Rebuilding Iraq's Media
By Borzou Daragahi


Hassan Hadi, a Muslim cleric and would-be director of television and radio for the Islamic Information Network, sat in his Baghdad office and fumed. It was late May, and six weeks earlier the U.S. military had freed Iraq of Saddam Hussein's tyranny, allowing Hadi to freely practice his Shiite faith, speak his mind, and even launch a newspaper called Voice of Friday. But now he railed against the Americans who had taken over the Iraqi capital's television and radio facilities and begun broadcasting.

A petition signed by former television employees authorized Hadi to speak in their name, and thus the Americans, he said, were defying the will of the Iraqi people. The Hawza, a famed Shiite seminary run by ayatollahs in the holy Iraqi city of Najaf, had granted Hadi authority over Baghdad's airwaves, and thus the Americans were also defying the will of God. "In America there is freedom of everything," says the white-turbaned cleric. "Press, food, drink, dancing, and even sex. The Iraqi people are a Muslim people, and such things are not acceptable here. The media is just like food. You have to clean it and make sure there's no poison before you distribute it."

Across town, behind razor-wire-shrouded checkpoints manned by peach-faced American soldiers, a group of Iraqi journalists and American advisers assembled news segments for the Iraqi Media Network (IMN), the U.S.-backed reincarnation of the country's hated -- and now dissolved, bombed, looted, and torched -- Ministry of Information. They have their own dream for the Iraqi media: a freewheeling cross between the BBC and PBS. "The vision is to provide the Iraqi people with a European broadcasting system model," says Mike Furlong, a senior adviser to the U.S. media reconstruction effort.

IMN employees -- many of whom are former low-level information ministry employees who now wear U.S. Defense Department badges -- use the makeshift broadcast equipment in the dilapidated Baghdad Convention Center to put together reports about mass graves, freed prisoners, electricity shortages, and even a few stories critical of the pace and style of the American reconstruction effort.

Their boss in Baghdad, Ahmad al Rikabi, a thirty-three-year-old Iraqi who was raised in Sweden, says he's keen on teaching his employees the rules of balanced journalism. "Trying to create a free media based on the experience of the journalists in the last thirty years is almost impossible, so you have to change the mentality," says al Rikabi, a former London bureau chief of Radio Free Iraq. "We don't serve the government."

Time will tell whether the U.S. advisers -- working with like-minded Iraqis -- can create an Iraqi Jim Lehrer without provoking the country's traditionalists and Islamists. The Islamists, in turn, are joined in their battle for Iraq's airwaves by Iran's ubiquitous, anti-American television and radio broadcasts. The Iranian broadcasts -- often the only television available to Iraqis -- mix poetry, music, and language classes with news reports about the "Zionist entity" and experts urging Iraqis to ignore the U.S. and take control of the government.

What the Americans hope to create is unprecedented in authoritarian Arab countries like Iraq, says Massoud Derhally, an editor of Arabian Business, a Dubai-based monthly magazine. "In Arab countries, you have media that toe the line," he says. And it may also be unrealistic to expect the Iraqi media to be a carbon copy of the U.S. press. But in between the efforts of the Americans on one end of the scale and the Iranians on the other, a new and unexpected media force has emerged from the rubble of Iraq. By late May, nearly 100 new publications and a handful of broadcast outlets were available in Baghdad, with others launching in major Iraqi cities such as Kirkuk, Mosul, and Basra. They are communist, monarchist, Kurdish, Assyrian, Islamist, nationalist, and secularist. Some are shrill and tawdry, like London tabloids. Others are staid and dry, like a New York broadsheet. But they are Iraqi.

And what their editors and reporters say about their visions for a post-Saddam media challenges the assumptions of both Iraq's foreign administrators as well as its domestic guardians of virtue.


Iraqis like to say that they gave mankind the written word 5,000 years ago. Iraqi journalists boast that the first Arabic newspaper, Al Zawra, was printed in Baghdad 135 years ago, and that the nation's first television station was launched in 1956, the same year that TV came to Sweden. Spirited, mostly politically partisan papers flourished until the late 1960s. Iraqis continue to pride themselves on their appetite for the printed word. "What is written in Cairo is published in Beirut but read in Baghdad," the saying goes.

