Shutting out the media in Iraq
By Jane Arraf Posted Apr 1 2003
I wonder if you knew the words coming out of your mouth would get you thrown out of the country, you would still say them.
In years of covering Iraq, there were times I wondered whether everyone there made too many compromises just to stay. But the other choice – leaving the country uncovered – seemed a greater crime.
In the end, the story that was a main reason I was expelled by the Iraqi government as CNN bureau chief late last year was pretty clear cut – something you could not walk away from and call yourself a journalist.
In all of the years of covering an amazing variety of protests, from mothers of dead babies to lawyers and engineers against sanctions, this was the first I’d seen that was spontaneous – a group of relatives of prisoners missing since after the Gulf War. They marched to the Information Ministry after Saddam Hussein announced every single prisoner had been released from the jails. Their relatives were nowhere to be found. It wasn’t an anti-government protest, but, astoundingly, they were demanding something from their government. They were literally right outside our door.
It was a small demonstration. To someone who didn’t live there, it might have seemed a small event. But if I needed any further proof it was a watershed, I needed only to look at the expressions of astonishment on Iraqis at the Information Ministry and the flickering of joy in some of the demonstrators that things could be different in the Iraq they knew.
There was a group of television cameras recording the impromptu demonstration. None of the Western television news agencies based in Baghdad used the pictures it shot. One government official who was blamed for failing to stop our reporting tells people he was suspended from his job for a month. I was accused of fabricating some of the report – even though it was on tape – and asked to leave.
That was when the door swung shut on what had been a yearlong widening of freedom in one of the most restrictive countries of the world. It sent a very clear lesson to all journalists and news organizations desperate to stay in Iraq to cover the story of the decade.
Just before I left, an influential Iraqi official advised that the only way media would be able to stand up to the increasing restrictions by the Iraqi government was to resist them together and present a united front. He predicted, though, it wouldn’t happen. It didn’t.
There was a time I went for weeks in Iraq without seeing another foreign journalist. Compared with the media frenzy and the growing sense of doom there now, it seems almost idyllic.
I flew out of Baghdad when I was expelled, after years of taking the 10-hour drive to Jordan when almost all flights were banned, and it was a sheer joy. But though Iraq is opening up to the world, it is still a black hole for journalists and one of the most difficult places in the world to cover well.
No computer modems or cell phones are allowed, no satellite TV, no outside newspapers. Iraq is isolated by more than a lack of airline connections.
CNN had opened the only Western news bureau in Iraq staffed by an international correspondent.
CNN forged something of a special relationship with Iraq when it became the first network to televise a war live 10 years ago. Over the years, the Iraqi government invited several news organizations to base international correspondents there. CNN was the only one to take them up on it.
The Iraqi government legitimately gives itself credit for letting in Western journalists to operate there in the first place – an opportunity that wouldn’t be extended to Iraqi journalists by other countries if those countries were continually being bombed by Iraq.
But once it lets them in, it seems not to know what to do with them.
I realized one day, when I was standing by the side of the highway in northern Iraq, arguing with an official from the Information Ministry about whether we could interview shepherds, how quickly the absurd becomes normal.
The shepherds were in the no-fly zone where missiles dropped by U.S. and British planes had hit one of their tents recently, killing a family.
I lost the argument. As it is the case when you travel outside of Baghdad, we had two officials with us — and they both agreed that shepherds weren’t educated enough to speak with us.
It’s the same sort of mindset that has banned us, over the past two years, from taking pictures in Iraq of children begging, poor people, garbage and almost anything else that would show the world that Iraq these days is still a devastated country.
You would think that the government would want to elicit sympathy for the sanctions still in place more than a decade after the Gulf War. But in present-day Iraq, the official message, as strange as it seems, is that the country is doing fine; that it doesn’t need sanctions to be lifted.
There are few things sadder than seeing a mother dressed in rags trying to keep her malnourished children alive, telling you – because she knows that’s what she is supposed to say – that, really, she and her family are doing fine. That’s the wonderful thing about television – when we are allowed to film – that pictures don’t lie the way words can.
The restrictions unfortunately often make for deadly dull television. It’s hard to do television without pictures. After the U.S. bombing in February of telecommunications installations near Baghdad, we were allowed to interview a telecommunications ministry official. But the only picture we could take of the ministry was a view of the back of the building. When I asked whether we could film a man painting the fence, to have something moving in the picture, it had to be run by security. They said no – in a tone that suggested it was extremely suspicious of us to be asking to do so.
Like many Iraqi journalists, foreign journalists in Iraq can expect to have their phones tapped, their movements watched and their stories closely monitored.
The difference is that, in the last decade, at least, the worst that has happened is being expelled and not let back in if you end up on the wrong side of the system. Let’s be blunt about this – Iraqi journalists are jailed. That’s why you don’t see a lot of risk-taking in local journalism in Baghdad.
Which is perhaps the biggest obstacle to reporting accurately in Iraq. If you do, you inevitably get people into trouble.
On many stories, by necessity, there is no stricter censorship than self-censorship. Even calling people on the phone or being seen talking to them can get them in trouble. Even if you are talking about the weather, no one will believe that talking about weather isn’t code for something.
Most people know enough, unfortunately, to be afraid to talk on camera. But some don’t, like the boy who, after an attack in the no-fly zones where two people he knew had been killed, explained that there had been movable radar across the street from the house before journalists were taken to the scene. If you use that kind of information, you have to use it very carefully.
It is often heartbreaking covering Iraq. In a town once a student came up to me in the street where we were filming to practice his English, not getting the chance very often. He ended up giving me a bunch of wildflowers and his address. Town officials decided a few minutes later that we really shouldn’t be filming. I turned around and saw him surrounded by security officials. We were literally escorted out of town by a police car.
The other thing to remember is to never believe what you hear. Once someone came up to me. “You have to know, we all want to leave Iraq,” he said. “No one can tell the truth.” My colleague happened to use him in an interview a short while later, and I heard him saying that, of course, no one wanted to leave, that everything was fine.
Different truths for different occasions. And different audiences.