June 9, 2003

The following is a speech presented by Robert Fisk to attendees of the 56th World Newspaper Congress in Dublin, Ireland, on Monday, June 9th, 2003. Click here for information on the World Association of Newspapers.

Threats, Lies and Videotape
Robert Fisk, Middle East Correspondent, The Independent, UK

News from the front. I've just got back from Baghdad. The Americans are being attacked almost daily. There's still only 12 hours electricity a day. There's shooting across the capital at night. And last week - unmentioned and unpublished here in the West - the Anglo American authorities in Iraq set up a legal committee to organize press censorship. Officially it's not called that but Paul Bremer's so-called 'Coalition Provisional Authority' has set up a legal committee to examine how restrictions should be clamped on Iraq's new - and free - press, to eliminate, in the words of one diplomat - the 'wilder' stories that might provoke incitement to ethnic hatred.

So Iraq is being given another shadow of Saddam, a controlled press, something which most Iraqis have been used to for more than two decades. Of course, it's not difficult to see what the Americans want to censor. Many stories in the emerging newspapers in Baghdad are untrue. There is no tradition of checking reports, of giving opponents the opportunity to be heard. There are constant articles about the behavior of U.S. troops, about beatings and about the selling of alcohol. In one of the most recent issues of a Shia Muslim newspaper, Muslims were told that it was against Holy law to marry a Christian.

What the Iraqis need, of course, is journalistic help rather than censorship, courses in reporting - albeit I find myself appalled at the bias and lies of our own western press - rather than a colonial style suppression of free speech which is what censorship will become. Already we're hearing that Imams in the mosques may be censored. In central Baghdad just over a week ago, I heard a sermon in a mosque. It demanded that the Americans leave Iraq immediately. And of course, we all know how the first Iraqi government of 'New Iraq' will treat the laws. They will enthusiastically adopt the western censorship law, just as former colonies almost always take over the most repressive rules of their former imperial masters.

A few thoughts, then, on the most recent Iraq war. The horrific Saddam lied to us. The Americans lied to us. And yes, the British lied to us. We've always been pretty good at spotting Saddam's lies and deceit and mendacity and cruelty. We were reporting his mass killings from the late seventies - when the U.S. government didn't want anything but good relations with the Iraqi regime. I recall one awful day in 1982 when I was traveling from the Iraq-Iran war front, back to Tehran, on an Iranian military hospital train. All the soldiers aboard had been gassed. They sat, those Iranians, all victims of Saddam, coughing and choking up blood and mucus into towels they held to their faces as they read their Korans. After some time, I smelled something strange, like a kind of sick perfume. Then I realized. I walked the carriages, throwing open the compartment windows. The dying men were coughing up the gas. It was spreading through the whole train.

Back in London - I was working for the London Times at the time - my paper front-paged my story of the death train. And later that week, a Foreign Office official told my then editor over lunch that my story had not been 'helpful'. Because, of course, Britain was supporting Saddam against the Iranians. The Americans were supporting Saddam against the Iranians. And that same week I was on the hospital train, the United States sent a special delegate tot meet Saddam Hussein in Baghdad to reopen the American embassy. His name was Donald Rumsfeld.

I recall all this because of the way in which any of our reports during this last war that suggested the Americans may have been bombing civilians rather than military targets were immediately attacked by governments as reports from 'behind enemy lines', written by journalists who were supposedly acting as Saddam's propaganda henchmen, duped by his secret services into lying about Anglo-American air raids.

Let me then, just now, give you a little picture portrait of Iraq at war this year, taken through the lens of my own camera, which I always carry to war with me. None of this negates the evidence of Saddam's killing fields, his butchery against the Kurds and the Shiites, his torture chambers. But it's worth a glance at these pictures, I think, to see that wars are not the clean and bloodless sandpits that our television colleagues like to pretend.

I took this picture of the little Iraqi girl in Hilla Hospital. Like many of the patients brought in that day, she had been the victim of a cluster bomb attack on her village. Were there Iraqi military near the village? I suspect so. Could the American or British planes which dropped these munitions have realized that a civilian target was also being attacked? Of course.

What I didn't notice when I took this girl's picture was her sister. Here she is on the left. But it was only after I'd taken their picture together that I realized the second girl had been terribly wounded. If you look carefully at my picture, you'll see blood on her neck and hair. And there is, just above her left ear, a hole in her head.

This old lady is a picture which needs no caption. The pieces of cluster bombs - the tiny bomblets that fall like grapes when the first munitions are used - still lay around their village. Sky Television even collected them from the ground.

Now that entry into Baghdad. Was it liberation or occupation? Here is my picture of the first American military vehicles, suddenly approaching the west bank of the Tigris River in the capital.