All this ended in the violent coup d'?tat of July 17,1968, that ushered in the era of Hussein's Baath Party. One of the Baathists' first acts was to jail Abdel Aziz Barakat, then head of the journalists' union, and shut down his newspaper, al Manar, which at the time was one of the most professional dailies in Iraq. Barakat was charged as an American spy and executed a month later.

Baathists placed a stranglehold on the press, turning it into a tool to glorify Saddam and his family. Underground or independent media were unheard of. Decree number 840, which Saddam signed in 1986, made death the maximum penalty for criticizing the government. Even carrying copies of unofficial newspapers posed a huge risk. In 2001, Kurdish officials say, a man was caught in the city of Khaneqin with a copy of al Ittihad, one of the newspapers published in the Kurdish-run northern section of Iraq. He was sentenced to twenty-one years in jail.

Tales from Saddam's prisons filled the nightmares of fearful journalists. The names of disappeared journalists went unspoken. Theraqem Hashem, a writer for Horass al Waqtan magazine, was arrested in 1992 and never heard from again. Aziz al Sayed Jassem, who wrote political books, was arrested in 1991 and disappeared after he refused to write a book extolling Saddam's glories. That same year Durgham Hashemi, a young journalist at al Thawra, disappeared a week after he criticized articles in his own newspaper that claimed Iraq's Shiite Arabs came from India. As many as 500 Iraqi journalists, artists, writers, and intellectuals have been executed or disappeared and are presumed dead since 1968, according to the International Alliance for Justice, a French human rights group.


But Saddam's grip on the media wasn't airtight. Though heavily infiltrated by the intelligence services, for example, the faculty of the University of Baghdad's College of Mass Media tried to teach their students the fundamentals of good reporting. "When I taught I would give the academic view," says Mo'ayed al Khafaf, a lecturer at the college. "How to write news, how to write a column, how to conduct an investigation. We taught students that they had to be brave, tell the truth, and be accurate." The problem, al Khafaf says, wasn't what students studied, but rather that the Ministry of Information controlled everything they wrote.

Even Iraq's American administrators are impressed with the skills of Iraq's journalists. "There are a lot of talented young people who just need some training, some highly technically competent people," says Mike Furlong.

In 1992, Saddam's oldest son, Uday -- by all accounts, a brutal man who treated his pet lions far better than his many underlings -- was "unanimously" elected head of the journalists' union and launched a number of purportedly independent publications, television stations, and radio operations. These allowed Saddam and Uday to attack their opponents without the formal imprimatur of the state-owned media. They also allowed the government to expand its system of rewards for sycophantic journalists. One broadcaster, for instance, received $2,500 and a Honda for his on-air call for the reelection of Saddam Hussein, says Khalil Ibrahim, a reporter for Fajr Baghdad.

But some of the journalists on Uday's payroll -- many were graduates of the College of Mass Media -- took the independent label seriously.

In 1997 Nab al Shabab, the Uday-controlled weekly paper of the Youth Union, began publishing articles that were unprecedented both in terms of their subject matter and as examples of journalists trying hard to retain their integrity in the harshest environment. "We criticized the government's behavior," says Mohamed Bedewi al Shamari, a former Nab al Shabab writer who is now an editor for Ashiraa, a new, 5,000-circulation weekly. "We criticized the checkpoints, the limited freedoms of the people, the actions of the Baathist security officers. We called on the government to respect the people's rights." Al Shamari and others who worked at these "independent" publications say they were able to get away with such criticism, ironically, because of the twisted reality of life under Saddam. Because they were known as Uday's publications, others in the regime mostly left them alone. And although Uday was a despot in his own right, he was also a bit of a loose cannon, these journalists say, and he argued with his father over what the papers wrote. Still, journalists did not dare criticize Saddam Hussein directly.

Instead, they pecked around him. One article in 1998 by Hashem Hassan, Nab al Shabab's editor, accused Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz of wasting his time and the country's money on foreign trips and speeches. Others chronicled the growing prostitution and crime problems. "We always went out in the streets and reported these stories out," says Saad al Awsi, a former news director of Nab al Shabab.

But in March 1998 the newspaper pushed too far, publishing a satirical front-page piece about Iraqi opposition groups. The headline, announcement #1, typically heralds a coming change in government. The piece included photos of opposition figures, such as Ahmad Chalabi.

