There are still those amongst us who assume the participants in this war in Iraq are America and Britain on the one side, and Iraq on the other.
Wrong! The real war in Iraq is that of the journalists.
They are scuttling all over the countryside, desperately seeking the ultimate daily scoop. News conferences held both by the Americans and the Iraqis don’t satisfy them. They want to see bloody pictures, stories with a human touch and, if possible, perhaps an extra bonus such as a plant producing weapons of mass destruction. Israelis feasted over the scoop of an Israeli journalist, according to which such a plant was located in A-Najaf.
Yet reporting from the field is unlike reporting from the comfort of one’s office. Sometimes it’s even dangerous.
The general assumption is that citizens of a country under attack will greet the media with open arms. This occurs in the Palestinian territories and it usually happens in Iraq. Yet a reporter from the daily newspaper Al-Hayyat determines that not all the Iraqis understand the media’s function.
Television, as far as they are concerned, comes in second place. Hunger comes first. Sixty foreign journalists, some of whom were Arabs, spent a terror-stricken night between Sunday and Monday, after some of them went missing, their fate unknown. This group of journalists had been spending the past few days on the border with Kuwait, near the small towns of ‘Safwan and Al-Jubayr, south of Ba’sra.
The journalists who went missing, and were later rescued by British forces, recounted that Iraqi residents from the town of Al-Zubayr asked them to come into the town, where they would be able to see and report on the wounded. A group of Canadian journalists fell for the bait and entered the town. This mistake cost them their cars and several hours of being forced to sit in a house, where they were incarcerated by the luring residents.
Despite their release, even when recounting the event to a group of journalists they were still clearly unnerved. Bullets fired onto the British army post forced them to flee to another post further south. They were then ordered not to use satellite telephones, not to turn on headlights, and not even to smoke, for fear of being spotted by the Iraqis.
At dawn, while the journalists escorted army forces on their way near ‘Safwan and A-Zubayr, they encountered bitter Iraqi residents shouting for food, who tried to stone the vehicles.
Despite the relatively easy accessibility to the war zone, the journalists covering it are clearly aware that the “PRESS” sign on the car doesn’t ensure their safety. Being a journalist now demands new skills: agility (when ducking bullets) and swiftness (when fleeing an angry crowd). Perhaps the time has come to offer them crash courses in military service, since clearly the days when a journalist only needed good writing skills are over.
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Yaniv Berman is an Arabist with The Media Line.