[Media-watch]

[Iain Campbell]

Under US Control, Press Freedom Falls Short in Iraq
by Robert Fisk

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.

"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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

"The long-muzzled Iraqi press was nonprofessional and tightly controlled, 
then suddenly it became free," he said.

For now, at least.

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

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