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Letter From Iraq, Starting from Scratch
4.3.2011
By Jackie Spinner |
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March
4, 2011
A university newspaper in Iraq's Kurdistan
region includes both Kurds and Arabs on the staff
and strives to bring straight-down-the-middle
journalism to a country where that has long been
hard to find.
Arez Hussen Ahmed never tells the whole story,
preferring not to disclose the specifics of how he
got into college. He reveals only, and reluctantly,
that he worked at the American University of Iraq-Sulaimani
before he enrolled in October 2008, before he became
one of the school's top academic performers, before
he went on to lead a staff of 50 students at the
first independent student newspaper in Iraq.
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Joshua Mitchell, the chancellor of the American
university at the time, encouraged Ahmed to apply,
telling him that he could be anything he wanted to
be. It didn't matter where he came from or how much
money he had. It didn't matter about his political
party affiliation, which in the Kurdistan region of
Iraq, where the university is located, determines
virtually everything. It only mattered that Ahmed
was smart and willing to work hard.
Ahmed, now 19 and majoring in international studies,
may not be ready to embrace it, but his
rags-to-riches saga is the story of the AUI-S Voice,
a scrappy bimonthly newspaper with an excess of
spelling and grammatical errors as well as an
abundance of ambition. The student newspaper is
attempting to do what few professional media outlets
have been able to accomplish since the fall of
Saddam Hussein: to bring Arab and Kurdish
journalists together in a politically and ethnically
divided Iraq with no alliance to any political party
or religious sect, with no allegiance to anything at
all except fairness and accuracy.
"It has not been an easy experience to be a
journalist, but I have made great strides in a few
months," Ahmed says. "I experienced being the head
of a newspaper, dealing with a large staff,
balancing my studies and work, improving my writing
and feeling what leaders feel when they face crises
and problems."
The
AUI-S Voice
published its first issue on January 31, 2010, with
coverage of the university's first MBA graduation,
news of an environmental sciences major being
developed and an editorial arguing against a
Facebook ban on campus. I was the founder and first
faculty adviser of the Voice. Nothing in my career
as a journalist -- and yet, paradoxically,
everything -- had prepared me for this experience:
starting a newspaper at an upstart university in a
fractured country, with limited press laws outside
our campus walls and a government that a Kurdish
writer described as a fledgling dictatorship rather
than a fledgling democracy.
Mitchell and the provost, John Agresto, had great
concerns about the student newspaper venture. The
university had tried to launch a newspaper the year
before, but political parties tried to control it
through the students, and the administration
immediately shut it down. AUI-S was trying hard to
remain independent itself, and the university was
vulnerable to such overtures. It accepts most of its
funds from key political and business leaders in the
region while trying to remain independent of their
influences.
Like the rest of Iraq, Kurdistan has a highly
partisan press that dominates the information flow.
A couple of newspapers are semi-independent, but
objectivity, or even the pursuit of objectivity, is
hard to find. In the first few months of publication
of the Voice, Zardasht Osman, a 23-year-old student
at the University of Salahaddin, was kidnapped,
tortured and murdered. A journalist, Osman had
written scathing articles about government leaders
in Kurdistan.
This was the climate in which we launched the AUI-S
Voice.
To make certain that students who joined the paper
understood how serious we were about staying
neutral, I wrote a detailed policy manual based on
the best practices of a number of college newspapers
in the United States.
The Voice prohibits students in political party
leadership positions from overseeing the staff;
accepting financial contributions from political
parties; and publishing stories or editorials about
political issues, a rule that we implemented, in
part, to teach the students that they could not
simply crib details about events at which they were
not present.
As adviser, I reviewed all material that went into
the Voice, something that does not happen at most
U.S. student newspapers because of the threat of
liability for the institution once the adviser has
seen or edited stories prior to publication. I
didn't have such legal concerns, and as most of the
students hadn't previously been exposed to a free
press or to good standards of journalism -- or to
any standards of journalism, for that matter -- I
often acted as the heavy, particularly when it came
to security issues.
The first editor-in-chief of the Voice initially
accepted my involvement but later balked, quitting
shortly after I interceded in connection with a
story in which he had called a professor without
telling him the reason for the conversation, used
quotes from that conversation to pit the professor
against the dean of students and then wrote a story
under someone else's byline. The consequences of
such journalism at our university could break a
fragile peace between Kurdish and Arab students,www.ekurd.netwho
grew up in an Iraq under Saddam and were told that
they were ethnic enemies. AUI-S, the only liberal
arts university in Iraq, was the first when it
opened in 2007 to encourage Kurdish and Arab
students to study together, to celebrate their
identity as Iraqis.
