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> 戦争３１ > 683.html
★阿修羅♪
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レバノンのThe Daily Star On Lineがまとめた、アラブ各国メディアの一連のジャーナリスト殺害に関する見解。一致して謀殺。
http://www.dailystar.com.lb
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/10_04_03/art11.asp
Newspaper headlines reflect the widespread conviction in the Arab world that Tuesday’s series of attacks by US forces on journalists in Baghdad was no accident, but part of a deliberate attempt to prevent the other side of the story of the American blitz on the Iraqi capital from reaching the outside world
“America shells journalists to prevent them from exposing its massacres in Baghdad,” reads a front-page banner in the pan-Arab daily Al-Quds al-Arabi.
Or as the Lebanese daily Al-Mustaqbal puts it: “Invaders cross Baghdad bridges - and assassinate the eyewitnesses.”
The Saudi-run pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat highlights the subsequent deployment of US forces in a “cordon to silence the Arab satellite channels” that have provided the most vivid coverage of the horrific human toll and physical damage inflicted on Iraq’s capital by three weeks of aerial and ground bombardment.
Another Beirut daily, An-Nahar, proclaims a “Black Tuesday for the press in Baghdad,” following the death of three journalists and the wounding of five others when their premises were hit by American shells or missiles.
Egypt’s Al-Ahram emphasizes the Arab Journalists Union’s condemnation of the “deliberate shelling of the journalists’ center in the Iraqi capital by American forces.”
Many Arab commentators see it as no coincidence that all three foreign media bases in the Iraqi capital - the Palestine Hotel and the offices of the Al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi satellite TV channels - were targeted simultaneously ahead of what is expected to be the final phase of the bloody American takeover of Baghdad.
“The bombardment of the Abu Dhabi and Al-Jazeera channels, their correspondents, and other Arab and Western reporters, was aimed at muzzling the truth,” the UAE daily Al-Khaleej says in its main editorial.
For 20 days, they have been exposing the cruelty of the invasion and the falsehood of America’s claims to be waging a clean war, which is sparing civilians and aimed at “liberating” the Iraqi people. “So they had to be stopped by all means,” it says, “so as to allow the invaders to get away with even worse in the days to come, without anyone on this Earth knowing.”
The Americans will have to commit a “massacre” if they are to achieve their goals in Iraq, “hence the need to switch off the lights, all the lights, to avoid further scandals,” Al-Khaleej claims.
The UAE daily notes that the targeting of journalists in their clearly identifiable workplaces is universally considered to be a war crime, all the more repugnant in this case because it was aimed at suppressing the documentation of the succession of war crimes that the American invading forces have been committing against the civilian population. “It was a warning,” it says, “and the aggressors will not flinch from following it up in order to enable them to conceal what is being perpetrated against Iraq and its people.”
Arab newspapers report Al-Jazeera’s decision to withdraw its correspondents from Iraq following the US air raid against its Baghdad bureau in which reporter Tareq Ayyoub was killed. The channel’s correspondent in the northern city of Mosul was asked to vacate his office by the staff of an adjacent hospital for fear that it would be targeted.
Although the channel has stopped just short of formally accusing the Americans of intentionally attacking it, Al-Jazeera newscaster Mohammed Kreishan writes in Al-Quds al-Arabi that the raid on the Baghdad bureau “was certainly not a mistake but deliberate and premeditated.”
Coworkers who watched as a US warplane circled low over the building before closing in and firing two missiles at it were left in no doubt whatsoever about that, he writes. This was confirmed when soon afterward the nearby Abu Dhabi TV office - also situated on a prime location by the Tigris, which enabled the two channels to provide exceptional coverage of the assault on Baghdad - was also hit.
Both had huge and highly conspicuous signs on their roofs and walls identifying them as TV bureaus, and details and maps of their location had been submitted to the Americans, who were also well aware of the presence of the journalists in the Palestine Hotel.
“It was certainly no mistake, but it was deemed necessary to silence all those irritating voices and blot out all those embarrassing images, which exposed American lies and made a mockery of the reports filed by the scores of ‘embedded’ journalists covering the battles from behind American and British tanks,” Kreishan writes. “Clearly, what is required is a massacre without witnesses in Iraq, and particularly in Baghdad.”
Kreishan recalls the “precedent” set by the Americans during their assault on Afghanistan, when they flattened the Al-Jazeera bureau in Kabul with four missiles (one of which didn’t explode), an incident for which no explanation was ever offered. During the current war, they have repeatedly riled at any media coverage that did not toe the US line, justify American actions, or meet criteria of “acceptability” that “render meaningless the ‘freedom’ they are intent on enforcing on Iraq.”
Kreishan concludes: “It was certainly no mistake. It was cold-blooded and premeditated assassination of all who dare provide a narrative that differs to a greater or lesser extent from what the latter-day Rome decrees.”
Jordanian newspapers are meanwhile filled with tributes to the slain Tareq Ayyoub, a popular journalist whose dedication and courage has been widely praised by grieving colleagues in Jordan.
The leading semi-official Amman daily Al-Rai eulogizes him as a “martyr” of the journalistic profession, who always refused to be co-opted or intimidated, and gave his life in the line of duty trying to convey the truth about the consequences of a war the Americans are intent on sanitizing.
