Arab nationalism tunes into
al-Jazeera By Thalif Deen
NEW
YORK - When the League of Arab States was created in
1945, it was perceived as the ultimate symbol of Arab
nationalism in a politically and militarily demoralized
Middle East.
But in recent years, the 22 members
of the pan-Arab organization have been struggling to
find common cause and their meetings have been
characterized mostly by political brawls and
near-fisticuffs. At one of its summits in March last
year, the cameras stopped rolling to prevent the
recording of insults and name-calling by two Arab
leaders.
"You see the Arab League get together,
and certain members can't even have a conversation,"
said Jehane Noujaim, the Lebanese-American filmmaker who
produced Control Room, a widely acclaimed
documentary on the Arab television network al-Jazeera.
"They're all standing on tables fighting with
one another. Al-Jazeera is one entity that everyone
across the Arab world watches. They may be the only
remaining base of Arab nationalism that exists. Arabs
are proud of that," said Noujaim.
Based in
the Qatari capital Doha and launched in November 1996,
al-Jazeera is not merely "an Arab phenomenon" but also a
remarkably popular television network that now rivals
giants such as Cable News Network (CNN) and the British
Broadcasting Corp, particularly in the Arab
world.
But the eight-year-old network has failed
to win plaudits from the administration of US President
George W Bush, which has denounced it as "inflammatory"
- specifically for its aggressive reporting on civilian
casualties in Iraq and for being "a mouthpiece" for
Iraqi insurgents and for the leader of al-Qaeda, Osama
bin Laden. The network denies the charges.
"We
have very deep concerns about al-Jazeera's broadcasts
because, again and again, we find inaccurate, false,
wrong reports that are, we think, designed to be
inflammatory," US State Department spokesman Richard
Boucher told reporters in April.
In US-occupied
Iraq, Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib says al-Jazeera
has been showing "a lot of crimes and criminals on TV,
and they transfer a bad picture about Iraq and about
Iraqis and encourage criminals to increase their
activities".
US Secretary of State Colin Powell made
a formal protest against the network when he met with Qatari
Foreign Minister Sheik Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabir al-Thani
in Washington last April. And the New York Times
reported that the Bush administration refused to invite
Qatar as an "observer" to the summit meeting of eight
world leaders (the Group of Eight) in the state of
Georgia in June because the Qatari government had failed to
curb the "excesses" of al-Jazeera.
"For many
years, top officials in Washington have bemoaned the
lack of a free press and other democratic freedoms in
Arab countries," said Norman Solomon, executive director
of the Washington-based Institute for Public Accuracy.
Yet since 2001, the Bush administration
has increasingly pressured the government of Qatar to
clamp down on al-Jazeera, he adds. "In recent months the
US State Department has escalated its campaign to
persuade Qatar to turn the screws on al-Jazeera. This effort
cuts the legs out from under Washington's claims that
it supports democratization in the Middle East,"
Solomon said.
In the case of al-Jazeera, on the
contrary, the White House has made clear that the US
government fervently desires outright censorship and
expression, he added.
The US, which relocated
its Central Command (CENTCOM) from Saudi Arabia to Qatar
early this year, has its biggest single Middle East
military base in Doha, about 24 kilometers from the offices
of al-Jazeera.
Asked whether the new political and
military relationship between Qatar and Washington would
impinge on al-Jazeera, one of its London-based program
presenters, Malek Triki, said the network would continue
to maintain its editorial independence.
He said
that on certain controversial issues, al-Jazeera "has
agreed to disagree" with the Qatari government, which
has not put any pressure on the network, despite US
demands.
Speaking at a seminar, "The Role of
the Media in the Development of the Arab World", held in
the Finnish capital Helsinki last month, Triki said the
Arab ruling elites who control the bulk of the region's
economic and political resources have imported a
development model based on economic growth, but have
taken care to empty it of its progressive substance.
The participants in the seminar, which was
co-sponsored by Inter Press Service (IPS) and the
Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, included
representatives from the Dubai-based al-Arabiya
television network, the US-backed al-Hurra network in
Washington, DC, and the School of Mass Communications in
Cairo University, the Arab world's largest university.
"Transposed to any Western context, nothing of
what al-Jazeera has done and is doing is out of the
ordinary," Triki told the seminar. "Had it been launched
in a region used to freedom of speech and freedom of the
press, such as northern Europe or Canada, al-Jazeera
would hardly have made any ripple; it would have been
just another TV channel.
