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London, Wednesday, April 21, 2004 Al-Jazeera has a
track record of accurate reporting -- which is why
its journalists have been criminalised and its
offices bombed by Arthur
Neslen 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 (left) 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
Nov 2003 Arab
television station is kicked out of
Iraq
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