The first is coming from what was an Iraqi position. The two vehicles on the left are - on the far left - a Bradley fighting vehicle, and to the right of it, an M1A1 Abrams tank.

Here are the first tanks on the Joumouriyah river bridge. Take a look at the second tank. An hour after I took this picture, it suddenly turned its barrel and fired a single shot at the Palestine Hotel - from which my own picture was taken - and fatally wounded two of my colleagues, a Reuters cameraman and a Spanish television crew member. Just over an hour earlier, an American aircraft attacked the Baghdad office of the Arab satellite Al-Djazeira channel. Its reporter - standing on the roof - was killed. And how were these killings of our colleagues explained? The U.S. Defense Department sent its condolences to Al-Djazeira, failing to account for the attack on its office an making no mention that the station had willingly given the Pentagon the map coordinates of the building, an act which prompted the U.S. administration to promise the satellite channel that it would not bomb its offices.

Back in 2001 Al-Djazeira's office in Kabul was attacked with a Cruise missile after the station had shown videotapes of Osama bin Laden. No explanation was given. But the Baghdad attack followed U.S. condemnation of Al-Djazeira for showing film of U.S. military prisoners and of civilian casualties of Anglo-American air raids. And no explanation has been given for this second attack.

As for the shell that hit the Palestine Hotel and killed my colleagues, the commander of the U.S. Fist Infantry Division claimed that light arms fire had been directed at his tank on the bridge, that the tank had fired at the hotel and the shooting ceased. This was a lie. I was between the tank and the hotel and there was no shooting. Had there been, I would not have been on the streets myself that morning. French television was running videotape of the tank for four minutes before it fired. The sound-track is silent. There was no shooting. So why were my colleagues killed? All of us should continue to demand an answer.

Here are the very first U.S. troops to enter Baghdad. There were no flowers, no songs. These were tired, frightened, tough men who had been fighting for three weeks. I took this picture in Saadoun Street. These are the very first soldiers on the first armored vehicle. Now be an Iraqi for a moment, an ordinary Iraqi, not a Saddam clone. And look at this picture. How would you react to seeing these foreigners in your street?

At the time, I was condemned for using the word 'liberated' in quotation marks. I suggested this was occupation - and far fewer people would argue with that description today. But now to that famous picture of the Saddam Stature being pulled off its plinth in Ferdows Square. You know the picture, the iron Saddam toppling from his perch, hauled down by a joyful crowd of Iraqis.

But it wasn't. Here's the picture most of you didn't see, a photograph I took from the Palestine Hotel. The hawsers around the neck of the statue are connected to this U.S. military vehicle. It was the Americans who pulled the statue down. Sure, I saw Iraqis pulling down some statues of their own in the days that followed. But that one critical, iconic image that went round the world deleted those ropes and that military vehicle.

Thus are myths created by us.

We journalists help to create these myths. Sometimes we just do it by changing our definitions. Take the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Occupied? Well, of course. But not if you read many reports in the United States. Forever since Colin Powell sent a memo to U.S. embassies in the region, telling them to describe the territories as "disputed", many papers now faithfully follow the State Department's lead. They are now 'disputed'. On the AP wire, there is a rule never to call these lands occupied. The AP calls them - wait for it - "war-won". AP had to invent such a tongue-twister.

Similarly, settlements. I have tried in vain to discover when we first used that word for the Israeli colonies on occupied Arab land. But now, even 'settlements' is being dropped. They are now 'neighborhoods' or, most recently, 'outposts'.

What we are doing, of course, is decontextualizing a tragedy, taking meaning away from violence. I hate all violence for any reason, anywhere. But if colonies or settlements are being built on someone else's land, we can at least see why a Palestinian might attack these settlements. But why would anyone attack a friendly, cozy place like a 'neighborhood' or something as tiny and insignificant as an 'outpost'. You might understand why a people would resist occupation. But anyone who would resort to violence over 'disputed' land, a land dispute, the sort of problem that could perhaps be settled in the courts, why such a person is obviously insane, mindless, a 'terrorist' - our most favorite of words - and has no reason behind his behavior. Thus do we decontextualize violence - and serve to make a whole people incomprehensible.

I'm not sure what we can do about that word 'terrorism'. It's been so overused in the Middle East context - and only about one group of people - that it has acquired a racist aspect. The word has lost its meaning through pejorative use. Yet the international crimes against humanity of September 11th, 2001, force us to look at that word again. I can feel sympathy for Israelis, too, when they rage at the idea that a man who blows himself up in a pizzeria and executes the families inside is called a 'militant' rather than a 'terrorist'.

