[News] Reality television: Al-Jazeera record of accurate reporting

Wed Apr 21 11:55:53 EDT 2004

Comment

Reality television

Al-Jazeera has a track record of accurate reporting - which is why its 
journalists have been criminalised and its offices bombed

Arthur Neslen
Wednesday April 21, 2004
The Guardian

When US forces recently demanded that a team from the Arabic TV station 
al-Jazeera leave Falluja as a condition for reaching a ceasefire with the 
local resistance, it came as no surprise at the network's headquarters in 
Doha. Reliable sources there say that coalition officials threatened to 
close down the al-Jazeera bureau in Baghdad earlier this year and last week 
sent a letter accusing the network of violating the Geneva convention and 
the principles of a free press.

Since the "war on terror" began, al-Jazeera has been a thorn in the side of 
the Pentagon. "My solution is to change the channel," Brigadier General 
Mark Kimmitt said this month in Baghdad, "to a legitimate, authoritative, 
honest news station. The stations that are showing Americans intentionally 
killing women and children are not legitimate news sources."

The trouble for Kimmitt is that millions of people in the Middle East 
disagree. Al-Jazeera has become the most popular TV network in the region - 
with a daily audience of 35 million - precisely because it has shown the 
human carnage that US military onslaughts leave in their wake. If it became 
a "legitimate, authoritative, honest news station" of the kind that 
routinely censors the realities of US military operations, it would lose 
its audience.

The al-Jazeera reports of US snipers firing at women and children in the 
streets of Falluja have now been corroborated by international observers in 
the city. Perhaps it is natural that a military force should seek to 
suppress evidence that could be used against it in future war crimes 
trials. But it is equally natural that a free media should resist.

Democratising the Middle East may have been the neo-cons' case for the 
conquest of Iraq. But on the ground, the US is acting against the flowering 
of Middle East media freedom, which al-Jazeera initiated.

The station was launched in 1996, by disenchanted BBC journalists, after 
Saudi investors pulled the plug on the Arabic TV division of the BBC News 
service. Since then, it has spawned a plethora of competitors such as EDTV, 
Abu Dhabi TV, the Lebanese Broadcasting Company and, most significantly, 
al-Arabiya. Like al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya has been banned by the US-appointed 
Iraqi governing council for weeks at a time for "incitement to murder", 
after airing tapes of Saddam Hussein. Two of its journalists were shot dead 
by US forces at a US checkpoint in March.

Last November, George Bush declared that successful societies "limit the 
power of the state and the military ... and allow room for independent 
newspapers and broadcast media". But three days earlier, an al-Jazeera 
camera man, Salah Hassan, had been arrested in Iraq, held incommunicado in 
a chicken-coup-sized cell and forced to stand hooded, bound and naked for 
up to 11 hours at a time. He was beaten by US soldiers who would address 
him only as "al-Jazeera" or "bitch". Finally, after a month, he was dumped 
on a street just outside Baghdad, in the same vomit-stained red jumpsuit 
that he had been detained in.

Twenty other al-Jazeera journalists have been arrested and jailed by US 
forces in Iraq and one, Tariq Ayoub, was killed last April when a US tank 
fired a shell at the al-Jazeera offices in Baghdad's Palestine hotel. It 
was an accident, the Pentagon said, even though al-Jazeera had given the 
Pentagon the coordinates of its Baghdad offices before the war began.

As the invasion was getting underway, aljazeera.net was taken offline by a 
hacker attack mounted from California by John William Racine III. With a 
maximum tariff of 25 years available, the US attorney's office agreed a 
sentence of 1,000 hours community service.

Ever since al-Jazeera broadcast videotapes of Osama bin Laden in the 
aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Washington has treated it like a fifth 
column. There have been allegations that intense pressure from the White 
House led the network to silence some of its more outspoken journalists, 
such as aljazeera.net's senior website editor, Yvonne Ridley, who was 
dismissed in November 2003.

In the weeks following 9/11, Colin Powell visited Emir al-Thani, the ruler 
of Qatar - and financier of al-Jazeera - to request that he rein in his 
country's free press. The emir went public about Powell's mission and, 
during the subsequent war in Afghanistan, al-Jazeera's offices in Kabul 
were bombed - by accident, the Pentagon said.

Sami al-Haj, an al-Jazeera cameraman seized in Afghanistan, remains 
detained in Guantánamo Bay to this day, and al-Jazeera's journalists in the 
west have been singled out. After attending the European social forum in 
Paris, I myself was detained for an hour by British special branch officers 
at Waterloo station. The questioning focused on my employer. The officers 
also wanted information about other al-Jazeera journalists in Paris and 
London, and asked if I would speak to someone in their office on a regular 
basis about my work contacts. I declined both requests.

The targeting of al-Jazeera is all the more remarkable, given that it is 
the only Arab TV network to routinely offer Israeli, US and British 
officials a platform to argue their case. The Israeli cabinet minister 
Gideon Ezra famously told the Jerusalem Post: "I wish all Arab media were 
like al-Jazeera". Kenton Keith, the former US ambassador to Qatar, 
commented: "You have to be a supporter of al-Jazeera, even if you have to 
hold your nose sometimes."

Al-Jazeera has a track record of honest and accurate reporting, and has 
maintained a principled pluralism in the face of brutal and authoritarian 
regimes within the region, and increasingly from those without. This is why 
it has been vilified, criminalised and bombed. It is also why it should be 
defended by those who genuinely believe that successful societies depend 
upon an independent media.

· Arthur Neslen was until last week London correspondent for aljazeera.net. 
He is writing a book about Israeli identity for Pluto Press

<mailto:art.neslen at ntlworld.com>art.neslen at ntlworld.com

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