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British television has a moral duty to
show this shocking film
2.7.2006
By Nick Cohen
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Last Monday, Ms Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, the
impressively titled High Representative to the UK of
the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq, hosted a
reception in Whitehall. To anyone who remembered
Saddam Hussein's al-Anfal extermination campaign,
her little party with the usual nibbles and warm
white wine was a sign of an extraordinary
transformation.
The Baathists had gassed and bombed tens of
thousands of Iraqi Kurds while an indifferent world
shrugged its shoulders. 'I will kill them all with
chemical weapons,' declared Ali Hassan al-Majid -
'Chemical Ali' - as the genocide began in 1987. 'Who
is going to say anything? The international
community? Fuck them.'
Almost 20 years on and look how the Iraqi Kurds have
come back. Ms Rahman was every inch the modern
ambassador: elegant, knowledgeable, funny. She
talked of the possibility of investment in
Kurdistan, the one part of Iraq which has seen off
'the insurgents' from al-Qaeda and the Baath party,
and of tourists coming to the mountains and oil
prospectors to the plains.
The slaughters of the past seemed a distant memory,
but they haven't gone away. How to cope with war
crimes and how to punish the criminals are as hard
questions for the Kurds now as in the Eighties. They
are also the subject of a documentary, Saddam's Road
to Hell, by veteran reporter Gwynne Roberts. TV
stations in 20 countries have broadcast it, but you
haven't seen it in Britain and, maybe the way
British TV is going, you may find it increasingly
difficult to see documentaries like it.
Roberts and his colleagues focus on a relatively
small massacre that anticipated the coming genocide.
In 1983, the Baathists took away 800 men and boys of
the Barzani clan as a collective punishment for the
Kurdish revolt against Saddam.
They murdered them all. Everyone knew it, except the
relatives who to this day cling on to the hope that
somehow their husbands and sons will stumble back to
their villages. |
Ms Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, Kurdistan Regional
Government Representative to the UK
Former dictator Saddam Hussein
Photo : AFP |
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The film follows Mohammed Ihsan, Kurdistan's Human
Rights Minister, as he sets off in an armoured
convoy through the maelstrom of postwar Iraq to find
the bodies of the dead, a case for the prosecution
in the trial of Saddam. We see backstreet shops
where, for a very high price, lawyers looking for
evidence can buy documents looted from secret police
archives, skeletons being dug out of mass graves in
the desert and snuff videos of torturers blowing up
prisoners or throwing them from rooftops. All the
time, like a low hum in the background, the threat
of assassination hangs over the investigators.
It is very good film, but Channel 4 failed to show
it. The Middle East being the way it is, the Kurds
have a conspiracy theory. Channel 4 is filled with
Rory Bremner types, they say: rich, Western
liberals, uncomfortable with crimes against humanity
they can't blame on Tony Blair or George W Bush.
QED. C4 has suppressed it to maintain its
unjustifiable self-righteousness.
I tried to say that their logic made no sense, and
not only because Channel 4 swore blind to me that,
after months of delays, it will put it on in
November. The point the Kurds miss is that censors
care about news. They worry about its effects on
viewers and believe it matters. Opponents of the war
may not want to look at modern fascism in its
Baathist or Islamist guises, but they could make an
excellent film about the treatment of prisoners at
Guantanamo Bay, for instance.
Unfortunately, research from the University of
Westminster on what factual programmes make it to
the screen found that commercial television didn't
so much want to censor news as ignore it completely.
A whopping 75 per cent of ITV1's new factual
programmes filmed outside the UK consisted of - er -
Celebrity Love Island, set in Fiji.
As for Channel 4, it was the only station 'to have
consistently reduced its factual international
programming since 1998-99. In 2005, there was almost
one-third less factual international programming on
Channel 4 than in 2000-01'.
Because it counted new documentaries and didn't look
at news bulletins, the results are unfair on Channel
4 News in particular. But the decline is still
there. Increasingly, what documentaries TV
executives want to make follow the gruesome examples
of Fox News and Michael Moore, programmes that
confirm rather than confront the audience's
prejudices.
Look again at Saddam's Road to Hell or, rather,
allow me to look at it again on your behalf. All its
facts have been triple-checked. The producers
present other points of view. Far from being a
celebrity hack, the reporter shrinks into the
background and allows Iraqis to speak for
themselves. I hope Channel 4 sticks to its word and
shows it, and not only to quash the Kurds'
suspicions. This is an example of a threatened form
of television journalism that we will miss more than
we know if we allow it to die.
While C4 dithers, Saddam's Road to Hell is available
at
www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/iraq501/video_index.html
observer co.uk
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