- First the Americans killed the correspondent of al-Jazeera
yesterday and wounded his cameraman. Then, within four hours, they attacked
the Reuters television bureau in Baghdad, killing one of its cameramen
and a cameraman for Spain's Tele 5 channel and wounding four other members
of the Reuters staff.
-
- Was it possible to believe this was an accident? Or was
it possible that the right word for these killings - the first with a jet
aircraft, the second with an M1A1 Abrams tank - was murder? These were
not, of course, the first journalists to die in the Anglo-American invasion
of Iraq. Terry Lloyd of ITV was shot dead by American troops in southern
Iraq, who apparently mistook his car for an Iraqi vehicle. His crew are
still missing. Michael Kelly of The Washington Post tragically drowned
in a canal. Two journalists have died in Kurdistan. Two journalists - a
German and a Spaniard - were killed on Monday night at a US base in Baghdad,
with two Americans, when an Iraqi missile exploded amid them.
-
- And we should not forget the Iraqi civilians who are
being killed and maimed by the hundred and who - unlike their journalist
guests - cannot leave the war and fly home. So the facts of yesterday should
speak for themselves. Unfortunately for the Americans, they make it look
very like murder.
-
- The US jet turned to rocket al-Jazeera's office on the
banks of the Tigris at 7.45am local time yesterday. The television station's
chief correspondent in Baghdad, Tariq Ayoub, a Jordanian-Palestinian, was
on the roof with his second cameraman, an Iraqi called Zuheir, reporting
a pitched battle near the bureau between American and Iraqi troops. Mr
Ayoub's colleague Maher Abdullah recalled afterwards that both men saw
the plane fire the rocket as it swooped toward their building, which is
close to the Jumhuriya Bridge upon which two American tanks had just appeared.
-
- "On the screen, there was this battle and we could
see bullets flying and then we heard the aircraft," Mr Abdullah said.
-
- "The plane was flying so low that those of us downstairs
thought it would land on the roof - that's how close it was. We actually
heard the rocket being launched. It was a direct hit - the missile actually
exploded against our electrical generator. Tariq died almost at once. Zuheir
was injured."
-
- Now for America's problems in explaining this little
saga. Back in 2001, the United States fired a cruise missile at al-Jazeera's
office in Kabul - from which tapes of Osama bin Laden had been broadcast
around the world. No explanation was ever given for this extraordinary
attack on the night before the city's "liberation"; the Kabul
correspondent, Taiseer Alouni, was unhurt. By the strange coincidence of
journalism, Mr Alouni was in the Baghdad office yesterday to endure the
USAF's second attack on al-Jazeera.
-
- Far more disturbing, however, is the fact that the al-Jazeera
network - the freest Arab television station, which has incurred the fury
of both the Americans and the Iraqi authorities for its live coverage of
the war - gave the Pentagon the co-ordinates of its Baghdad office two
months ago and received assurances that the bureau would not be attacked.
-
- Then on Monday, the US State Department's spokesman in
Doha, an Arab-American called Nabil Khouri, visited al-Jazeera's offices
in the city and, according to a source within the Qatari satellite channel,
repeated the Pentagon's assurances. Within 24 hours, the Americans had
fired their missile into the Baghdad office.
-
- The next assault, on Reuters, came just before midday
when an Abrams tank on the Jamhuriya Bridge suddenly pointed its gun barrel
towards the Palestine Hotel where more than 200 foreign journalists are
staying to cover the war from the Iraqi side. Sky Television's David Chater
noticed the barrel moving. The French television channel France 3 had a
crew in a neighbouring room and videotaped the tank on the bridge. The
tape shows a bubble of fire emerging from the barrel, the sound of a detonation
and then pieces of paintwork falling past the camera as it vibrates with
the impact.
-
- In the Reuters bureau on the 15th floor, the shell exploded
amid the staff. It mortally wounded a Ukrainian cameraman, Taras Protsyuk,
who was also filming the tanks, and seriously wounded another member of
the staff, Paul Pasquale from Britain, and two other journalists, including
Reuters' Lebanese-Palestinian reporter Samia Nakhoul. On the next floor,
Tele 5's cameraman Jose Couso was badly hurt. Mr Protsyuk died shortly
afterwards. His camera and its tripod were left in the office, which was
swamped with the crew's blood. Mr Couso had a leg amputated but he died
half an hour after the operation.
