al-Jazeera | 21-07-04

al-Jazeera: An insider's View

Shaista Aziz recounts her experiences with the Arab World's most popular news network.

As a practising British Muslim I had always found it problematic working in a mainstream, middle class, white newsroom. I always felt like a fish

english.aljazeera.net

out of water, uncomfortable with the lack of diversity around me. I told myself that I would have to deal with feeling uncomfortable in my working environment and focus on my work.

The day two hijacked airplanes slammed into the World Trade Centre in New York I, like so many others around the world, felt sick to the pit of my stomach watching live television pictures beaming images showing desperate people throwing themselves out of burning skyscrapers to meet their death.

At the time I was working as a Broadcast Journalist in one of the BBC’s regional newsrooms. I walked into the newsroom a few minutes before the second plane hit one of the Twin Towers and a senior news editor turned his head, looked at me and declared: ‘This has to be the work of Islamic fanatics.’ I walked out shocked, confused and bewildered at what I had just seen.

The next day my boss received a call from the main BBC television newsroom based in the aptly named White City, west London. I was asked to come up to London and to assist the news team in the television news coverage of 11 September with a special focus on the impact on the British Muslim community. I was supposed to be working for network news for a few weeks, but in the end I stayed for 18 months working across a variety of news programmes covering all stories, but specialising in issues around Islam and Muslims.

Difficult
It was a very difficult time, and I found myself being asked questions left, right and centre about Islam and Muslims, something that I generally encouraged, as it was often the only way for journalists to receive correct and accurate information. But at the same time I felt like I was under the microscope. I had to justify my very being to some of my colleges and explain why ‘my people’ believed in what they believed in.

One journalist asked me if I knew where the latest terror cell operated from and another asked me if I felt embarrassed by September 11th on the basis that I’m a Muslim. I felt miserable. My health was being affected by the ignorance that I was surrounded by and the stress that I was under. Unlike the majority of my colleges who could go home and switch off after a hard day at the office, I was going home to hear from my family and friends how my line of work was impacting on their very lives.

A friend told me how she was abused and spat at when she went to collect her children from the school gates at a school in Birmingham. Another friend was called a terrorist and asked if he was related to Bin Laden.

My father told me that on his way to the local Mosque, a man driving a white van shouted out at him, ‘You Taliban bastard!’. My uncle in New York, a Delboy style character (from British TV comedy series Only Fools & Horses) complete with sheepskin jacket was hysterical when I contacted him. ‘Please don’t call me again, my phone line is tapped. Things are crazy here, I will call you guys when things calm down.’ Of course his phone line wasn’t tapped, he was just incredibly anxious and finding it difficult to cope with the enormity of what had happened in New York like so many others around the world. At the same time he was fearful of what was to come, telling me that he was too scared to even step outside of the house to collect his post.

Poverty effects women regardless of if they choose to or are forced to wear the burkha or
the hijab, something more champions of women’s ‘liberation’ need to focus on.

Spiritual
I became increasingly disgusted and disturbed by the ‘news’ coverage. Most of what I was reading, hearing and seeing was one dimensional and hysterical. Headlines screamed the words ‘Muslim and Terrorist’, ‘Islamic and Fanatic’. I lost count of the number of times that I was asked by non-Muslims if I agreed with what happened on 11 September.

The mental and physical stress was getting to me, my body decided that it could take no more and my immune system caved in. I went to see my doctor who diagnosed me with glandular fever. I was signed off work for six months, I felt like I had no energy, my head was a total mess and for the fist time in my life I felt lost. I had no focus and felt very depressed. I did very little except sleep for six months and spent lots of time by myself. I read the Qu’ran and began to pray five times a day. I started wearing the hijab, something that came as a total surprise to my family and friends, but something that has given me a great deal of peace and focus in my life. I had reconnected with Islam and I believe that it was my faith that pulled me through the depression and the illness.

