Today, when our planet is “mined” by countless conflicts between groups, between states and even between cultural spheres, we have an enormous need for a “peace journalism” that gives us keys to understand these conflicts, offers us the elements to grasp the contradictions they reflect, and suggests ways of thinking about how to transform and transcend them. For it must be admitted that when it comes to covering a conflict, what we have at present, especially in the mainstream media, is a “war journalism” that confuses “conflict” with “violence” and reports, alas, only the symptoms – that is, death and destruction – taking no interest in either the causes or the means of healing.
At the beginning of the last decade of the past century, the war against Iraq (1991) revealed the role of the media as a formidable “weapon of war”. CNN’s coverage of “Desert Storm” was the textbook example of slanted information at the service of the Pentagon, charged with spreading the concept of a “surgical war”. At the beginning of this century, the wars against Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) confirmed this role and reinforced it with the appearance of the “embedded” journalist – that is, one who is subordinated, accredited and integrated into the military apparatus.
But these first wars of the twenty-first century, waged by the United States and its allies, also revealed that CNN and Fox News no longer held the monopoly on information about armed conflicts. New media demonstrated their ability to present an “other” point of view. This is notably the case of the Qatari channel Al Jazeera which – to paraphrase Johan Galtung (Reporting Conflict) – while CNN was reporting on the dispatch of missiles and bombs, was reporting on their arrival on the ground and on the massive suffering caused by attacks that were not as surgical as we were led to believe.
Naturally, the US administration did not appreciate this unexpected media competition. It was disturbed by images that gave another description of the reality of wars waged in the name of the fight against terrorism, and that damaged the image of an American army liberating the Afghan and Iraqi peoples. Thus in 2001, in the midst of the invasion of Afghanistan, Al Jazeera drew Washington’s wrath and its Kabul office was bombed by the Americans. In 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, it was the Baghdad office that suffered a similar attack, killing one of the channel’s correspondents. Furious at finding that he could not control the flow of images coming out of Iraq, the then US Deputy Secretary of Defense, the influential Paul Wolfowitz, declared on Fox News at the end of July 2003 that Al Jazeera was “endangering the lives of American troops”. According to the British newspaper the Daily Mirror of 22 November 2005, George W. Bush even contemplated bombing Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha during a meeting with Tony Blair at the White House in April 2004.
It is in this context of a war on journalism that will not bow to the will of the US administration that we must place the arrest in Peshawar in 2001 of the journalist Sami El Haj, who was doing his work as a reporter for Al Jazeera, his detention at Bagram and then his transfer to the sinister Guantanamo Bay camp. He would spend seven years in this lawless place of dehumanisation – seven long years in isolation in a cramped cell, punctuated by numerous sessions of torture, frequent scenes of humiliation and repeated hunger strikes – before being released on 1 May 2008 in poor health, without ever having been charged, let alone tried.
At the ceremony held at Al Jazeera’s headquarters three weeks ago in honour of Sami El Haj, he stated that he had left Guantanamo Bay – where the conditions of detention drove some detainees to suicide and others to madness – firmly determined to fight with all his strength for the release not only of dozens of his fellow detainees, but also of the 27,000 victims held arbitrarily in various secret prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, and for the definitive closure of these new gulags. It is in this spirit that Sami El Haj is in Geneva this week, invited by the Alkarama Foundation for Human Rights for an awareness-raising tour of UN bodies and human rights NGOs. May this visit enlighten us about the nature and the views of these orange-clad individuals whom, for years, people sought to present to us as monsters threatening the free world.
Abbas Aroua, 27 June 2008
