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Journalists sucked into Iraqi
violence
By Iason Athanasiadis
On a typical Baghdad news day, an Arab-English
journalist working for an international news network is
sent out by his editor to a blast site where a missile
has struck a house.
By the time he arrives, US
troops are already there, but they are having trouble
communicating with the residents. The journalist speaks
fluent Arabic, so he begins to translate back and forth
between the angry locals and the American major in
charge.
Later, as he goes over the incident in
his mind, he pin-points the moment when he crossed the
near-invisible line between reporting an event and being
a part of it.
Soon, the angry crowd presses
closer, shoving and heckling him.
"I was mobbed,
told that I was a traitor," said the journalist last
week in a telephone interview from Baghdad. "I felt that
they were going to kill me because I was translating for
an American."
Following that incident, the
journalist concluded that "if you work for Western
organizations, you're as much, if not more, of a
target". He is now back in London after completing two
tours of duty in Iraq. He does not expect to return a
third time.
Richard Wilde was not as lucky. The
24-year-old freelance cameraman was shot dead on a
stiflingly hot day, last summer, in Baghdad. The attack
happened in broad daylight in front of the busy National
Museum. Wilde had just stepped away from a US-manned
roadblock where he had been talking to a soldier.
His death was one of the more poignant recent
examples of journalists being killed at a time when
international news networks in Iraq have been spending
millions of dollars to safeguard their staff.
"It looks like they've really tried to increase
guarantees as much as they could during this last war,"
said Cezarine Sazes, the Middle East desk officer for
Reporters Sans Frontieres. "Many journalists were sent
to training courses, though the situation is very
different depending on the size, resources and
nationality of each media outlet."
The wealthier
networks have embraced private security in a move that
sealed a relationship that had heretofore largely been
restricted to training courses outside war zones. With
the dangers of asymmetric warfare apparent everywhere in
Iraq, private security advisers were hired to accompany
journalists, triggering off heated debate in the
process. "It's a great time to be a former SAS [Special
Air Services] soldier," said Dima Hamdan, a Jordanian
journalist working for the BBC's Arabic service, who was
recently in Iraq. "But it's only the American networks
that have armed security. The British would tell you
that it's wrong because the last thing you want is to
have a shootout, which could aggravate the situation."
Not only is it wrong, but once media workers are
accompanied by armed security advisers (critics call
them mercenaries) the profession may be viewed with even
greater suspicion by outsiders. The journalists who will
be placed under the greatest danger are usually those
unsupported freelancers who cannot afford to shell out
around $500 a day on armed advisers.
"It's
important that the difference between journalists and
the military remains very clear," said Sazes. "Having
armed guards could muddy the waters between the two
different professions in the minds of the [Iraqi]
people."
Paul Rees does not agree. The director
of Centurion Risk Services revolutionized the field of
security for media workers when he introduced the
concept of hostile environment training courses which
taught journalists the basics of keeping safe in the
middle of a riot or a war-zone.
"In Iraq, the
Saddam loyalists are not going to give up. Nor will the
coalition. Journalists get caught in the middle and they
need protection," he told Asia Times Online. "We know
media want to be seen as being neutral, it's part of
their occupation. I think that they should have armed
advisers because they're not working in a typical war,
one in which they know who they're fighting against.
This is an unforeseen enemy."
Dealing with an
invisible enemy does not come cheap. Six months before
US tanks rolled across the Kuwaiti border into Iraq, CNN
summoned its Middle East bureau chiefs for a meeting at
its London headquarters and announced it would be
spending a million dollars safeguarding its staff.
The recent killing of two CNN employees in an
ambush in Baghdad has prompted a review of security
measures, amid claims by some Iraq-based journalists
that not enough was done to protect the local staff and
normal security procedures were not followed.
"They haven't been speaking since the incident,
while they've been reviewing safety measures," said
Nigel Pritchard, a CNN spokesman in Atlanta. "When we
do, we want it to be with one voice."
Although
neither CNN nor the BBC discuss their security
arrangements, a Canadian journalist who was recently in
Baghdad reported that the British organization had just
taken delivery of two new armored vehicles, costing over
$150,000 each.
"I don't think that the Iraq
story is losing prominence," the Canadian journalist
said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "A lot of news
organizations began realizing a few months ago that Iraq
is going to continue to be a major story for at least
another year, maybe two. Now everyone's trying to figure
out how they're going to be able to maintain coverage,
do it safely and somehow manage to afford it."
With expensive private security remaining the
only option for news networks that are financially
hemorrhaging after a budget-sapping war, cutbacks will
occur. "That's inevitable, you'll always get that," said
Centurion's Rees. "Cutbacks happened in Iraq in 1991,
the Balkans, Bosnia, Macedonia and Afghanistan, where
even the government cut back. You've got to cut back
somewhere and security may be part of that procedure."
"Armed security can cost thousands of dollars a
day to maintain," said the Canadian journalist. "At that
price, networks from smaller countries with smaller
budgets can't even afford a single guard, and for most
of them it's a struggle to even find the money to keep a
correspondent in Iraq to cover the story. In the absence
of armed protection or an armored vehicle, sometimes
it's just too risky to venture very far. And that can
really limit your ability to get out and about ...
especially outside of Baghdad."
The starkest
warning comes from Rohan Jayasekera, the director of
British non-governmental agency Index on Censorship's
Baghdad operations. He believes that protecting
journalists by giving them armed escorts will actually
lead to more deaths.
"One day very soon four
people are going to get out of a 4x4 marked Press
somewhere in the world and a nervous, inexperienced,
armed paramilitary is going to make an immediate
decision about what to do next on the basis ... that
three out of the four will be journalists and the fourth
will be a highly trained ex-special forces soldier armed
with an automatic weapon. All four will be in civilian
clothes. What will he do? Shoot first and ask for
accreditation later."
Jayasekera believes that
"reporters may be robbed, dumped in the wilderness,
arrested, even raped or killed, but as long as it was
understood that the Press sign also meant 'unarmed',
journalists had time to at least try and talk their way
out of trouble."
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times
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