Journalists between war and peace

This is an edited version of a lecture given at the conference of the Mut zur Ethik working group in the Swiss town of Sirnach on 30 August 2024. The theme of this conference was “Respect for equality and the equivalence of all people and nations. Despotism, wars and abuses of power must be confronted”. A part of the lecture relating to the history and development of the Al Jazeera television station will follow in a separate text.

“Karin Leukefeld is a peace journalist, she is an expert, or rather committed to this kind of journalism, which ensures that here in this country, we can take on those in power, that we can communicate internationally and will fight for peace.”
  This is how I was introduced by a student in Hamburg a few months ago. An “International Solidarity” working group has been in existence for many years at the university there, and this group uses films to explain what is happening in the world. They invite speakers to give an introduction to the selected film and take part in the subsequent discussion after watching the movie together. The film shown on this occasion was titled “Control Room”.
  According to the student, the government wanted to wake up the population  from “war fatigue” and make them “fit for war”. But every war starts with propaganda and lies. Anyone who listens every morning to Deutschlandfunk, German radio, as I do, gets an impression of how partial truths and one-sided reports are used to legitimise war preparations and armament.

The war in Iraq
also began with a lie

“Control Room” concerns the 2003 Iraq war, which actually began with a lie – the now-infamous lie that Iraq produced and possessed of weapons of mass destruction that could hit targets in London within a very short time. The relevant report by the British secret service soon turned out to be “exaggerated”. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found, of course. The late Colin Powell, serving as the American secretary of state at the time, later admitted to having lied in his incendiary speech against Iraq in the UN Security Council on 6 March 2003.
  Years later, “Control Room” still conveys how important committed truth-finding is for a free debate and for the formation of public opinion. It is March 2003 and the scene is set in Doha, the capital of the Gulf emirate of Qatar. The main characters are a US army media officer and journalists from the Al Jazeera news channel.

U.S. Army ‘Control Room’

The US Army has set up a “Control Room” in which journalists the American military provides information to journalists from all over the world. Al Jazeera, based in Doha, also has a “Control Room” through which the recordings and reports of the correspondents from Iraq are channelled for the channel’s reporting. As the name suggests, the U.S. Army’s Control Room is intended to control the flow of news. The media officer on duty goes to great lengths, according to the motto: “Every West Point graduate knows that wars are not won with bombs, but with information. Whoever controls the facts controls the battlefield.”
  Al Jazeera, founded in 1996, broadcast what its correspondents reported from Iraq. The core question of the dialogues and discussions in the film is how the war should be reported. For Al Jazeera, the focus is on the humanitarian situation; gruesome images are inevitably a feature of its coverage. The U.S. Army wants to control what is happening and therefore also the images and information that should reach the public.
  In preparation for the event, I had watched the film twice and was initially confronted with something completely different.

Media ‘reality’ …

In my mind’s eye, in my memory, a movie was playing about what I had experienced in Iraq in the weeks and months before the war began. I had travelled to Baghdad in December 2002 and left Iraq just a few days before the US bombing began. I was struck by the huge difference in how I had experienced Iraq while the troops were deploying to attack the country, and how the US army and journalists looked at Iraq from the outside and reported on the war.
  While in December 2002 I had been almost alone with a handful of journalists in the Ministry of Information in Baghdad, at the beginning of 2003 more and more journalists came and opened offices there. Most of them were television journalists, and shortly before the war began there were more than 200 of them. A colleague said to me at the time that it was as if the vultures were gathering and waiting for their prey to die so that they could disembowel the carrion.

… and what was not reported

What the cameras focused on was shown and perceived as reality in  global media. But what happened beyond the cameras, in the side streets, in the small craft businesses, was not shown and seen. Because you cannot see those in the dark, you cannot hear them. No camera, no microphone, documented the fears, hopes, and worries of the population before the war. And nothing has changed to this day.
  Given the huge demonstrations that took place all over the world at the time, the Iraqis living in the shadow of US troop deployment had hope. But in our memories today – in general – these images are no longer as present as burning oil fields, advancing tanks in the desert sand, bombs on Baghdad, and the falling statue of Saddam Hussein.
  This stood in Ferdoz Square, in front of the Palestine Hotel. I had often sat there in the evening with colleagues from all over the world and talked long into the night. And we sat there with people who had come from peace groups to protect the country from attacks. So there were many discussions.
  International media reported on these people derisively and disparagingly. They were called “puppets of the Saddam regime”. Their aim, however, was to act as “human shields” to protect hospitals, water treatment plants, museums, and kindergartens from attack.

‘Time to break the silence’

