Al-Jazeera Tells
the Truth About War
By
Faisal Bodi
30 March, 2003
Last month, when it became
clear that the US-led drive to war was irreversible, I - like many other
British journalists - relocated to Qatar for a ringside seat. But I
am an Islamist journalist, so while the others bedded down at the £1m
media center at US central command in As-Sayliyah, I found a more humble
berth in the capital Doha, working for the internet arm of al-Jazeera.
And yet, only a week into
the war, I find myself working for the most sought-after news resource
in the world. On March 23, the night the channel screened the first
footage of captured US PoW's, al-Jazeera was the most searched item
on the internet portal, Lycos, registering three times as many hits
as the next item.
I do not mean to brag - people
are turning to us simply because the western media coverage has been
so poor. For although Doha is just a 15-minute drive from central command,
the view of events from here could not be more different. Of all the
major global networks, al-Jazeera has been alone in proceeding from
the premise that this war should be viewed as an illegal enterprise.
It has broadcast the horror of the bombing campaign, the blown-out brains,
the blood-spattered pavements, the screaming infants and the corpses.
Its team of on-the-ground, unembedded correspondents has provided a
corrective to the official line that the campaign is, barring occasional
resistance, going to plan.
Last Tuesday, while western
channels were celebrating a Basra "uprising" which none of
them could have witnessed since they don't have reporters in the city,
our correspondent in the Sheraton there returned a rather flat verdict
of "uneventful" - a view confirmed shortly afterwards by a
spokesman for the opposition Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution
in Iraq. By reporting propaganda as fact, the mainstream media had simply
mirrored the Blair/Bush fantasy that the people who have been starved
by UN sanctions and deformed by depleted uranium since 1991 will greet
them as saviors.
Only hours before the Basra
non-event, one of Iraq's most esteemed Shia authorities, Ayatollah Sistani,
had dented coalition hopes of a southern uprising by reiterating a fatwa
calling on all Muslims to resist the US-led forces. This real, and highly
significant, event went unreported in the west.
Earlier in the week Arab
viewers had seen the gruesome aftermath of the coalition bombing of
"Ansar al-Islam" positions in the north-east of the country.
All but two of the 35 killed were civilians in an area controlled by
a neutral Islamist group, a fact passed over with undue haste in western
reports. And before that, on the second day of the war, most of the
western media reported verbatim central command statements that Umm
Qasr was under "coalition" control - it was not until Wednesday
that al-Jazeera could confirm all resistance there had been pacified.
Throughout the past week,
armed peoples in the west and south have been attacking the exposed
rearguard of coalition positions, while all the time - despite debilitating
sandstorms - western TV audiences have seen little except their steady
advance towards Baghdad. This is not truthful reporting.
There is also a marked difference
when reporting the anger the invasion has unleashed on the Muslim street.
The view from here is that any vestige of goodwill towards the US has
evaporated with this latest aggression, and that Britain has now joined
the US and Israel as a target of this rage.
The British media has condemned
al-Jazeera's decision to screen a 30-second video clip of two dead British
soldiers. This is simple hypocrisy. From the outset of the war, the
British media has not balked at showing images of Iraqi soldiers either
dead or captured and humiliated.
Amid the battle for hearts
and minds in the most information-controlled war in history, one measure
of the importance of those American PoW pictures and the images of the
dead British soldiers is surely the sustained "shock and awe"
hacking campaign directed at aljazeera.net since the start of the war.
As I write, the al-Jazeera website has been down for three days and
few here doubt that the provenance of the attack is the Pentagon. Meanwhile,
our hosting company, the US-based DataPipe, has terminated our contract
after lobbying by other clients whose websites have been brought down
by the hacking.
It's too early for me to
say when, or indeed if, I will return to my homeland. So far this war
has progressed according to a near worst-case scenario. Iraqis have
not turned against their tormentor. The southern Shia regard the invasion
force as the greater Satan. Opposition in surrounding countries is shaking
their regimes. I fear there remains much work to be done.
Faisal Bodi is a senior
editor for aljazeera.net