My reasons for wearing the hijab were tied to my spiritual journey into Islam, but I won’t deny that one of the reasons for wearing the hijab was connected to my identity as a British Muslim in the post 11 September world. I wanted people to see me as a visible Muslim woman, be it in my newsroom or out in the supermarket. I knew that I was in a powerful position to challenge the stereotypes that so many people have about Islam and Muslims, particularly Muslim women.

Don’t get me wrong…I know things are far from perfect for women in the Muslim world, in fact things are just as imperfect for Muslim women as they are for non Muslim women. But the inequalities and hardships that Muslim women face in my opinion has nothing to do with the true teachings of Islam and everything to do with culture and patriarchy within Islamic countries. One in eight women in the world live on less than $1 a day according to UN statistics. That kind of poverty effects women regardless of if they choose to or are forced to wear the burkha or the hijab, something more champions of women’s ‘liberation’ need to focus on.

Qatar
I decided to resign from the BBC and spend more time working on the things that I believed in, travelling up and down the country as a peace campaigner and raising awareness of the military occupation in Palestine and Iraq. I was invited to speak at meetings about the impact of George Bush’s so-called ‘War on Terror’, seen widely by many Muslims, myself included, as a war on Islam, asylum seekers and any individual or group in society viewed as ‘other’.

It was during this period that I was offered the opportunity to work for al-Jazeera’s English language website in Doha, Qatar. For me this was a fantastic opportunity, a chance to work for a news organisation that had carved an international reputation for being independent and for having unique access to the countries and people that were being targeted by Bush and Blair’s one-sided wars. I packed my bags and headed out to Qatar in September 2003.

After arriving in the tiny Gulf state I was shown around the al-Jazeera office and told that in the next few days I would have to go to the local hospital and give blood samples and be checked for HIV. I would have to undergo chest x-rays to ensure that I didn’t have TB, be fingerprinted and issued with an ID card. All my movements would be restricted and in order to leave the country, I would have to seek permission from my employers and apply for an exit permit to leave Qatar. Al-Jazeera would then decide if I would be allowed to leave the country. I couldn’t help but think that British Home Secretary David Blunkett must be envious of Qatar's restrictions on personal freedoms and rights.

Commitment
I settled in to my daily routine of work, the long 10 hour shifts would zap all my energy, but it was exhilarating to be working with a team of experienced news journalists such as Yvonne Ridley and Faisal Bodi, who were passionate and committed to writing about the military occupation of Arab countries, the human rights violations in the US military prison in Guantánamo, the poverty and re-formation of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the impact of the ‘War on Terror’ on Muslims across the globe. It was liberating to be in a newsroom where I didn’t have to explain myself, where I could go and pray in a purpose-built prayer room and openly talk about the hypocrisy of US and Western foreign policy in the region. Ramadan was a special time for me. I, along with my colleges from 15 different countries, would pray and break our fast together. This was a very spiritual and uplifting experience for me.

In the office however, things were anything but uplifting. Journalists were issued with contracts that gave us limited rights. We contacted a Qatari employment lawyer who informed us that sections of the contract were illegal because the document didn’t comply with Qatar’s labour laws. A group of us refused to sign the illegal contracts and attempted to open negotiations with al-Jazeera management. Journalists were given access to one international phone line in the newsroom which had to be shared between all the newsroom journalists. We were later given access to another phone line in a separate room away from the newsroom. Journalists were asked to log the contact details and phone numbers of everyone that was called using that phone line. This was something that I refused to do on the grounds that I was talking to Iraqi and Palestinian civilians on a daily basis hearing their accounts of life under military occupation, and I wasn’t going to compromise their safety by handing over their contact details to anyone.

It was very clear to me after a few days of working for al-Jazeera that a handful of the news editors and journalists had a very different vision of what kind of journalism we should be engaged in from that shared by management. The website managers wanted us to produce a copy-and-paste website, where journalists would take material from the news wires and copy and paste it on the site. Myself, Ridley and Bodi along with a handful of news journalists had no interest in doing that day in and day out.

