01 Mar 11 | Middle East and North Africa, News and features
“Listening to the fear in people’s voices had been heartbreaking but not hearing anything was terrifying,” describes Huda Abuzeid, Libyan exile and filmmaker
Nobody expected Libya’s protests to amount to much; after 42 years everyone had all but given up on the country.
Even when 17 February was touted as Libya’s day of rage, pretty much everyone believed protest would be quashed, quickly and bloodily.
On 15 February, Fathi Terbli, a human rights lawyer acting on behalf of the families of the Abu Salim prison massacre was arrested in Benghazi, Libya’s second city on the eastern border with Egypt. [Photo, right: via Twitpic, protests outside the Libyan embassy in London].
Worried about recent events in Tunisia and Egypt either side of Libya, the authorities had decided on a pre-emptive strike to try and prevent any possible protests before they started.
Arrests and disappearances were the regime’s favourite way of instilling fear, a method that had kept the populace cowed for over four decades.
This time, however, the arrests actually brought the protests out a day early. Benghazi’s people surrounded the police station where Terbli was detained, refusing to move despite clashes with security forces, and he was soon released.
This first win, inspired by Tunisia and Egypt, spread throughout the east and many western areas, leaving Gaddafi ruthlessly fighting from his remaining stronghold in Tripoli.
Exiled voices
As this was happening I, along with every other Libyan exile, tried to figure out how to help. What could we possibly do from abroad to support the incredible people who were braving snipers, mercenaries and heavy fire to overthrow the Gaddafi regime city by city?
The one thing Gaddafi has been successful at is cutting off Libya from the world. Whilst he was welcomed back into the international community with unseemly haste in 2003, his own people were still not to be seen or heard of without fear of reprisals.
Those who spoke would be quickly silenced, even those safely abroad were warned that their relatives inside the country would be targets if they publicly criticised the newly “reformed” regime. Damned if you spoke, damned if you didn’t.
Limited media
The international media was wrong footed, suddenly trying to cover a country about which little was known, and where they had no journalists or cameras to independently report what was happening.
During the first few days of Libyan protest there was barely any news coming out; the mobile phone clips that would appear online were short and so badly shot that it was difficult to make out what was happening.
The phrases “citizen journalism” and “user generated content” have become popular in the past few years, but when these forms of media were the only news source their limitations became apparent.
The fact that this was a genuinely popular uprising also meant that the go-to Libyan figures abroad didn’t know who was responsible either, so they themselves were struggling to follow events.
As a TV producer I knew that international media coverage was key to breaking through Gaddafi’s wall of silence. Not only would it ensure the world saw what was happening, but more importantly, that news reached those inside Libya watching Al-Jazeera, BBC Arabic and other channels, with the truth about what was happening in other parts of the country.
Libyans abroad could offer the media their perspective from any town or city across Libya, challenging the notion of different tribes who would be unable to unite once Gaddafi went.
Everyone had willing relatives desperate for someone to hear their plight.
We collected numbers and phoned people on the ground, dispassionately questioned them to find out accounts of what was going on and then forwarded on the information to interested media.
When it worked we preferred Skype because it felt more secure than the heavily tapped phone lines. We translated the Libyan dialect being broadcast on a revolutionary radio station in Benghazi and concentrated on feeding the ever-hungry news channels.
Each city that fell to anti-Gaddafi forces emboldened others and as events changed hourly it was of vital importance that networks covered it.
Sadly, in the beginning it was an uphill struggle to get news networks interested. Despite knowing that phone calls from abroad were monitored, many courageous Libyans spoke directly to TV news channels. It took a couple of arrests for the media to stop using their full names. This was not Tunisia or Egypt; this was a regime that had no problem using its full power to keep its people silent.
This was practical tangible work that kept me mentally distracted, until last Tuesday when not one of our compiled telephone numbers worked. Entire cities in Libya were cut off once more from the world.
That was the first day I actually felt a sense of real panic, listening to lines go dead or just ring off. I imagined all manner of horrors being committed. Listening to the fear in people’s voices had been heartbreaking but not hearing anything was terrifying.
It was only when the lines returned and we started to help journalists get into Libya with their satellite phones that the panic began to ease.
The next mission is to collate all that citizen journalism. When no journalist was able to go in, it was the Libyan people who risked their lives to show the world the protests and attacks.
Whilst the regime blithely claimed nobody was injured, the quantity of juddering mobile phone footage of dead bodies exposed the lie. The professionals could no longer ignore the veracity of the uploaded material. Ahum Ahum al libyoun ahum “here we are, the Libyans we are here”.
Huda Abuzeid is a filmmaker and TV producer based in the UK. Follow her on Twitter: @hudduh
25 Feb 11 | News and features
As the lone eyewitness to events that international news organisations have found difficult to access, Al Jazeera has been an inseparable part of the story in the Middle East and North Africa. For a solid month, US outlets have hummed with borrowed Al Jazeera content and content about Al Jazeera itself.
Meanwhile, the irony grows by the day: most US households still can’t get the English-language version of the network on their TVs.
