WELCOME TO IWPR'S IRAQI CRISIS REPORT No. 08, March 26, 2003

THE BATTLE FOR BASRA The people of Basra oppose the regime but they will
not rise up until they are certain Saddam Hussein is falling. By Dr. Ali
Hassani in London.

APOCALYPSE NOW The war is a nightmare, filling Iraqis with dread. By Nuha
al-Radi in Beirut.

AIRING THE TRUTH Networks' decisions to censor gruesome images of war may
violate their legal duties to inform. By Angela Ward in London.

SILENCING SADDAM Iraqis looking for signs of a collapsing regime wonder
why the Americans have yet to stop the government television. By Julie
Flint in London.

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THE BATTLE FOR BASRA

The people of Basra oppose the regime but they will not rise up until they
are certain Saddam Hussein is falling.

By Dr. Ali Hassani in London

Saddam Hussein has ordered his forces in Basra to kill not just anyone who
rises against the regime but everyone who refuses to fight against the
Americans. This order has been transmitted openly over state television.
The people of Basra want to get rid of the gang that has kidnapped the
country and subjected them to decades of harassment. But this time, it is
not so easy to rise up.

There has been no uprising in Basra thus far. There has been fighting
between some of the people and some Ba'athists, with about 30 people
killed and wounded. But so far the environment for uprising is not right.

Saddam in 2003 is different from Saddam in 1991. He is weaker, but he has
learned. Most importantly, he does not trust the people. In 1991, when the
Allies went to war against him after he invaded Kuwait, Saddam armed
forces in Basra. On this occasion he has sent outside forces into the
city - and these forces have a plan to prevent any uprising.

A week into the war, the Iraqi regime still has control, albeit weakened,
in Basra. Forewarned of attack, the regime made the necessary
preparations. The Ba'ath Party headquarters hit and destroyed by artillery
had been evacuated some time earlier. Ba'ath Party fighters and commandos
of the Fedayeen of Saddam have taken off their uniforms and are passing
themselves off as civilians.

The ordinary people of Basra have mixed feelings. They have been waiting
for 12 years to liberate themselves again, but they know that things are
different now.

In 1991, Ba'athists were in their headquarters. They were in one area and
could be attacked. Today they are in the street. In 1991, the Iraqi army
had been driven in disarray from Kuwait and there were a lot of weapons in
the hands of ordinary people conscripted into the army. There was hunger
and thirst and degradation. Even the army was feeling humiliated. The war
for Kuwait was not the army's war; it was Saddam's war.

But this war was not started by Saddam; his forces have to know they
cannot win before they will be willing to turn against him.

In 1991 the people rose up - and the United States watched as they were
put down. The losses during the suppression of the uprising were much
greater than the losses during the war. Because of this bad experience,
the people of Basra say they will only rise up at the right moment. That
moment will be when Saddam is gone or his regime has lost control.

Basra was the first city to rise up in the South in 1991, in part because
there was a rumour that Saddam had been killed or run away. It knows the
price of failure - and not just because of what happened in 1991. In 1998,
the regime staged a car accident that killed the man recognised as the
supreme religious authority of Iraqi Shias: Sayyed Mohammed Sadr. Basra
rebelled. The regime cracked down hard and in doing so razed the city's
three mosques.

Basra today is a very degraded city. The cumulative effect of years of
Ba'athist misrule is a shortage of water, electricity, schools and
hospitals. Only one of three hospitals is working and even this lacks all
sorts of equipment. The people don't mind being without all these things,
but the British and the Americans have to create the same environment for
uprising as there was in 1991.

If they decide to storm Basra - a city of more than a million people - it
is vital that they liaise beforehand with people inside. The people of
Basra think they can liberate themselves if they have assistance. Even
some of the Fedayeen of Saddam are said to be anxious and fearing for
their lives. If the coalition contacts cities like Basra, they could
collapse quickly. But there is no evidence, as far as I know, of any
serious contacts by the Americans with the ordinary people inside. The
Americans are not investing in the right people.

For the future, the most important thing is that the Americans and the
British treat the people with respect. Some of Saddam's men have put on
headbands with slogans saying: "God is great". The danger is that the
Americans will blame the Shias of the South - and perceived Iranian
influence on them - for any crimes committed by Saddam's men. America
understands little about Iraqi Shias. Iraq is not Iran or Lebanon. Iraqis
are a multi-cultured people. Even the most extreme Iraqi Shia is a
moderate.

Dr. Ali Hassani, an Iraqi engineer, is head of the Basra Association in
London.


APOCALYPSE NOW

The war is a nightmare, filling Iraqis with dread.

By Nuha al-Radi in Beirut

I am willing and wishing biblical catastrophes. The sandstorms in Iraq are
continuing and now I am adding: may a thunderbolt smite the White House.
It is only nature that can come to our aid now.

Thankfully I still manage to talk to my mother in Baghdad every morning
and ask her about the last 24 hours. Yesterday was bad for them. They
didn't get much sleep and three of their windows broke. Amal's house had
its front door blasted out, so she doesn't need her keys anymore. But my
aunt Needles seems more fragile and doesn't seem to be coping so well. I
worry about their houses with all this pounding. How long can they remain
standing?