Saddam cracked down. The paper's staff was pushed out. Al Awsi was banned from writing. Al Shamari managed a job at Musawar al Arabi, another Uday-owned weekly, and began writing an opinion column that touched upon the same themes. In September 1998, two men in an unmarked car came to his office and took al Shamari away. He was jailed for eight days without charges. "They didn't even take down my name," al Shamari says. "They were trying to send a message."

Hashem Hassan was briefly jailed, too, and eventually fled to the autonomous Kurdish north early last year, where freedom from Saddam's rule since 1991 has ushered in a relatively free press, including several newspapers completely independent of political parties.

Over time, many Iraqi journalists fled Saddam's rule and found success in other countries. And today's media bloom springs in part from these long-dormant seeds of press freedom planted years earlier.

The media universe in Iraq these days is populated by everything from Islamists to exiled media tycoons to local politicians to collectives run by idealistic journalists. Regardless of their ultimate goal, though, all are far more likely to look for guidance to the wider Arab world, or to their own traditions, than to America and the West.

The London-based Azzaman, run by an exiled Iraqi journalist, began planning to publish an Iraq edition months before Saddam's fall. The full-color, twenty-page daily, carrying international and local news as well as celebrity gossip and sports, has wowed Baghdad. Filled with news from around the world and the Middle East, the mildly Arab-nationalist paper often publishes articles skeptical of U.S. aims in Iraq and the region. And it's the hottest paper in town, with a circulation that Hathem Aziza, Azzaman's general manager, claims has grown to 30,000. He hopes to reach 50,000 by summer's end, and 100,000 by the end of the year. Editions of Azzaman are also published in London, Bahrain, and Algeria.

Just days after the regime fell, volunteers in the city of Karbala, southwest of Baghdad, took over an abandoned 100-watt television substation and began broadcasting over a range of about twelve miles. Karbala TV mixes Koranic verses with pirated satellite news broadcasts, cartoons, and local news segments about the city's electrical and water problems, put together by volunteers using handheld camcorders. Announcers sit in a scruffy "studio:" a desk and chair in front of a black backdrop. A committee of locals runs the station, making programming decisions by consensus. "It's a free, independent television station," says Haydar Noori, an electrical engineer who spends his spare time as a technician. "We don't receive any support from anyone."

Meanwhile, Najaf TV broadcasts eight hours a day from a tiny one-kilowatt substation once used to strengthen Baghdad broadcasts. "We cover all of Najaf's problems, the city council elections, the gas shortage," says Ali Abdul Kareem Kashaf al Qeta, the volunteer station manager who fled Iraq after he launched Radio Najaf during the Shiite uprising against Saddam that was brutally crushed in 1991. "We found out early that the problem of water was connected to the electricity problem," he says. "We broadcast images of the destroyed power stations and got people to fix the problem. Now the water is back."

New newspapers include Al Riazy al Jadeed, a sports weekly, and the Baghdad Bulletin, an English-language bimonthly launched by American college students studying in Lebanon. The twice-weekly Al Ahrar was launched with $10,000 by a thirty-six-year-old candy merchant. The twice-weekly Asaa, with a print run of 10,000, is overseen by Adeeb Shabaan, Uday's longtime personal secretary, who had a falling-out with him and was imprisoned in the last months of the regime.

The new publications mostly crib reports from the wires as well as major international and Arabic newspapers. Some of them, though not all, are little more than mouthpieces for political parties and groups that have sprung up. The free, eight-page Communist party paper was among the first to hit Baghdad's streets after Saddam's fall. "It appears the political press is getting in first and gaining advantage," says Mark Pomar, president of IREX, a Washington-based group that has helped train independent media in Eastern Europe and Asia.

The new press remains obsessed with the Saddam era and haunted by his Baath party's thirty-five-year rule. Articles about his misdeeds and mass graves fill the pages. The papers pump out salacious stories about Saddam and his family's troubles and exploits, making them sound like characters in Dynasty rather than fearsome dictators. qusay grabbed $1 billion and 70 billion euros before the war, screamed a headline in Al Adala, a new daily published by the pro-Iranian Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. uday and his mother killed man who introduced him to saddam's second wife, said Al Shams, a new weekly. uday offered $1.5 million to fire editor in chief of jordanian newspaper, said Al Sumer, a highbrow daily published by the Iraqi Media Network. after three years of a secret relationship, woman married saddam after he forced her to divorce her husband, reported Al Resalah, a religious weekly.

