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For Your Eyes Only
Posted by Tony (Guest) - Wednesday, September 8 2004, 17:36:43 (CEST)
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Borrowing from the old school in Iraq

By Hassan Fattah
Special to The Daily Star
Wednesday, September 08, 2004


They could have been used as examples of the brutality the interim Iraqi government is up against. Instead, the airing of videotapes of Westerners and Arabs kidnapped by Islamists or other insurgent Iraqi groups has been seized upon by the government as a reason to banish the Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera from Iraq for the third time in 12 months - a ban extended a few days ago.

Far from strengthening the position of the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, the ban may have underscored its weaknesses. In trying to squelch the voice of the insurgency, the government may in fact have squelched its own. In the process, it risks losing the powerful war of ideas as it works to build up domestic and international legitimacy.

Several weeks ago, police cleared out Al-Jazeera's offices and padlocked the doors, acting on a decree from Allawi. The ban, said the prime minister, was due to Al-Jazeera's "inciting hatred." The Interior Ministry issued a statement saying that the satellite station had failed to show the "reality of Iraqi political life," and that a secret monitoring board would be given authority to review the station's progress in readjusting its "policy agenda."

This is the kind of language that we have grown accustomed to hearing from a dictatorship, but not from a fledgling democracy.

Indeed, the interim government has done little to restrain its heavy hand with the press. Well into the three-week Najaf standoff with Moqtada al-Sadr, for example, reporters were banned from the city for "their own safety." Even on the momentous day that Ayatollah Ali Sistani returned to town to broker an end to the stalemate, Najaf police rounded up some 60 reporters, again "for their own safety."

Luckily for Al-Jazeera, the station has been banned several times in Iraq. Last September and earlier this year the now-defunct Iraqi Governing Council closed the station's offices based on similar allegations. But Al-Jazeera has learned to work around the problem using a wide network of freelancers, wire services and more. Even as its employees were being shooed away, videos taken by insurgent groups continued to be broadcast on Al-Jazeera, and critics of the occupation and the interim government continued to speak out. About the only thing missing from the channel was full coverage of Iraqi official news conferences and interviews with representatives of the interim government.

Al-Jazeera certainly deserves its share of criticism. Its shrill, often biased reporting leaves room for misunderstanding. Its choice of coverage and editorial lineup tends to draw a dramatically worse picture of the situation in Iraq than what may actually be occurring on the ground. Some government insiders fume, for instance, that when the government paraded several would-be suicide bombers before the cameras, Al-Jazeera showed the footage for less than a day. In comparison, tapes of Westerners kidnapped by the insurgents tend to make the news loop for more than 24 hours. In much the same way, commentators on Al-Jazeera tend to throw out facts that are often skewed, if not outright incorrect. And the channel is often unwilling to issue corrections of its coverage.

This behavior is likely to make any minister's blood boil. The difference is that ministers in more democratic countries deal with such challenges by engaging the press, not by banning it. Indeed, it is not unusual for people to grant interviews to reporters even when they know the subject of the story will be negative. One has to wonder, for example, what Israeli officials are thinking when they, too, are interviewed by Al-Jazeera. Nonetheless, they do speak, on the assumption that being allowed to say something is far better than not saying anything.

The short history of Iraq under occupation is enough to prove why banning media has bad consequences. When the former civilian administrator Paul Bremer banned the newspaper Al-Hawza, published by followers of Moqtada al-Sadr, it became an excuse for Sadr to launch his March uprising. When the Iraqi Governing Council banned Al-Jazeera last spring, this only confirmed the public's worst suspicions about the council.

For Allawi and his government, denying oneself a say on the Arab world's most popular television channel can be disastrous. After all, the government's biggest battle isn't one with guns and grenades, but one over impressions. Allawi's challenge is to prove that the old ways of Saddam Hussein's regime have changed, and more importantly that the language of the past is gone. Only then can he build up legitimacy to calm tempers and bring some stability on the ground. Just two months into taking in hand nominal sovereignty of Iraq, the interim government, through its blunt actions, risks telling Iraqis that only the faces have changed.

As one researcher with the Arab Press Freedom Watch, a London-based media watchdog, recently put it: "These guys (the reporters) are used to being intimidated and pushed around." However, he lamented, the "goal of this whole exercise was not only to change Saddam but the school of Saddam itself." So far, the government appears to be getting good grades only in the ways of the old school.


Hassan Fattah is the former editor of the English-language weekly Iraq Today. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR



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