Wake up world!

The UN is silent. Aren't they supposed to be the promoters of peace?
Instead they talk of sending food and medical supplies. Despite their
opposition to Bush and Blair, they accepted the war before it started by
setting up all those camps on the borders of Jordan and Syria, expecting a
mass exodus. But in fact the reverse happened. An expensive
miscalculation: the camps stand empty. Instead of coming out of Iraq,
hundreds of Iraqis have gone back, to defend their country. Iraq is
fighting for its life and its history. It is a matter of life or death
now.

The scenario painted by the US seems to have backfired. There are no
flag-waving Iraqis, no flower-strewing population to welcome American
troops. The administration has been misinformed by none other than the
Iraqi opposition it supports, none of whose leaders have set foot in Iraq
for the past 30 years.

The Pentagon says 600 sites are considered most likely to be hiding
prohibited weapons, but only 75 were visited by the inspectors. If the
Pentagon knew the sites, why didn't they tell the inspectors where they
were? To me their reticence is obvious. They wanted to occupy Iraqi
themselves. Iraq will be their war booty. The first contract - the
rebuilding of Umm Qasr - has already been awarded to an American company.
Now they are saying that Iraq is going to use chemical weapons against
them. Where is their evidence? Will they now plant it?

The carnage takes place in apocalyptic proportions. It unfolds in serial
form, daily, live in front of our eyes on television and in their sitting
rooms. Everyone is hooked and the streets are empty. For those living
under this carnage, the operation is called "Iraqi Freedom". The friendly
Tomahawk and other missiles rain down to liberate by killing them. This is
the latest new world order.

I am not so certain that I will be in front of the television tonight. I
just might go to bed. Sometimes I want to cry, but I resist. I am totally
withered, and feel so useless. I dread what is going to happen when they
get to Baghdad.

Who is next?

Wake up world!

Nuha al-Radi is an Iraqi artist and author of the best-selling Baghdad
Diaries, which she began to write in Baghdad during the last Iraq war. For
the last few years she has lived in Beirut.


AIRING THE TRUTH

Networks' decisions to censor gruesome images of war may violate their
legal duties to inform.

By Angela Ward in London

The television networks have already made public their first decisions to
censor, on grounds of decency, pictures emanating from the war in Iraq.

On Sunday Channel 5 announced that it had pictures of action "too
disturbing to show here". Other UK broadcasters are doubtless under
pressure to sanitise their pictures due to the legal prohibition on
offending against good taste and decency.

By contrast, Al-Jazeera, the Arab-language satellite station, broadcast
throughout the Arab world pictures described in a leading Sunday newspaper
as "grisly and explicit images of the dead and wounded" in bombing
assaults on Basra. These were reported to include "a child with the back
of its skull blown off and bloodstained people being treated on the floor
of a hospital."

The war in Iraq is an event of the most acute political significance. It
precipitated the largest political protest in British history and will
remain an issue on which hinge the political futures of some of the
world's most powerful individuals. On what grounds, then, may the
gatekeepers of images from Iraq assemble a sanitised collage which leaves
most insidious consequences of war on the cutting-room floor?

The gruesome nature of such images, in and of itself, may no longer amount
to sufficient legal justification. The 1998 Human Rights Act may have
tipped towards the latter the balance between the networks' duty to
refrain from offending standards of decency on one hand, and their
(sometimes competing) obligation not impede free political speech. This
may carry important ramifications for war reporting, and stretch the
limits of the range of images transmittable for public broadcast.

In January 2002, the Court of Appeal heard the ProLife Alliance argue that
its right to free political expression, protected by the Human Rights Act,
bound the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5 to transmit a Pro Life party
election broadcast (PEB). The advertisement showed graphic images of
mangled foetuses that had been aborted. The footage included dismembered
limbs and a separated head.

The ProLife Alliance argued that the networks' refusal to air the
advertisement was not justified either by the duty on the private
broadcasters, contained in the 1990 Broadcasting Act, not to include
anything in their programmes which offended against good taste and decency
or by the equivalent obligation in an agreement between the BBC and the UK
government.

The alliance argued that it had a right to freedom of political expression
and that this was violated by the decision to block transmission.

The Court of Appeal accepted these arguments. Lord Justice Laws ruled that
"there is nothing gratuitous or sensational or untrue in the appellant's
intended PEB. It is certainly graphic; and, as I have said, disturbing.
But if we are to take political free speech seriously, those
characteristics cannot begin to justify the censorship that was done in
this case. Here the image is the message, or at least an important part of
it. . . . They show what actually happens. . . . The appellant is entitled
to show - not just tell - what happens."

By the same token, all broadcasters are bound by a legal duty to present
news with "accuracy and impartiality". To what extent, then, does removal
from the airwaves of the most terrible consequences of war do undue
violence to debate and discussion that is central to the right to free
political expression?

If the free expression rights of the ProLife Alliance are violated by
refusal to broadcast gruesome but factual footage of dismembered foetuses,
could it be argued that a breach of political expression, and distortion
of the political debate, result from refusal to transmit the gruesome but
truthful consequences of a war to which many are opposed?