-
- The Americans responded with what all the evidence proves
to be a straightforward lie. General Buford Blount of the US 3rd Infantry
Division - whose tanks were on the bridge - announced that his vehicles
had come under rocket and rifle fire from snipers in the Palestine Hotel,
that his tank had fired a single round at the hotel and that the gunfire
had then ceased. The general's statement, however, was untrue.
-
- I was driving on a road between the tanks and the hotel
at the moment the shell was fired - and heard no shooting. The French videotape
of the attack runs for more than four minutes and records absolute silence
before the tank's armament is fired. And there were no snipers in the building.
Indeed, the dozens of journalists and crews living there - myself included
- have watched like hawks to make sure that no armed men should ever use
the hotel as an assault point.
-
- This is, one should add, the same General Blount who
boasted just over a month ago that his crews would be using depleted uranium
munitions - the kind many believe to be responsible for an explosion of
cancers after the 1991 Gulf War - in their tanks. For General Blount to
suggest, as he clearly does, that the Reuters camera crew was in some way
involved in shooting at Americans merely turns a meretricious statement
into a libellous one.
-
- Again, we should remember that three dead and five wounded
journalists do not constitute a massacre - let alone the equivalence of
the hundreds of civilians being maimed by the invasion force. And it is
a truth that needs to be remembered that the Iraqi regime has killed a
few journalists of its own over the years, with tens of thousands of its
own people. But something very dangerous appeared to be getting loose yesterday.
General Blount's explanation was the kind employed by the Israelis after
they have killed the innocent. Is there therefore some message that we
reporters are supposed to learn from all this? Is there some element in
the American military that has come to hate the press and wants to take
out journalists based in Baghdad, to hurt those whom our Home Secretary,
David Blunkett, has maliciously claimed to be working "behind enemy
lines". Could it be that this claim - that international correspondents
are in effect collaborating with Mr Blunkett's enemy (most Britons having
never supported this war in the first place) - is turning into some kind
of a death sentence?
-
- I knew Mr Ayoub. I have broadcast during the war from
the rooftop on which he died. I told him then how easy a target his Baghdad
office would make if the Americans wanted to destroy its coverage - seen
across the Arab world - of civilian victims of the bombing. Mr Protsyuk
of Reuters often shared the Palestine Hotel's elevator with me. Samia Nakhoul,
who is 42, has been a friend and colleague since the 1975-90 Lebanese civil
war. She is married to the Financial Times correspondent David Gardner.
-
- Yesterday afternoon, she lay covered in blood in a Baghdad
hospital. And General Blount dared to imply that this innocent woman and
her brave colleagues were snipers. What, I wonder, does this tell us about
the war in Iraq?
-
- 'The American forces knew exactly what this hotel is'
-
- The Sky News correspondent David Chater was in the Palestine
Hotel when the hotel was hit by American tank fire. This is his account
of what happened.
-
- "I was about to go out on to the balcony when there
was a huge explosion, then shouts and screams from people along our corridor.
They were shouting, 'Somebody's been hit. Can somebody find a doctor?'
They were saying they could see blood and bone.
-
- "There were a lot of French journalists screaming,
'Get a doctor, get a doctor'. There was a great sense of panic because
these walls are very thin. "We saw the tanks up on the bridge. They
started firing across the bank. The shells were landing either side of
us at what we thought were military targets. Then we were hit. We are in
the middle of a tank battle.
-
- "I don't understand why they were doing that. There
was no fire coming out of this hotel - everyone knows it's full of journalists.
-
- "Everybody is putting on flak jackets. Everybody
is running for cover. We now feel extremely vulnerable and we are now going
to say goodbye to you." The line was cut but minutes later Chater
resumed his report, saying journalists had been watching American forces
from their balconies and the troops had surely been aware of their presence.
-
- "They knew exactly what this hotel is. They know
the press corps is here. I don't know why they are trying to target journalists.
There are awful scenes around me. There's a Reuters tent just a few yards
away from me where people are in tears. It makes you realise how vulnerable
you are. What are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to carry on if
American shells are targeting Western journalists?"
-
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- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=395412
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