In the Saudi daily Al-Watan, Suleiman al-Okayli comments that “while in previous wars, journalists have been casualties of crossfire on the battlefield, what happened yesterday - and previously in Kabul - was manifest targeting of journalists while in their offices or bedrooms.” That is tantamount to “intellectual terrorism,” he says, “and it is regrettable that its source should be a nation that claims it is engaged in a worldwide war on terror.”
In Al-Watan’s Omani namesake, Zuhair Majed writes that the attacks on journalists “show the US is either desperate to muzzle the media - in anticipation that the impending task of US forces is going to be extremely dirty and lead to massacres in Baghdad - or else it cannot take any more of its coverage and the role it has been playing since the start of the war.”
He says journalists in Baghdad will inevitably become much more cautious about their coverage after being singled out for attack, especially the Arab TV reporters who have opened the world’s eyes to the human cost of the invasion. But he appeals to the journalists who stay on in Baghdad not to be intimidated, and to continue reporting the truth and standing by their Iraqi brethren.
An-Nahar’s Sahar Baassiri remarks that the US administration is applying its dictum, “you’re either with us or against us,” to the media.
She writes that the assertion that the Americans hit the three media sites accidentally or that they were unaware that journalists were based in them are impossible to believe, and the subsequent claim that they were merely responding to firing that was directed at their troops was refuted by many witnesses
“So were they deliberately targeted? Probably. America’s previous conduct suggests so. They were targeted because they convey the other image of the war, the image America does not want to show or be shown. The only permissible image is that depicted by the journalists ‘embedded’ with US forces, who convey it in exactly the manner those forces want,” she says.
So it was not surprising that the Pentagon’s spokesman should try to justify the attacks by declaring that the US only knows the whereabouts of the journalists accompanying its forces, and won’t vouch for the safety of other reporters.
“His forces recognize only the journalists who are with them, just as the US administration recognizes only whoever is with it,” Baassiri remarks. “Everyone who is not with is against it, and is a target.”
Commenting on the Arab satellite TV coverage that has so annoyed the Americans, editor in chief Joseph Samaha observes in the Lebanese daily As-Safir that over the past three weeks, the audience ratings of competing Arabic channels have been directly proportionate to the anti-war tone of their coverage of developments in Iraq. People have been drawn to the stations that have been doing most to highlight the scope of death and destruction caused by US forces and give the Iraqi side of the story. The channels, for their part, have been pitching their coverage to people’s emotions, “and Arab emotions are with Iraq.”
This is also why Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed al-Saeed Sahhaf has become such a popular figure in the Arab world recently. People don’t necessarily believe he tells the truth, and may find his manner crude and demagogic. But they see in him a courageous figure, present on the battlefield, who tries to rally support and raise morale, and “gives a face to the resistance the Iraqis have shown,” thus fulfilling a “psychological need” among many Arabs.
“His disappearance has come to signify danger,” and he has been helped as much by the Arab public’s “yearning to believe him” as by the many blunders America’s propaganda machine has committed.
Samaha adds that while Sahhaf’s popularity reflects the Arabs’ overwhelming opposition to the war, Al-Jazeera’s popularity in the Arab world obviously far exceeds that of “its owner.” This raises a question which US policymakers must have asked themselves: “Why has the friendly Qatari government chosen a … line for Al-Jazeera that conflicts with Doha’s line?” The answer is clear. “Al-Jazeera is the veil that is supposed to cover the shame of the relationship with Washington. That is why the US has no qualms about marketing the Qatari political model, while at the same time subjecting Al-Jazeera to persecution to the level of premeditated murder.”
This, says Samaha, helps illustrate the fundamental dilemma facing the “war party” in the United States. “It has to choose between two things: either a democratic Arab world opposed to Washington’s policies, or else a repressive Arab world that is browbeaten into supporting those policies. But the idea of a democratic Arab world that supports the United States is a flight of fantasy.”
Members of the “war party” argue that it is possible to “impose democracy and friendship toward America by force of arms” on the Arab world, citing the post-war experiences of Japan and Germany. But these models, in countries whose peoples developed an overwhelming sense that they were being punished for initiating aggression, don’t apply to an Arab world that feels it has been constantly on the receiving end of foreign aggression for the past century and a half.
In Iraq’s case, Arabs see the lack of democracy as having been the main reason why resistance to the US invasion was not stronger. And the model of the East European states that embraced the US and capitalism after being freed from Soviet tutelage is even less applicable to the region, Samaha reasons.
“By virtue of its definition of its interests in the Middle East, Washington has put itself at odds with Arab liberation.” Far from upholding those interests, democracy becomes the best way of challenging them and the “policy of subjugation” that the US is pursuing in a throwback to old-style colonialism.
With the attacks on the TV reporters in Baghdad, Samaha says the American “war party” demonstrated its resolve to make the war invisible, and thus disengage public opinion from it. “This is a bit strange for a war that is being waged in the guise of a ‘democratic revolution.’” It affirms that the struggle for democracy will be left to those forces in the Arab world that draw a radical distinction between the region’s interests and those of the US, “especially as seen from the perspective of the alliance of hard-liners in America and Israel.”
“Those interests cannot be worked at in broad daylight. They can only be worked at if the screens are blacked out, and the Arabs are plunged into prolonged darkness.”
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