We had some excellent leads and began to break lots of exclusive stories. We published photographs showing US soldiers with guns searching five-year-old children in Afghanistan. When aljazeera.net asked US Central Command for a comment they openly admitted that they viewed the children in the photographs as ‘terrorists’ and justified their behaviour. More photos were obtained and published showing US occupation troops in Iraq searching the homes of civilians– tying the hands of children and women using plastic material. I contacted US Central Command for a comment; this time around they were far more aggressive and told me in no uncertain terms: ‘You will not publish those photographs.’ The photos were published and the story was picked up by news organisations around the world.

We were told that we would no longer be required to be digging around for stories in Iraq and that we must ensure that we were never first on the scene of an explosion as this would lead to al-Jazeera staff being arrested and targeted by US soldiers.

US Pressure
A cartoon was published on the website on the anniversary of 11 September showing the Twin Towers crashing down and two petrol pumps with the dollar signs emerging. al-Jazeera management received a phone call from the White House demanding that the cartoon be pulled from the website. The cartoon was promptly pulled. Representatives from the US embassy in Qatar would regularly visit the website offices, in the time that I was there we had three visits in three months.

US embassy staff took a keen interest in the content of the site and the feedback that journalists were receiving. Around 75 per cent of the feedback was from readers in America who praised and ridiculed the stories that we were writing in equal measure. It was becoming increasingly clear from the way management were behaving that they were under a great deal of pressure from the US administration to report the news in a certain way and to be less critical of the occupation in Iraq.

An al-Jazeera journalist, based in the Baghdad office and who didn’t want to be named, told me that journalists had been briefed by al-Jazeera managers to, ‘Follow the Reuters news line. We were told that we would no longer be required to be digging around for stories in Iraq and that we must ensure that we were never first on the scene of an explosion as this would lead to al-Jazeera staff being arrested and targeted by US soldiers.’ al-Jazeera staff were regularly arrested and interrogated by US occupation soldiers when I was working for the news organisation, and as far as I know the harassment is still going on.

Targeting
Camera operator Salah Hassan was arrested in October and November 2003 while working for the news organisation in Iraq. Hassan had raced to the scene of a roadside explosion near a US military convoy in Dialah, eastern Iraq. US occupation troops arrested the cameraman accusing him of having prior knowledge of the attack.

Hassan says he told occupation soldiers to view his tapes, so that they could see that he had arrived at the scene of the blast over half an hour after the bomb exploded. Hassan says that he was taken from Baquba to a US military base at the international airport, held in a bathroom and then hooded and transported to Tilkrit.

Two days after being detained in Tilkrit he was loaded onto a truck alongside other detainees and shipped to Abu Ghraib, a prison built by Saddam Hussein that now serves as the US occupation forces main detention centre with a capacity to hold up to 13,000 prisoners. Hassan recalls how once inside the detention centre he was stripped naked and was addressed by occupation troops as ‘al-Jazeera’. He says that he was made to stand for hours in the cold, naked and bound.

Two Americans in civilian clothing interrogated him and repeatedly called him a terrorist. Hours later he says he was given a dirty red jumpsuit to wear that was covered in someone else’s sick– the red jumpsuit similar to the orange jumpsuits handed out to detainees in another US military prison thousands of miles away in Guantanamo, Cuba.

The contempt that the US administration and the US military has for al-Jazeera journalists is clear for all who have worked or still do work for the news organisation.

Isolation
Hassan describes how he was held in a maximum-security isolation unit alongside other prisoners including a 13-year-old girl whom he says was mentally disturbed and would be allowed out of her cell by US occupation troops. The girl would run up and down the hallway of the unit screaming and then return to her cell. Another al-Jazeera camera person Suheib Badr Darwish was also arrested in Samarra on 18 November and, according to a college in the Baghad bureau, Darwish was severely beaten by US occupation soldiers.

Hassan was eventually released on 18 December when the Iraqi Federal Supreme Court ruled that there wasn’t enough evidence against Hassan to charge him. He says that he was dumped on the streets of Baghdad to make his own way back to the al-Jazeera offices. One month later Darwish was also released because of a lack of evidence connecting him with ‘terrorist activity’ in occupied Iraq.