The legal pendulum, at least, appears to be swinging in favour of honest
and accurate depiction of the human consequences of political
decision-making. This may, perhaps, be extendable to the human results of
the decision to wage war.

Angela Ward is a barrister specialising in European Union and human rights
law at 17 Bedford Row, London. She is also reader in the law faculty at
the University of Essex, and a member of the Human Rights Centre.


SILENCING SADDAM

Iraqis looking for signs of a collapsing regime wonder why the Americans
have yet to stop the government television.

By Julie Flint in London

Iraqis hoping for a swift end to the US-led war against Saddam Hussein had
little to cheer about in the first week of the conflict. "Coalition"
forces ran into desert storms and suffered their first casualties, and
Arab television stations showed stomach-twisting pictures of dead and
captured American soldiers. In vain did US generals insist that everything
was going according to plan. The Iraqis they said they were fighting for
simply didn’t believe them.

Yet a crack in the regime opened on Wednesday when Iraq's state-controlled
television was knocked off the air, albeit briefly, after broadcasting
uninterrupted throughout the first week of war.

In that time, Saddam Hussein, or someone who looked very much like him,
addressed the nation twice. Sundry ministers came, spoke and went.
Although nervous, and often on the verge of losing its temper, the regime
was clearly still in business. For Iraqi supporters of war who had hoped
that the conflict would be short and sharp, even the attempt to silence
the voice of the Leader, Teacher, Thinker, Hero and Holy Warrior was a
small, much-needed victory in a week of accumulating disappointments.

In the 1991 war against Saddam, television was one of the Allies' first
targets. Why not also in 2003? Iraqis asked.

"Iraqi television is a propaganda channel," said Salah Shaikhly, a former
governor of the Iraqi central bank and currently in charge of media and
foreign relations for the opposition Iraqi National Accord. "Allowing it
to continue to broadcast doesn't give much comfort to people who might be
thinking of doing something about Saddam. If I was with the government and
saw these people alive and well, I'd stay with the government. If I was
against the government, I wouldn't do anything because its key figures are
clearly very much around still."

Immediately after the strikes against television headquarters in central
Baghdad, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) denounced the
attack, saying there was no evidence that the station was being used for
military purposes - the only justification for targeting it under
international rules of war.

But that was not how many Iraqis saw it. With evidence that at least some
of his command-and-control capability had been knocked out, Saddam used
television to give a progress report on his various divisions -
interspersing military detail with exhortations to patience taken, oddly,
from a poem written in praise of the camel. As American troops raced to
Baghdad, senior vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan went on air to accuse
Jordan of "plotting" against Iraq. Once the regime had finished with
America, Ramadan said, it would deal with Jordan.

"All these ministers are speaking in a very threatening tone of voice -
especially against neighbouring countries," said Shaikhly. "They are
saying: 'We're going to pull you into the m. . . . We're going to do this
and that to you. Unfortunately, this doesn't encourage people to oppose
the regime."

The IFJ dismissed suggestions that Saddam was using television to send
coded messages to his own army. Once again, Iraqis who were in a position
to know begged to differ. A senior opposition figure said at least one
strongman of the regime - former military intelligence chief Wafik
Samarrai - had organised his defection through coded messages beamed into
Iraq from a television station outside. If Samarrai had used television,
he asked, why not Saddam?

Iraqis who know Saddam well, and who have worked closely with him, say
there is still no incontrovertible proof that Saddam is unharmed. They
believe the first "Saddam" seen after the war began was a double. It was
not so much the oversized and rather comical glasses, they say, as the
beret: it just didn't look right. They believe the second appearance may
well have been Saddam himself. But they have identified no fewer than 72
edits in the broadcast and speculate that it was a patchwork of
pre-recorded statements that covered every possible eventuality in a war
whose opening moves were well-known in advance. Significantly, the Saddam
in this broadcast spoke in generalities and gave no dates.

"The debate over whether Saddam is Saddam, and whether the real Saddam is
alive and well, doesn't really matter when you are considering the impact
on the people," said Shaikhly. "Every time you switch on the television
you see meetings and ministers - all of them speaking in a very
challenging tone. Ordinary people don't know how it's done. They don't
know about pre-recordings and splicing. They think this is happening here
and now - and they understand that Saddam is still in charge."

Some Iraqis believe the United States is reluctant to win yet more
disfavour in the Arab and Islamic worlds by causing civilian casualties in
bombing Saddam off the air; others insist that footage broadcast by the
regime is in some way useful to the war effort against it. Opposition
leaders in Washington and London have asked why Saddam is allowed to
continue broadcasting, but have received no clear answers.

"Everybody I have spoken to has asked this question," said Shaikhly.
"Television has been and still is a very great tool in the hands of the
regime. When his television is taken off the air, he will follow soon,
too."

Julie Flint is Iraqi Crisis Report co-ordinating editor and a former IWPR
trustee.

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Copyright (c) 2003 The Institute for War & Peace Reporting

IRAQI CRISIS REPORT No. 08