“Our local cable-TV monopoly Comcast won’t carry Al Jazeera on its service but finds it newsworthy that Al Jazeera has been shut down in Egypt. What’s the difference?” asked a bitter subscriber on a lively Comcast community message board debating the inconsistency.
Comcast’s news site had, in fact, just published an Associated Press story on the closure of Al Jazeera’s Cairo office two weeks ago.
Americans haven’t paid this much attention to the Qatar-based network since Donald Rumsfeld was accusing it of inciting violence in the early days of the Iraq war. For many US news consumers, it’s the first time they’re seeing the network as a serious news operation – and one covering events about which Americans care deeply.
Old stereotypes, though, die slowly – especially those associated with 9/11 in the American imagination. Even as Al Jazeera proves its worth in Egypt, Bahrain and Libya, it continues to face a tough row with US cable distributors.
Providers like Comcast have long insisted that AJE, which launched in 2006, wouldn’t attract enough viewers to justify offering it. But the vast American cable menu makes that argument sound anemic.
“Why do we have Current TV but not Al-Jazeera?” laments a Kansas City Star columnist. Also on offer to most US cable customers: channels devoted exclusively to replays of decades-old sporting events, do-it-yourself home-improvement projects and country music videos. Surely live coverage of key global events could do just as well?
Cable’s aversion to AJE is undoubtedly more calculated. Many Americans have long associated the network with being somehow anti-American, or the go-to distributor of Osama bin Laden each time he puts out a new preachy home video. The suspicion runs deep – and, in the past, it’s run straight to the top of the US government.
George W. Bush singled out the network in his 2004 State of the Union address as a source of “hateful propaganda,” and Donald Rumsfeld called its coverage of civilian casualties in Iraq “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable“. In 2001, the US military even launched a missile at Al Jazeera’s Kabul office, later referring to the building as “a known Al Qaeda facility“. (The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has a fascinating timeline of the troubled relationship between Al Jazeera and the US government).
It’s little wonder, amid such dramatic official pronouncements, that many Americans became wary of the network, and many cable providers are skittish of associating with it. But the stereotype of Al Jazeera as a tool of anti-American terrorists hasn’t survived recent events. Oddly, the perception of bias has been undercut as much by strong reporting in North Africa, as by Al Jazeera’s own role as a victim of repressive regimes.
To critics who still brand the network as a propaganda arm for Middle Eastern strongmen, Wired wrote: “This might come as a surprise to Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who accused the channel of ‘fomenting unrest’. Or to embattled Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi [sic] who in a rambling and defiant speech Tuesday said Al Jazeera was trying to portray Libyans as ‘bad people… a people of turbans and low beards,’ according to one translation.”
Hawkish American commentators may be forgiven for not knowing what’s actually on AJE these days – after all, they can’t tune in to it, either. Bill O’Reilly probably wouldn’t change his mind if he could (nor would the folks behind www.stopaljazeera.org, who push something that looks much more like propaganda than anything AJE airs). But for the rest of US consumers enthralled by events in the Middle East – people who have been rushing, in the absence of anything else, onto AJE’s web feed – things are changing. American news outlets can less and less afford foreign bureaus, and this is one legitimate news source already on the ground that can.
Sensing the opportunity, Al Jazeera has placed a prominent add on its English home page encouraging people to “Demand Al Jazeera in the USA“. Comcast, as of this week, may finally be coming to the table.
22 Feb 11 | News and features
Gaddafi’s tight rein on journalists means that protests in Libya are particularly difficult to monitor, as violence escalates. Libya is placed 160th out of 178 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom index 2010.
Sarah Leah Whitson from Human Rights Watch explained the difficulties of counting the number of demonstrators on America’s NPR:
“[It’s] extremely hard to say because we are only relying on eyewitnesses in the ground and estimating numbers of crowds is the most inaccurate information that people ever give. But we have reports of thousands and tens of thousands people demonstrating in various cities.”
CNN is claiming that the channel’s correspondent Ben Wedeman, who entered eastern Libya from Egypt, is the “first Western television correspondent to enter and report from Libya during the current crisis”.
Meanwhile, Nazanine Moshiri has filed Al Jazeera’s first report from the border with Libya. Details are scant, however. On Tuesday morning eyewitness in Tripoli reported extreme violence, with “fighter jets bombarding and heavily armed mercenaries using high-caliber, perhaps even anti-aircraft guns on protesters”. But, as Al Jazeera reports: “So far, though, almost no images or videos have emerged of the attacks.”
Libyans are unlikely to be able to access Al Jazeera’s coverage: its website is blocked in Libya, and the country’s intelligence agency is behind a “powerful jamming” that has disrupted its television signal in the Middle East and North Africa, according to a report on Reuters Africa.
“The source of (the) signal blockage has been pinpointed to a Libyan intelligence agency building… south of the capital Tripoli,” said Al Jazeera, whose coverage of a regional political unrest has been watched across the Arab world.”
At the time of writing, death count estimates vary. The International Federation for Human Rights says that protests have resulted in 300 to 400 deaths, with thousands injured. On 20 February, Human Rights Watch reported the death toll was up to 233 over four days.