On the banks of the Tigris, they recalled Martin Luther King and his speech at Riverside Church in Upper Manhattan in 1967. It was “time to break the silence”, these activists told the correspondents who were watching them with their cameras – only then to write derisive comments.
  The peace activists recalled the bombing of the Amiriyah shelter bunker in Baghdad during an earlier US war against Iraq, on 13 February 1991, when the US Air Force bombed the bunker, killing 408 people. Today, reports can be found on the Internet detailing the planning and which bombs were used. To find out the names of the victims, you have to go to the bunker itself.
  I met a young man there, Ahmad, who had survived as a child with severe burns and had been flown out by German doctors and rescued in a special clinic in Hamm. When he heard that I was a German journalist, he asked me to visit him a few days later, because he wanted to give me a present for the doctor who had saved his life.
  I still have gifts at home from many of the people I met back then: a smile for the camera, a scarf, a portrait painted with charcoal at a market, signed books, addresses, a picture and thoughts written in haste in a notebook.
  “There will be no war” – so wrote one of the peace activists in my notebook. But the war came, and after it came other wars. Some of the companions from my time in Iraq are no longer alive. Others have left the country and found  new homes far away. They have started families. They have started professional careers. One young man is highly qualified and lives with his family in England. It is particularly his wife who is unhappy with all that has happened – I had conducted a long interview with both of them before the war. A Christian family lost its father, who died of cancer. The mother first moved to Aleppo with her son and daughter; then they lived in Turkey for a long time, between Istanbul and Izmir. At the end of last year, the son told me, that they had moved to Australia with a United Nations resettlement programme.
  All of these stories – and many more – played no role in the media back then and they certainly play none today. The “media vultures” have moved on. From war to war, they count the dead, the bombs, the money that is burned in the wars and makes arms companies rich and influential. They have disembowelled the dead carrion.

‘When politics fails
in such a disgusting way’

Today, the term “human shields” has been turned into its opposite. When Israel kills more than 43,700 Palestinians  in the Gaza Strip [as of the end of August 2024; the figure as we publish is according to a new Lancet study 64,260; the editors] – almost half of them are children and a quarter are women – local media report that the “Hamas terrorists” are using these people as “human shields”. And German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock declared in the German Bundestag (14 October 2023) that the Israeli state’s right to self-defence in the Gaza war not only meant “attacking terrorists, but also destroying them”. If “Hamas terrorists” hid behind the population, behind schools, “then civilian places lose their protected status, because terrorists abuse it”.
  Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the observance of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, said the minister should provide evidence for her claims that Israel’s attacks (on schools, hospitals and shelters) are legal. She, Albanese, pointed out that Germany’s political decision to ally itself with a state that commits international crimes will have legal consequences. She hoped “that justice will prevail when politics fails in such a disgusting way”.

Reporting war – Reporting for peace

In view of the brutalisation, the disregard for international law, the reversal of right and wrong – how should journalists report on war today? About this “war on terror” that has been devastating countries between Afghanistan and Libya and in Africa for more than 20 years, driving millions to flee their homes, leaving behind countries where death has survived the wars, while the people have died? How should we report on a war that is being waged with state-of-the-art weapons and artificial intelligence – on the battlefield and in the media? What is “peace journalism” when “getting in good trim for war” and the stockpiling of armaments dominate the headlines? When the warring military controls the news and – not infrequently – think tanks and media companies in warring or war-fuelling states disseminate reports and coverage, perhaps also under a different name?
  If we compare Arab and European media coverage of the Gaza war, the absence of images and eyewitness accounts (which are prominent in Arab media – and in media in the Global South) is particularly striking in the latter.

The ‘human cost of war’

The “human cost of war” must be the journalist’s focus, says the studio manager of Al Jazeera in “Control Room”. It is the Arab perspective on the war to which the station commits itself.  “As a journalist, you can’t think abstractly,” he says. Every journalist is “a human being first. He has his own mentality, his convictions or beliefs, and then come the requirements of his station”.
  But what does this mean for media professionals in the Western world? In Germany and other countries that support the state of Israel in the war against the Palestinians in Gaza and Lebanon, Syria or even in Yemen? They adopt the language and the rules laid down by the Israeli military censor and occasionally supplement them with their own rules. News generated by Palestinians may be reported, but at the same time it is characterised as untrustworthy propaganda because it “comes from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, which is controlled by the terrorist organisation Hamas”. Every target that the Israeli army bombs in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, or Yemen is, according to the Israeli narrative, a command centre, a weapons depot, a weapons production site or a rocket launching pad. If there is a denial from a concerned party, this may be included in the report but also characterised as implausible.
  Is there a critical debate among journalists and media professionals about this narrative? Presumably there is one among them, internally, but if there is, they make efforts to avoid making this public. Journalists who initiate a public debate are quickly dismissed as “puppets of foreign interests” in Russia, China, or Iran. Or they are labelled “anti-semitic” and isolated.
  The director of “Control Room”, Jehane Noujaim, describes how she first viewed and edited her footage in Egypt and later in the US In Egypt – her home country – it was a matter of course for her to shoot footage of the dead and injured, of wounded children in hospital for the film. When she was in the U.S. and switched on the television, something strange happened to her: “You see how everything is put together neatly, cleanly, and flawlessly. And then you look at your footage and think that the images are extremely violent. And you ask yourself, ‘Is it even important to show these images’”?

Why images of reality are so important

The answer is: Yes. The images from Gaza and Lebanon are important because they show us what is being done to people. They show that these people are not in a position even to defend themselves, but that they are fleeing again and again, trying to bring themselves, their children, and the survivors of their families to safety with the belongings they have left.
  These pictures are just as important as the selfies that thousands of Israeli army soldiers send out into the world. The latter are important, certainly but for a very different reason. They show how these men and women make fun of the Palestinians they have expelled, how they destroy their property, blow up their schools and universities, how they perform obscene dances with their weapons and in front of the ruins. A new chant of derision is making the rounds on “social media”, shouted by football hooligans who supported Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam last November: “There are no schools in Gaza because there are no more children in Gaza.”
  All these images and sounds correct the “neat and spotless” narrative of those who think they are the winners and are in the right. However, they are only part of the reality until eyewitness accounts, evidence, and voices for a just future for the Palestinians reach the public. •

(Translation Current Concerns)