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Propagandistan: Iraqi Kurdistan is Free,
but its Media sure isn't
6.4.2006
By David Axe |
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Despite the demand for news
in Iraqi Kurdistan, there is only one private
newspaper: Hawlati (www.hawlati.com). All other
media in Kurdistan is funded by the political
parties, which these days are synonymous with the
Kurdistan Regional Government.
During the struggle against Saddam Hussein's regime,
Kurdish peshmerga fighters sought refuge in the
mountains surrounding the northern Iraqi cities of
Erbil and Sulaymaniyah. From here the peshmerga
launched raids against Iraqi forces. Often
accompanying them were the guerilla propagandists of
the dominant Kurdish political parties, the
Kurdistan Democratic Party, or K.D.P., and the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or P.U.K.
Plying the countryside with crude newsletters, the
propagandists, or "mountain journalists," were a
decisive force in rallying Kurds to the insurgent
parties. "The Kurdish people at that time was
confronting a giant tyrant," says former mountain
journalist Dilshad Mustafa, now editor-in-chief of
Khabat, a K.D.P.-funded newspaper in Erbil. The
journalists' goal, Mustafa says, was "to instigate
[the Kurdish people] to do their national duty" — to
join them in the mountains resisting the government.
A decade after the Kurds won their fight for
autonomy, mountain journalism is no more. The
guerillas are now family men with nine-to-five jobs
in Kurdistan's burgeoning economy. Their officers
are politicians. And the mountain journalists have
become the editors and reporters of the region's
expanding media.
For many of these former propagandists, the
transition to true journalism has been a hard one.
Nor has the governing K.D.P.-P.U.K. alliance been
eager to surrender its propaganda machinery in the
interest of free media. Despite Kurdistan's steady
march towards democracy, its media largely remains a
function of its government — and anything but
democratic.
Still, today's "city journalism" is vastly different
from mountain journalism, Mustafa says. "The
newspapers issued in the mountains were not reaching
the hands of big numbers of people."
Now there are dozens of Iraqi Kurdish newspapers,
the largest with a daily circulation of 7,000 — not
bad for a region of just five million where many
people are illiterate. Considering the diversity of
regional satellite TV news programs and news radio
and the large number of Kurdish magazines — not to
mention the affiliated Web sites of all these media
in a country where internet usage is exploding —
Kurdistan is awash in news.
Despite the demand for news, there is only one
private newspaper in the region: Hawlati, based in
Sulaymaniyah with offices in Erbil. All other media
in Kurdistan is funded by the political parties,
which these days are synonymous with the Kurdistan
Regional Government, or K.R.G.
The government's control is hard to overstate.
Education and health care are free. Many Kurds,
including widows and veterans, subsist entirely on
government handouts. But big brother exacts a toll.
Police, peshmerga and Kurdish Iraqi Army units, all
of which answer to the government, maintain a
constant presence on the streets and man checkpoints
on every major road. There are Kurdish government
minders on the staffs of every public institution,
from hospitals to schools. The biggest publisher in
Kurdistan is the Ministry of Culture, which by way
of an antiquated press prints volumes of fiction,
nonfiction and poetry and dozens of magazine titles.
With the exception of Hawlati, all newspapers are
funded by the government and charge only a nominal
price. But they too answer to the parties.
Which seems to contradict the government's official
policy on press freedom.
"We have no censorship," says Sami Shorish,
Kurdistan's minister of culture. "Freedom to us is a
very precious value because we have been oppressed
for hundreds of years. We provide freedom to the
media provided the media does not act in a
slanderous way."
The problem is that "slander" is so vaguely defined
that it could mean almost anything. It's an
open-ended prohibition, and in a country with no
Miranda rights and little sense of due process, that
can be a very dangerous thing for journalists.
Karwan Abdula, a former Communist and editor of the
Kurdish government-funded Caravan literary magazine
says that slander could include specific criticism
of party officials. "We publish articles critical of
political thought, sometimes critical of the K.R.G.
itself," he says. "But we're not naming names. We do
not allow slanderous articles in the magazine."