The new press also hasn't been shy about publishing negative articles on the motives and methods of the American invasion force, which now numbers nearly 160,000. u.s. and europeans race to win iraq mobile phone contracts, reported Al Ayam. security has become a dream that will never come true, read a headline in al Adala, over an article declaring that Iraq will never have true safety until the Americans leave and a national government takes over. under america's watch, raping, killing, burning and looting, said Al Ahrar.

Despite all the freedom, criticism of the influence and methods of Iraq's religious leaders is still off limits. Many journalists say Iraq remains at heart a traditional, religious country. "We don't have to criticize sacred values, especially in the beginning," says Hamid Ali Alkifaey, a former Iraqi exile journalist.

If the press has refrained from critiquing the political power of the Islamic hierarchy, it has enthusiastically published photographs of scantily clad women that would offend Islamists' cultural sensitivities. Back pages are filled with celebrity gossip and chatter from the Arab world as well as Hollywood. who will be miss universe? asked a headline in Alahali, a new weekly, above a picture of a former Panamanian beauty queen, Justine Pasek, wearing a see-through blouse. egyptian actress chosen to portray saddam's girlfriend in upcoming movie, declared a headline on the back page of Azzaman.

The media explosion will likely abate unless the Iraqi economy -- eroded by twelve years of sanctions and then knocked flat by the war -- quickly picks up and generates advertising revenue, say experts at nonprofit organizations who've rebuilt media in other war-torn countries. "Now we can see a thousands flowers blooming," said Antti Kuusi of the Baltic Media Centre, a Denmark-based organization. "But it won't last, because no media here is able to function profitably."

In addition to money, the newspapers need a legal framework in which to operate. In early June, Iraqi opposition figures and journalist-rights activists gathered in Athens for a forum on an Iraqi media law. "We want to have an independent media," says Hamid Ali Alkifaey, one of the conference's organizers. "And you can't have new media without a new media law that clearly defines the relationship between the press and the government."

Meanwhile, the U.S. authorities in Baghdad were drafting a media "code of conduct" -- including the licensing of broadcast outlets and a possible regulatory board to monitor media. This elicited howls of protest from Iraqi journalists, who called it censorship. At press time, details of the code -- as well as its ultimate fate -- were not available. But the idea, say U.S. officials, is to prevent hate speech or ideas that hinder the development of a civil society. "There's no room for hateful messages that will destabilize the emerging Iraqi democracy," says Mike Furlong.

In addition to the Americans, a handful of international organizations have mobilized to help Iraqi journalists. In late April and early May, representatives from media charities and liberal publications such as The Nation and Salon met in London to coordinate efforts to rebuild Iraq's media, says Rohan Jayasekera, a veteran of reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Sri Lanka, Georgia, and Cyprus. "Of all these countries, Iraq has the resources to rebuild its media in the long run," says Jayasekera. "You have money, education, political participation. You add all that together and it's a great growing environment for independent, professional media."

For now, though, most Iraqi journalists have put aside worries about long-term survival as they dive joyfully into new freedoms and reconnect to their nation's literary past. After graduating from journalism school, Ashtar Ali Yasseri, twenty-five, wrote for al Zawra, a mouthpiece for Uday's journalists' union. After the fall of Saddam, she and her father relaunched Habezbooz, a satirical Baghdad paper last published in 1932. One early issue of the illustrated weekly included a mock interview with Jay Garner, then the Pentagon's top man in Iraq, in which he describes his love of Mosul's kabobs. "This is the best time for this kind of newspaper," says Ali Yasseri. "It's good to make fun of things. It feels good to laugh."

Al Manar has also been relaunched after a thirty-five-year absence, and dedicated to its founder, Aziz Abdel Barakat, the journalism union chief whose execution in 1968 marked the beginning of the Iraqi media's darkest days. The 15,000-circulation daily has ambition, with forty journalists and bureaus in Hilla, Karbala, Najaf, Basra, Kirkuk, and Mosul. Without working phone lines, reporters file stories via courier, says Taha Arif Muhammad, the sprightly sixty-seven-year-old editor for whom Barakat was a mentor. "Some day, we would love to add bureaus in Jordan, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates," he said.

One day in late May, two American soldiers -- most likely from Army civil affairs units -- came by to ask Muhammad what his newspaper needed. "I told them, `We don't want financial support or equipment or any other kind of help,'" he recalls. "`But if you have any news tips, please give them to us.'"