July 12, 2016.

The Palestinian tragedy seems to be condemned to painful repetitions:
depopulation, refuge and catastrophe; year after year. Like Sisyphus,
their story of refuge adds another cycles in Syria to those of 1948 and
1967. Al-Yarmouk Radio 63,
which broadcasts from Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus,
that has been besieged for months, is one example. 
The radio has
recently launched a show called “Radio 48”, which references the first
catastrophe of 1948, when radio became the main tool to connect
fragmented families and to bring their news across the many exiles they
were forced into. Today, the show brings letters of support and
solidarity with the besieged camp from all over the world.


The radio station was established by a diverse array of activists who
worked in relief, media and politics, and who had stayed in the Yarmouk
camp, despite the siege, hunger and bombardment. They refused any
external funding of their initiatives, as they are not willing to submit
to any conditions on their work. The team overcome the technical
difficulties of broadcasting from a besieged town by using a technical
team based outside the camp to manage the broadcast, while producing all
the programming from inside the camp.

The radio was established to counter the growing politicisation and
ideological-leanings of other media outlets as “most of these bias their
news and reporting according to the political preferences of their
workers or managers,” as recounted by one of the founders. The radio
aims to be “closer to the civilian population besieged in Yarmouk, and
to the civilian refugees everywhere else in the world.” 

Thus they
present themselves as “an online radio speaking for the besieged
Palestinian camp of Yarmouk, and broadcasting from the heart of the camp
to deliver its news and stories, and to give a voice to its people. 
The
radio is independent of any political or party influence, and is
managed by a group of politically independent Palestinian youth who have
worked in diverse fields in the camp.”

The difficult conditions at the camp forces the radio to broadcast
online only between 6pm and midnight. 
Replays of the broadcast are
scheduled, whenever possible, between noon and 6pm the next day. The
radio has scheduled short news bulletins that are based on its workers’
first hand experiences in the camp and that of their extensive network
of friends and sources. It also organises debates with political,
cultural and artistic figures when the situation permits. 
The radio also
aims to expand its network to other Palestinian camps around the
country, and performs an auxiliary function of documenting human rights
violations in Yarmouk.

SOURCE: Syriauntold