Hawlati editors say the slander law was responsible
for three of its reporters being jailed recently for
covering controversial stories. One was arrested for
criticizing Kurdish government officials over
privacy laws after a racy bootleg DVD of some local
girls dancing surfaced at Sulaymaniyah markets.
Another was nabbed while investigating a medical
warehouse fire, also in Sulaymaniyah, that some
claim was deliberately set to cover the tracks of a
Kurdish government minister who'd been stealing
supplies to sell on the black market. A third
Hawlati journalist was arrested in Dohuk while
reporting on a story even Hawlati's editors won't
talk about on the record. All three jailed reporters
are out on bail awaiting trial.
The day-to-day consequences of working for
Kurdistan's only independent newspaper aren't always
so dramatic. The most frustrating is that most
officials — from the lowliest cop to ministers and
members of the regional assembly — refuse to talk to
any media not affiliated with the government.
"We are not dealt with equally," says Talib
Mohammed, a Hawlati reporter.
Najat Ahmed, the most senior Hawlati editor in Erbil,
says the government is waging a campaign to
undermine the newspaper.
"Both the P.U.K. and the K.D.P. are trying hard to
penetrate the Hawlati staff and lure, even bribe,
our staff to stop working for the newspaper," says
Faisal Khalil, also a Hawlati editor in Erbil. "We
have a number of staff who have quit. They even took
the [office] tea-maker with them."
What's more, Ahmed and Khalil say that they promptly
fire any staffers they suspect might be bending
under the government's assault. Ahmed says he has
seen the staff turn over completely three times in
only a few years. As a result of external pressure
and internal vigilance, the atmosphere at Hawlati is
the same you'd expect at a besieged fortress.
Even the oppressive work environment won't deter
him, Mohammed says. "In the very beginning I came to
the realization that government newspapers cannot
cover many of society's problems." That, he adds, is
why he fights.
Kurdish government-funded newspapers justify their
cozy relationships saying that's the only way to do
business in Kurdistan. Besides, Mustafa says,
Hawlati has "many articles that are critical of the
K.R.G."
"We have a page called the open page where writers
can shoot their own ideas. It is not commanded that
all writers should reflect the ideas of the K.D.P.,"
he says.
But the prohibition of slander stands and no
criticism of the government can be too specific.
Naming names is a no-no.
Shorish says that too much press freedom would
jeopardize Kurdistan's security by undermining the
government. "You have to take into consideration
that currently the Middle East is a cradle of
terrorism. We give freedom to media but not to
terrorists."
Asked if the security climate encourages
self-censorship, Shorish says no. "I haven't felt it
in an excessive way. I've felt it with Arabs, but
not with Kurds."
For some, the government's stranglehold on the
regional press has unsettling historical precedents.
Sharzad Farman Jacob, a Christian Kurd and former
freedom fighter who spent ten years imprisoned at
Abu Ghraib back when it was one of Hussein's torture
pits, recalls that even in prison, the Baath regime
had a coordinated propaganda machine. The only books
allowed inside prison walls were from Baathist
publishers. The only newspapers prisoners could get
their hands on were state-owned. Every time that
Hussein addressed the nation on TV, all the
prisoners were ushered into halls and made to watch,
sometimes for hours at a time. When Jacob was freed
in 1995, he vowed that he would fight for a Kurdish
government that did things differently than the
Baathists did. "I'd like everybody to work opposite
to how the Baath party was working here."
Kurdish government officials stress that press
freedom is important to Kurdistan's development. But
few seem to understand that money means control, and
in Kurdish media, the government controls all the
money.
"[A lack of] education is the greatest obstacle to
true democracy in Kurdistan," Mufti says, coming as
close as any Kurdish government big wig to admitting
that the region needs a freer press.
Confesses Shorish, "It's not easy to have this
experiment of having a free media."
www.worldpress.org
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