Iraqi journalists, faceless, but not voiceless
Posted: Friday, August 24, 2007 7:23 AM
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Baghdad, Iraq
By Jane Arraf, NBC News Correspondent
Nermeen al-Mufti reported on the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980's – she was the only female Iraqi reporter on the frontlines.
Like many Iraqi journalists, Mufti is a nationalist. She didn’t live through the Saddam years, raise a child on her own, and spend years trying to show Western journalists parts of the real Iraq to give up now.
She moved from Baghdad to her hometown of Kirkuk and started an Arabic-language newspaper, as well as writing in English for the weekly al-Ahram.
Electricity cuts, curfews, and unpredictable phone and Internet lines are only the start of difficulties there. Like all journalists and any other Iraqi in the public eye, she faces the very real prospect of being killed for doing her job – being caught in a cross-fire or a car bomb, or like dozens of local journalists, deliberately targeted.
More than 140 journalists and media workers have been killed in Iraq since the war began – most of them murdered and most of them Iraqi.
"Until now no one has been tried for killing, kidnapping or torturing a journalist," Mufti points out.
Apart from the physical danger, there are also increasing government restrictions on what Iraqi journalists can cover and the threat of suspension, fines or jail for unwarranted criticism of public figures.
"I’m not a hero, but I think it’s my duty to write toward keeping Iraq united," says Mufti. "I do it to try to restore the Iraq I knew – that gave me my identity, memories and pride."
Need for independent voices
For several years before the war, I was the only Western correspondent permanently based in Iraq. There was no independent Iraqi media. People like Mufti tried to push the envelope by writing a trouble-shooting column in state newspapers for people having issues with Iraqi government bureaucracy. For any Iraqis – including journalists - even asking normal questions could get them and their families thrown in jail.
When Baghdad fell, I was thrilled to see Iraqi journalists get on their feet, learn how to ask questions, and finally demand answers. Now those Iraqi voices – the only people who can really speak for their country - are being silenced again.
A lot of Iraqi journalists don’t write under their own names. Most of them started in other professions and never thought of being reporters, but they are the eyes, ears and insights that make it possible for Western journalists to write anything at all.
Many of them go to great lengths to remain anonymous – particularly when it comes to being photographed or videotaped.
Our producer Ghazi Balkiz interviewed one woman working for an American newspaper in silhouette so she wouldn’t be recognized – by people who might want to kill her, and even by her own family.
"Very few people know what I do," said the journalist, a single mother of two. "My father doesn’t know what I do. My father doesn’t know what I do for the simple reason that it would give him a heart attack."
I got a call a few months ago from another courageous Iraqi journalist I’d known in the Saddam days. She worked for a Western news organization and was one of the very few people I knew who would persist in trying to get answers – at the cost of regularly having her credentials revoked by the Information Ministry and being barred from working.
She had supported her entire family for years. When I talked to her though she said she was just staying at home – it had become too dangerous to work.
Determined to tell their stories
The journalist interviewed by Ghazi said she continued to take the risk of working because Iraqis had allowed the rest of the world to make assumptions about them and now they had to speak for themselves.
"Who should tell the world about our culture? It is us. Who should tell the world about our beliefs? It is us. Who should tell the world about our lives? Why have we waited?"
"What I’m trying to say is, please don’t take (what is happening in Iraq) at face value," she said. "Get to know us better."
We couldn’t show her face on camera. We couldn’t print her name. But her voice, and Mufti’s and all the other Iraqi journalists who believe telling stories of their people and their country is worth risking everything is still strong.