Our own editorial staff was made up of Kurds and
Arabs, and included a woman as photo editor.
"I was the only female editor, which I consider as a
foundation to making a difference in others'
perspectives about the female role in the
community," says Hazha Ahmed, 19, the newspaper's
first photo editor. "We all started from zero and
had no skill of how to work in a newspaper, but with
the passage of time and engaging more with the work,
I learned that we are capable of managing a
newspaper that achieved many accomplishments."
The Voice editors began to understand the
responsibility and consequences of the pen in an
atmosphere that, fortunately, many U.S. college
students will never experience. Their journalism got
better as the weeks went by. They tackled such
issues as the school's attendance policy,
distribution of financial aid and lack of Internet
access in the dormitories, which many students
insisted should be rectified because of the distance
between the dorms and the rest of the campus.
Baker Alhashimi, the Voice's first editorial page
editor, was charged with guarding against undue
influence from political parties and religious
organizations, somewhat of a first for the Iraqi
press. As the nephew of Iraq's vice president,
Alhashimi had strong opinions about politics, about
Iraq and about most other issues. But every week he
allowed a majority opinion among the editorial board
to determine what position he would take when he
wrote the unsigned staff editorial.
"I learned the work should be done with friendship,
an open mind, persuasive opinion and a smile on the
face," Alhashimi says. "I learned to make the hard
decisions for the common interest."
Because the newspaper was started in 2010, we always
assumed that it would have a vibrant Web site, with
multimedia journalism, podcasts and breaking news
between print editions. Namo Kaftan, the paper's
first Web editor, assigned video reports, created
multimedia and updated the site. The Voice's early
multimedia efforts, edited very simply with
QuickTime Pro, were modeled after TV reports, often
ran too long and didn't use sequencing or
transitions well. Technical glitches and lack of
experience plagued the site, which was nonetheless
recognized for its achievements in July 2010 by the
Associated Collegiate Press, of which the Voice is a
member. It was a remarkable honor for a staff that
had no experience yet set high expectations for
itself.
The Voice was never about me, and I understand that
now more than ever, having left AUI-S in September
for a U.S. Fulbright Scholarship in Oman, where I'm
teaching digital journalism and starting another
newspaper at Sultan Qaboos University. I have
worried from a distance about the Voice, especially
as students have e-mailed seeking advice, attention,
reassurance. The students have not produced any new
multimedia reports or posted breaking news on the
Voice Web site in five months because no one has
taught the new staff how to produce the reports or
stressed the importance of the Web. Arez Hussen
Ahmed has shouldered much of the administration
burden, including fighting to get the paper's
publisher paid this year after AUI-S fell months
behind in doing so.
He recently sent me a long e-mail detailing the
problems with the Voice, most of them coming down to
a smaller, less committed staff and the absence of a
strong, experienced advocate for the students. "The
good thing that helped me to make the paper survive
was convincing myself that working with that mess
would be an experience for me and my love for the
Voice," he wrote.
In late January I returned to Iraq to help the Voice
celebrate its one-year anniversary, honoring the
students who stepped onto the unchartered path of
independent journalism in Iraq. The university needs
to take the next step now, offering classes in mass
communication taught by a seasoned journalist or
educator. It needs to make a real commitment and to
set aside resources to sustain the birth of Iraq's
student press. It needs to hire an experienced
faculty adviser whose full-time job is to help
develop student media at AUI-S. If it does not, AUI-S
will squander a significant opportunity.
"Having a group of young students with different
ethnic, religious and political backgrounds
committed to having an independent campus newspaper
is a cause for much celebration," says Mohammed
Salih, an Iraqi media specialist at AUI-S who has a
master's in journalism from the University of
Missouri. "It can be a model for other student media
outlets in the country. And on a deeper level, it is
also a cause for hope that the young generation,
through some assistance and liberal education, as
offered at AUI-S, is capable of putting forward a
different vision for the future of the country, one
that shows despite all differences we can work
together in a productive manner."
He understands well what is at stake.
Jackie Spinner (jackiespinner@mac.com) is a
journalist based in the Middle East, where she is
currently a U.S. Fulbright Scholar in Oman. She was
a staff writer for the Washington Post for 14 years
and is the author of “Tell Them I Didn’t Cry: A
Young Journalist’s Story of Joy, Loss, and Survival
in Iraq.” She wrote about AFN Iraq, a network of
radio stations and TV programming featuring news and
entertainment produced by soldiers for soldiers, in
AJR’s Fall issue.
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