Target: The Media

by Karen Button

On September 13 two more journalists were murdered in Iraq.

Freelance photographer Safa Isma’il Enad was in a Baghdad print shop when armed men entered and asked for him by name. When he answered, the 31 year-old was gunned down and taken away by car. According to the Iraq-based Journalistic Freedoms Observatory, his body was later found east of Baghdad.

In a separate incident, 56 year-old Hadi Anawi al-Jabouri’s car was riddled with bullets as he was driving in the governate of Diyala. In addition to being a journalist, al-Jabouri was also the representative of the Iraqi Journalists Syndicate.

And on September 11 Abdel Karim al-Rubai, editor of the government daily Al-Sabah was gunned down while on his way to work. Al-Rubai had received death threats two weeks prior from a militia when he wrote an editorial that the group resented.

Together, their deaths bring the total number of journalists and media workers killed in Iraq since the Anglo-American invasion of 2003 to 107. Iraq is the most dangerous place in the world for a journalist to work. Especially if that journalist is an Iraqi. Sixty-five of the 107 dead are Iraqi. The US occupation of Iraq is also the deadliest conflict on record.

The US-based non-partisan organizations Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Freedom Forum (FF) both maintain lists of past conflicts. The Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan also kept track of journalist’s deaths during the Vietnam war. Following is a breakdown of the heaviest tolls and some comparative conflicts:
• Afghanistan: 2001-2006 / CPJ lists 10 journalists killed.
• Kosovo: 1999-2001 / CPJ lists 7 killed.
• Algeria: 1993-1996 / CPJ lists 58 killed.
• First Iraq war: 1991 / CPJ lists 4 killed. (All were killed after the official end of the war but died in the conflict in the immediate aftermath.)
• Balkans:1991-1995 / CPJ lists 36 killed.
• Central American conflicts: 1979-1989 / FF lists 89 killed.
• Argentina: 1976-1983 / FF lists 98 killed.
• Vietnam: 1955-1975 / FF lists 66 killed. 1962-1975 / The Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan lists 71 killed.
• Korean War: FF lists 17 killed.
• World War II: FF lists 68 killed.

Kidnapping is also an ever present worry; since 2003, 41 journalists have been kidnapped in Iraq. Of those, 32 have been released and seven killed. Two are still being held.

Besides the constant threat of violence against individuals, Iraq’s media is under ever more tightening restrictions.

It was under Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority that the first free speech restrictions were imposed. Those regulations were used when US-led occupation forces shut down cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr’s popular paper, al-Hawza, in March 2004. The paper was charged with inciting violence against US and other coalition forces.

Continuing the restrictions, this past July the US-backed Iraqi government announced it would impose emergency laws on the media should they criticize Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s official security plans or “offend Iraqi sensibilities.” Rather, al-Maliki urged the media to be “positive and cooperative with the state.”

Just a week ago he followed through on that threat when he ordered police to shut down the satellite channel Al-Arabiya’s Baghdad offices for one month. Though no evidence was produced, al-Maliki charged the station with inciting “sectarian violence and war in Iraq” through its news reports. The Allawi government’s July 2004 decision to ban satellite news station Al-Jazeera from Baghdad remains in place to this day. Instead, the station must broadcast out of Kurdistan in northern Iraq.

In another crackdown on free press, both the managing editor and editor-in-chief of the now defunct Sada Wasit will face at least10 years in prison and heavy fines if convicted of defamation from three articles written in 2005, in which local police and judicial officials were criticized. Notably, the editor, Ahmed Mutair Abbas, was on his way to the trial when he and his car disappeared on September 10.

Media in Iraq are the target of ever-increasing government suppression; their reporters the target of unbelievable violence.

Freedom of speech, long-touted in the U.S. as a litmus for democracy, has never been allowed in Iraq under U.S. occupation. Instead continues the long pattern of media suppression that also existed under Saddam Hussein. The difference? The violence. Now, 107 journalists are dead.