27 Jan 10 | Uncategorized
‘Some saw a flash. All I saw were my things flying across the room’ ‘“Yasser” was the first thing that I heard Haider say. “Where is Yasser?” Haider and Yasser, two brothers, have worked for The Times since the invasion in 2003. I had sent Yasser on an errand and he was due back soon.’
No-one reading yesterday’s dispatch from The Times Baghdad bureau chief could have failed to get caught up in the search for Yasser. The paper’s driver was missing following a bomb blast in the Iraqi capital. When I opened my paper this morning it was the first story I looked for, but there was no happy ending. Instead the papers editor, James Harding paid tribute to a brave and generous colleague.
The foreign editor Richard Beeston goes behind the story to explain the key role that fixers play in enabling Western news organisation to report the news. Beeston spotlights the “heroic service of a small, dedicated army of Iraqis — drivers, fixers and translators. With little or no experience of reporting, they are ready to risk their lives every day to get the news”.
Yasser was just one of 36 Iraqis killed and 80 wounded in the three co-ordinated bomb blasts in Baghdad on 25 January. The New York Times At War blog also pays tribute.
07 Dec 09 | Middle East and North Africa, News and features, United Kingdom
Chris Ames says the Chilcot Inquiry is highlighting flaws of previous Iraq war investigations
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01 Dec 09 | Middle East and North Africa, News and features, United Kingdom
The government’s control over what the Chilcot Inquiry can publish and the questions it can ask is providing a watered-down account of why Britain went to war and an easy ride for witnesses argues Chris Ames
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11 Nov 09 | News and features
The use of so-called “insult laws” to censor legitimate criticism of a country’s leader is a tool of authoritarian regimes everywhere, and now, it seems Iraq too. On Tuesday Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was awarded damages of 100 million dinars ($85,000) in damages in a defamation case against Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
The paper had run a story describing Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s administration as “increasingly autocratic” and quoted three unnamed Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) members as saying “elements of Maliki’s rule resembled a dictatorship”.
Almost as if to prove him right the court — meeting in closed session and without hearing any evidence from the Guardian — found in his favour. While the post Saddam-era constitution’s Article 38 guarantees freedom of speech, there are a rack of laws in the country’s largely unreformed Penal Code that prohibit insult on pain of jail.
In this case INIS — clearly embarrassed by the loose talk among their supposed “secret” policemen — were looking not to jail them, but to secure a public apology, the closure of the Guardian office in Baghdad, disclosure of the unnamed sources and $1m in damages for Maliki, even though Maliki’s spokesmen maintain that he is not behind the writ.
Direct appeals to Maliki’s office saw off the threat to close the Guardian’s Baghdad office, but the action, begun in May 2009, rolled on to its conclusion on 10 November. The paper is to appeal.
During the case, said the Guardian, they had not been given the opportunity to present any evidence or had even been asked to give a written statement to the court.
The court asked a panel of three prominent members of the country’s independent journalists’ union for their opinion. Their view was that the article, by the paper’s award-winning correspondent Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, was neither defamatory nor damaging.
The NCIS sought and got a second opinion from a group of five experts of their own. This group, including the host of a legal affairs show on state TV, Salah Najim al-Maliki, concluded the opposite in what the Guardian was told –– they were not allowed to see their report — was “very hostile and unfavourable” language.
The allegedly defamatory article was published on the day that the Iraqi PM arrived in London to meet potential UK investors in Iraq. Interestingly both sides argued that the supposed slight that Maliki suffered did not deserve payment of damages.
Dozens of media outlets have sprung up in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein and Iraqi journalists enjoy considerable freedom compared to before and to other Middle Eastern countries. Nevertheless the tools to prohibit insult are still in the penal code toolbox if needed.
Countries with laws prohibiting insult of public officials keep them “to intimidate” opposition, says US-based World Press Freedom Committee chairman Richard N. Winfield in a recent report by the group. “Complete repeal is the only sensible remedy.”
