Al Sharq Al Awsat, the Saudi-owned and relatively pro-American newspaper, announced today that it was temporarily closing its Baghdad bureau after receiving a terrorist threat (here's an English version of the story). According to its report, a figure known to be part of the "Mujahidin" came to the house of one of its journalists on Monday night and issued a direct warning. The story relates the threat directly to the "Omar Hadid" controversy which I mentioned a few weeks ago: the mujahidin said, according to the threatened reporter, that their anger was not on account of al Jazeera but rather because the story insulted the mujahidin and Omar Hadid. Coming on the heels of the horrific bombing of the Al Arabiya offices in Baghdad, and the killings of other journalists, Al Sharq Al Awsat had to take such a threat seriously.
In an impassioned editorial, Tariq al Hamid writes: "We were the first Arab newspaper to publish in Iraq after the fall of Saddam... when we made that decision, we understood the dangers due to the security situation in Iraq. It is often said that the first victim of war is the truth, and likewise those who search for the truth. That is what happened today for our colleagues in our office in Baghdad."
Hamid claims that terrorist groups were trying to intimidate and pressure the paper of what to publish and what not to publish, how to cover the news, and were making increasingly direct threats to the paper's staff. He argues strongly for the urgent need for Arab journalists to report from Iraq, to bring accurate information at a critical time in Iraq's - and the Arab world's - political development. And he reassures readers that Al Sharq Al Awsat will continue to cover Iraq to the best of its ability. But despite this urgency, the paper's management could not in good conscience expose its staff to an urgent, imminent, and real threat to their lives. So, as Hamid puts it, "we are closing our office but we as a newspaper are not leaving Iraq... we will remain in the heart of events."
This seems part of a concerted insurgency campaign against the Arab media (al Jazeera is already gone from Iraq on the orders of the interim Iraqi government, so there is no way to know if the campaign would extend to them). It is a significant and highly negative development from almost any perspective, and will make it that much more difficult for the press to operate effectively inside of Iraq or for accurate information to be reported. And in the desire to forcefully control information and the news, this new front of the insurgent campaign echoes rather depressingly the attitude of the American military and the interim Iraqi government towards the Arab media (the closure of al Jazeera's offices, the control of the media in Fallujah, etc).
UPDATE: The BBC has a report, but doesn't add anything new to the story.
That's so sad. I hope it helps lead to a broader popular revulsion against that sort of thing.
Posted by: praktike | December 16, 2004 at 11:25 AM
It's more than a little alarming that in the six weeks leading up to the Iraq elections, there might be no major outside Arab media.
Posted by: Nell Lancaster | December 16, 2004 at 05:00 PM