Even 2001 threw up its own myth for us journalists- the myth of the question 'why'. Merely to ask why 19 killers could strike down more than 3,000 innocents was the equivalent of journalistic thought crime. We were allowed to know who did it, their identities, how they hijacked four aircraft - but not to ask the question 'why?'. To do this- as I did in The Independent on September 12th, 2001 - was to incur the wrath of the righteous. Even to ask the question was helping 'terrorism', was anti-American, was denying America's goodness.

It was a very sinister moment in journalism, our failure to ask the 'why' question. And odd, too. After all, the first thing a cop does at the scene of the crime is to try to find the motive for the crime. Yet when we experience the most appalling crime against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, we are not supposed to look for the motive. Merely to connect the dots was potentially evil. The killers were Arabs, they called themselves Muslims, they came from the Middle East. Is there some kind of a problem in the Middle East? Is anything going on there we should know about? I can well see why, in this context, to ask the 'why' question is dangerous, uncomfortable, unpatriotic, subversive.

I have to ad, in the context of the Middle East, that Arab journalism, along with its slavish desire to imitate CNN, is an arid wasteland. I've been called in the pages of Egypt's Al Ahram newspaper "a black crow pecking at the corpse of Egypt" for telling readers that President Moubarak's 97.8 per cent election victory was a fraud. I've been condemned by Damascus radio as a liar because I managed to enter the Syrian city of Hama in 1982 when Syrian troops were massacring the population.

After I investigated the torture in the stat security police headquarters in Bahrain - a headquarters run by a former British Special Branch officer called Ian Henderson - the Bahrain newspaper Akhbar al-Khaleej portrayed me in a cartoon, along with two other colleagues - Simon Ingram of the BBC and Christopher Walker of the Times - as a rabid dog, straining on what was labeled a "Murdoch-Maxwell" leash in my attempt to get my teeth into a bag full of cash.

Here's the cartoon.

Now lets take a closer look at Bob. (teeth, ears).

Humorous enough you may think. Certainly nothing to worry a hard-skinned reporter. But in the Arab world, a dog - a "kelb" - is something dirty - there is an Arabic expression, "najis", 'dirty like a dog'. The dog is an animal scarcely worthy of life, certainly not one whose life should be protected. And the dogs in that cartoon were rabid. And rabid dogs should be put down, exterminated. Which is why that cartoon, ladies and gentlemen, was not a joke. It was a threat.

So what is our job? How do we define a profession which is for all of us ever more dangerous, ever more potentially lethal? I was discussing this not long ago with that fine Israeli reporter Amira Haas of 'Haaretz' newspaper. I was rabbiting on to her in my Brit way that we reporters had the job of writing the first pages of history, we were the impartial witnesses to war and peace. "You're wrong, Robert," Amira corrected me. "Our job," she said, "our job as journalists is to monitor the centers of power". To monitor the centers of power, perhaps the best definition of our profession I've ever heard.

So let me end by returning to a theme I've already touched on -and by showing you a little film. Back in 1983 - 20 years ago - I made a three-hour film for Channel 4 in Britain and the Discovery Channel in the States. It was called "Beirut to Bosnia" and its subtitle was 'how Muslims are coming to hate the West'. We filmed - on real film, not videotape - in Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Egypt, Bosnia, Croatian and Poland. One segment aroused much anger in the states - and some criticism in Britain. It involved my return to a Bosnian Muslim village which was under Serb occupation - this was during the Bosnian war - and my attempt to find the Muslim Imam of the Mosque whom I'd met a year before. In this sequence, you'll see me enter a destroyed mosque. In the light of September 11th, 2001, the question I ask on the soundtrack - "what do the Muslims have in store for us" - was more than valid. But let me show you the film. It was made, surprisingly, 8 years before September 11, 2001.

Ladies and gentlemen, I should tell you that the sequence of film you've just seen was widely condemned for suggestion that a growing hatred was being felt towards us, the West, in the Muslim world. The London 'Times' took the film series apart. The Israeli lobby wrote letters of complaint saying that there were no (I quote) " large Jewish settlements being built on occupied land." Discovery dropped a second showing for the film in the States.

Are we under threat? Yes, we are. From ever more lethal weapons and ever more cynical governments, from our failure to use real words, from those who will try to smother or censor our questions as well as our answers. This afternoon, we're going to hear the views first-hand from those who have to fight journalism's battle a lot more bravely than most of us who can cover wars if we choose but can always fly home, who can write from the security of a western city if we choose, rather than from Angola, Columbia or Bangladesh.

So please, let's ask the 'why' questions. Let's not say 'disputed' when we mean 'occupied' or 'neighborhood' when we mean 'settlement. Let's not be afraid to warn as well as to resist propaganda. Let's monitor the centers of power. Or, as American journalists used to be taught, let's tell it how it is.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your patience.

Robert Fisk writes for the Independent of London.