"But in the
autocratic, authoritarian, censorship-ridden,
taboo-obsessed Arab world, al-Jazeera was an
innovation," he said. Al-Jazeera has played "a leading
role" in furthering the cause of Arab political
development and in liberalizing Arab political culture,
according to Triki.
Asked to explain the reasons
for the network's phenomenal success in the Arab world,
Mouin Rabbani, a contributing editor to the
Washington-based Middle East Report, said: "The success
of al-Jazeera is, in my view, primarily explained by a
very simple reality: it has broken the monopoly of the
state-owned, government-controlled broadcasting
organizations that dominated the Arab world since the
advent of mass communication technologies, by rejecting
their formula for providing news."
Conventional state broadcasters were designed not to provide news
but rather to legitimize their regimes and, more often
than not, glorify their leaders, he said.
"Consequently, they lost their legitimacy and credibility -
being correctly seen as third-rate propaganda
outfits," Rabbani said. "Their headlines were never about what
actually happened that day, but rather about how the
leader responded to them."
If you go back
through the record, he said, you will find that the news
was not "Nelson Mandela released from prison" or
"hundreds of thousands dead in Rwanda" but rather
"King/President X congratulates Mandela on his release
from prison" or "expresses alarm at the situation in
central Africa".
"Al-Jazeera is
altogether different: it is based in Qatar and funded by the
Qatari royal family, but the number of times Qatari news
has led the bulletin can be counted on one hand, and
even then was usually for legitimate reasons," Rabbani
said. In other words, he said, the network's main success
is that compared with state broadcasters it provides news
rather than regime propaganda. And by not emphasizing
the comings and goings of a single leadership, it
garnered pan-Arab appeal.
Another factor has
been al-Jazeera's willingness to confront controversial
issues and provide a diversity of viewpoints - certainly
more diversified than is available on any of the leading
US broadcasters. "I would also add that this formula has
been put to good use by a host of other Arab channels,
such as al-Arabiya, Abu Dhabi and Lebanese Broadcasting
Corporation to name just a few, so would not single out
al-Jazeera in this respect, though it certainly was the
pioneer," Rabbani said.
Al-Jazeera is an enigma,
says Naseer H Aruri, chancellor professor (emeritus) of
the University of Massachusetts. Owned by the amir of
Qatar, one of the most pro-Western sheikdoms in the
Arabian peninsula, it is hardly a bastion of Arab
nationalism and steadfastness against ongoing US
penetration, yet the network is an indispensable source
of news about the daily atrocities committed against
Arab civilians by occupying armies in Palestine and
Iraq.
"The coverage of al-Jazeera has been a
thorn in the side of the neo-conservatives who rule
America today and whose distortion of political
realities relating to the US debacle in Iraq,
Afghanistan and the 'war on terror' eluded the
mainstream US media, which acts more as a government
appendage than an independent source of news and
analysis in a democratic society," Aruri told IPS.
The Bush administration, which claims to be
exporting democracy to Arabs and Muslims, has exerted
strenuous pressure on al-Jazeera and the government of
Qatar to tone down its critical coverage, he added.
Moreover, the US military has targeted buildings that
housed the network's stations in Iraq and Afghanistan,
killing and wounding its employees.
"Since the
US Central Command has relocated from Saudi Arabia to
Qatar, and the US is increasing its political and
military links, al-Jazeera and the Qatar government
should expect increased US pressure intended to silence
a voice which has become identified with indigenous
opposition to foreign intrusion and local surrogates,"
predicted Aruri.
Should the punishment succeed,
the network will have a hard time finding an alternative
location, given the tendency of Arab leaders to comply
with US ultimatums, outside international law. But it is
doubtful that even such punishment would suppress voices
in the region that would like to see an end to foreign
occupations, and aspire to a dignified existence and a
stable political order, Aruri said.
Rabbani
pointed out that the Palestinian uprising and the Iraq
crisis have most certainly contributed to al-Jazeera's
success - for several reasons. "An important reason is
purely technological - it was able to beam the conflict
straight into people's living rooms, much like CNN did
with the 1991 Gulf War, and do so in Arabic. It was
there. And given that it does not operate under the same
constraints as the conventional state broadcasters it
was able to reflect the views of its viewers - a key
factor. In sum, I would tend to agree that it represents
an important facet of contemporary pan-Arabism," Rabbani
said.
