- BAGHDAD -- Freedom of the
press is beginning to smell a little rotten in the new Iraq. A couple of
weeks ago, the Arabic Al-Jazeera television channel received a phone call
from one of U.S. Proconsul Paul Bremer's flunkies at the presidential palace
compound. The station had to answer a series of questions in 24 hours,
its reporters were told.
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- "They insisted that if we didn't go to them, they'd
come for us," one of Al-Jazeera's reporters told The Independent.
And come they did - to drive the station's employees to the palace, where
they were handed a sheet of paper asking if they had been given advance
notice of "terrorist attacks" or had paid "terrorists"
for information.
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- Al-Jazeera - along with its rival channel, Al-Arabiya
- had already been denounced by the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, currently
led by the convicted fraudster Ahmed Chalabi, and punished for allegedly
provocative programs by being banned from the council's press conferences
for two weeks.
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- Then the same council - obviously on Bremer's instructions
- listed a series of "do's" and "don'ts" for all the
media, ranging from a prohibition on inciting violence all the way to a
ban on reporting on the rebirth of the Baath Party or speeches by Saddam.
As columnist Hassan Fattah remarked about the council's punishment of the
two Arab channels, "the council and the interim council will be silent
for two weeks, throughout much of the Arab world, including Iraq itself.
The resistance and the terrorists, meanwhile, will still be able to say
what they want. What a perfect opportunity to pour their footage onto the
airwaves and capture the hearts and minds of Iraqis desperate for stability
and some leadership."
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- Things are no better in the American-run television and
radio stations in Baghdad. The 357 journalists working from the Bremer
palace grounds have twice gone on strike for more pay and have complained
of censorship. According to one of the reporters, they were told by John
Sandrock - head of the private American company SAIC, which runs the television
station - that "either you accept what we offer or you resign; there
are plenty of candidates for your jobs."
-
-
- Needless to say, the television "news" is a
miserable affair that often fails to make any mention of the growing violence
and anti-American attacks in Iraq that every foreign journalist - and most
Iraqi newspapers - report.
-
- When a bomb blew up in part of a mosque in Fallujah last
month, for example - killing at least three men - local residents claimed
the building had been hit by a rocket from an American jet. The Americans
denied this. But no mention of the incident was made on the American-controlled
media in Baghdad. Asked for an explanation, newsreader Fadl Hatta Al-Timini
replied: "I don't know the answer to that - I'm here to read the news
that's brought to me from the Convention Palace (the American headquarters
that also houses the station's offices), that's all."
-
- As Patrice Claude of Le Monde noted in his paper, all
the American-run media refer to the authorities as "the forces of
liberation," even though the foreign press - including the New York
Times - refer to them as "occupation forces." The United States
has supposedly already spent just over 21 million pounds sterling on Iraq's
new audiovisual output, but the Iraqi staff say they've not seen the money.
When Le Monde's man in Baghdad asked Sandrock for an explanation, he declined
to respond.
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- On the surface, of course, Bremer's publicity men can
boast of a thriving new free press - at least 106 new newspapers in Baghdad
alone, many of them sponsored by political parties or by men who want to
become politicians. Some have called for a jihad against the Americans
- and have been visited by American officers asking why. Others have carried
blatantly untruthful stories about the occupation army, claiming that U.S.
soldiers have been involved in distributing pornographic pictures to schoolgirls
or taking Iraqi women to the bedrooms of the Palestine Hotel. One problem
is that many journalists for the Iraqi papers are either converts from
the old regime or new writers who have no journalistic training in fairness
or fact checking.
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- The most professionally produced paper - and the stress
must be on the word "produced" - is Az-Zaman, which, roughly
translated, means The Age and is run by Saad Al-Bazaz, the former Iraqi
diplomat who fell out with Saddam and published his paper from London through
the long last years of Baathist rule. Bazaz was himself the former editor
of Saddam's Al-Jumhouriya newspaper, and one of his former colleagues on
the old Baathist rag, Nada Shawqat, is now the editorial supervisor for
Az-Zaman in Baghdad. "We have a circulation of 50,000 in Baghdad,
another 15,000 in Basra, each edition carrying 12 pages of foreign and
Arab news and eight of local news," she says. "It's good to feel
like a real journalist at last."
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- But all news decisions are made in Az-Zaman's London
offices, and the paper never refers to the "occupation," only
to the "coalition," America's own favored expression for the
armies of the United States and its allies in Iraq. Bazaz still lives in
London, where Az-Zaman was printed for years in exile. Two other papers
- the Iraqi National Congress' Al-Moutamar and the Kurdish Al-Ittihad -
have also come out of foreign exile to print in Baghdad.
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- Shawqat stayed at her post at the Saddamite Al Jumouriyah
until the very last day of the war, April 9, when its offices were looted
and burned and when its archives - which included the paper's own reports
of the 1983 meeting between Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam - were destroyed.
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- Shawqat said that under Saddam, she had some freedom
to write - until his two sons, Udai and Qusai, took an interest in the
press. "Then we started getting instructions every day from the minister
of information, telling us what to write and what not to write - it just
got worse and worse over the last 13 years."
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- No one suggests that journalism under the Americans bears
any relation to those days. But Iraqi writers feel that the Bremer "code
of conduct" - forbidding "intemperate (sic) speech that could
incite violence" - is an example of "selective democracy,"
similar in spirit if not in effect to the censorship under Saddam.
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- According to journalist Khadhim Achrash, "the decision
doesn't fit with the U.S. announcement that they came here to liberate
Iraq and set up a democratic system."
-
-
- Many of the new papers carry a menu of gossip and entertainment
and stories of the old regime. One of the first, terrible reports of Saddam's
atrocities told of his treatment of soldiers accused of cowardice in the
1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Two chilling photographs - taken by Saddam's own
military intelligence officers - showed a firing party executing a line
of soldiers and an officer giving the coup de grace to a still-living man
as he lay on the ground.
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- Many Iraqi journalists believe the semi-legal "press
syndicate" taking shape in Baghdad is still Baathist at root although
others say it could be used to enact a new press law that would take censorship
out of Bremer's hands. Jalal Al-Mashta, the editor of An-Nahda, blames
much of the problem on the speed of transition.
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- "The long-muzzled Iraqi press was nonprofessional
and tightly controlled, then suddenly it became free," he said.
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- For now, at least.
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- - Robert Fisk's reports on the Middle East and world
affairs can be found at www.independent.co.uk. Many of his articles are
archived at www.robert-fisk.com.
-
- Copyright 2003 The Capital Times. Freelance writers retain
the copyright for their work that appears on this site.
-
- http://www.madison.com/captimes/opinion/column/guest/61641.php
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