevolencija was the affiliate of a Jewish welfare organization by the same name based in Sarajevo, Bosnia.

During the Balkan war of the 1990s, the organization took a neutral position and provided a safe haven, food and medicines, to all ethnicities in the city while it was under siege.

At the time, Weiss founded a Dutch affiliate that supported the Sarajevo organization financially and politically.

When the war ended, he transformed the Dutch affiliate into an independent foundation that would use mass media as a tool to educate people about ethnic and racial hatred and violence and help them deal with trauma.

"We began our activities in Rwanda in 2003, after the genocide," Weiss says.

Initially, La Benevolencija developed a prototype for a media campaign, the Great Lakes Reconciliation Radio.

It involved the development and production of a weekly radio soap opera.

The show, broadcast in the local language and played by local actors, replays the ethnic tensions the people of Rwanda dealt with during and after the genocide.

"The storyline of the soap opera basically mirrors reality," says Weiss. "We want to try to help people deal with trauma, but we also want to help them overcome their pain."

Assisting the professional journalists and scriptwriters hired by La Benevolencija to write the radio shows, was a special team of psychologists from Yale University in the US.

They assisted the journalists in integrating the educational and psychological message in the programmes. They also evaluated the programmes' effectiveness on a yearly basis.

"Our academic research team interviews our listeners as well as non-listeners and subsequently compare the results. It turns out that our programmes have a strong impact on people's capacity to think critically."

Today, La Benevolencija operates in Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo, employing a total of 45 staff - excluding the nearly 200 actors who play in the various radio shows.

The Dutch NGO has a budget of around 3 million euros (3.8 million dollars) for two years - subsidies from the Dutch and Belgian foreign ministries, the Swedish International Development Agency SIDA and Oxfam-Novib.

Today, they have a soap opera running in Goma, Rwanda and another in Bukavu, located in the South Kivu region in Denmocratic Republic of Congo.

Developing a soap opera for the people of Congo was a lot more complicated than it was for Rwanda, says Weiss.

"In Rwanda you had two ethnicities who hated each other, the Hutus and the Tutsis. It made the structure of our soap opera relatively simple, and our message of tolerance could be integrated relatively easily.

But in Congo, the situation is much more complicated. Suddenly we had to deal with several groups hating each other, and the origins of that hatred also varied."

"Congo is a place of victimization. It never existed as a proud country. The people are proud, but they are coping with an absolutely abominable situation."

Weiss says the Congolese do not trust their politicians, because they cooperate with international diamond dealers - Israeli, Lebanese, Chinese and others - while the money resulting from that trade often disappears.

La Benevolencija's soap operas tries to restore people's faith in the rule of law.

"Our radio show tells people that the police are doing their work. We say: if something happens to you, you have certain rights - but rather than take justice into your own hands, go and ask for just treatment."

For more information: www. labenevolencija. org (dpa)