The harassment of Hassan and Darwish comes behind the backdrop of the incarceration of another al-Jazeera camera person Sami Al-Haj who in the words of al-Jazeera chairman Hamad Bin Thamer Al Thami is ‘still languishing in the cages of the Delta camp in Guantanamo’.

Al-Haj, a Sudanese national was arrested on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan while working for the news organisation. al-Jazeera journalists based in Doha who didn’t want to be named criticised the news organisation for not doing enough to get Al-Haj released or support his family. ‘I find it appalling that one of my colleagues had been locked up like an animal without charge for over two years in Guantánamo, and yet nobody here talks about him, there is no public campaign to have him released, it’s like the bosses here have forgotten about him,’ said the producer.

Then there is al-Jazeera’s star correspondent Taysir Allouni who was arrested and detained by Spanish authorities over alleged links with al-Qaeda in 2003. Allouni was released on bail late last year on the grounds of ill-health but is forced to remain in Spain. Former colleagues have told me that the evidence against him is at best flimsy and at worst comical. Tariq Ayoub was killed whilst working for the news channel and covering the invasion of Iraq in 2003. A US rocket slammed into the Palestine Hotel from where the al-Jazeera team was operating killing him.

Ayoub had been working for the channel for only three months. Al-Jazeera management at the time denied that Ayoub or the network had deliberately been targeted by US occupation troops, but did disclose that the network had given the co-ordinates of the Palestine Hotel to US occupation forces to prevent a similar attack to the one that lead to the bombing of the channel’s offices inside Afghanistan.

The contempt that the US administration and the US military has for al-Jazeera journalists is clear for all who have worked or still do work for the news organisation.

I was frog-marched from the office by security and treated like a criminal.

Removal
In May 2003 George Bush arrived in Qatar for a short visit, a time when there was a great deal of criticism being directed towards the channel from the US administration who wanted the Arab world to acknowledge the ‘liberation’ of Iraq.
One month later, Mohammed Jassem, al-Jazeera’s director was removed from his job. Rumours are still rife in the region that Jassem was forced out by the US government unhappy at the direction that the channel was taking.

Late last year Donald Rumsfeld attacked al-Jazeera for being ‘inexcusably biased’ and implied that he would be pleased to see the news organisation expelled from Iraq. Rumsfeld went on to say that the US would deal with the likes of al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya head on.

In September 2003 Kuwaiti newspaper As-Siyasa quoted a Gulf diplomatic source in Washington as saying that a series of meetings were held at the Security Intelligence Committee of the House of Representatives reviewing Al-Jazeera’s effect on Arab audiences and US-Qatar relations. According to the newspaper, strong and clear recommendations were made to the Qatari government asking it to ‘take urgent steps to consider closing Al-Jazeera’ or ‘substitute the current staff with moderate and neutral ones’.

In January 2003 I was sacked from al-Jazeera.net. My dismissal came five weeks after the network fired Yvonne Ridley. Ridley was given a letter by al-Jazeera stating that she was a ‘threat to the national security of the beautiful state of Qatar’. The British National Union of Journalists (NUJ) is supporting Yvonne Ridley’s case of unfair dismissal and has hired lawyers in Qatar who are preparing to go to court in the next few months. The Union is also asking for an explanation behind my dismissal. Three months after being fired I still don’t know why I was sacked by the company… well I don’t know the official reasons.

I was frog-marched from the office by security and treated like a criminal. This despite the fact that days after sacking me I was asked by a colleague supported by management to write and ask for my job back.

In the three months that I was employed by al-Jazeera I produced the most number of original news stories published on the site. After being fired on 1 January, I was asked to continue working for another five days, my articles and by-lines continued to appear on the website.

The majority of my writing focused on the on-going brutal military occupation of Palestine. Many of my former al-Jazeera colleagues wrote to me in support of my dismissal, one journalist who doesn’t want to be named told me that my ‘overzealous’ approach to the Palestinian issue had contributed to my downfall. Another told me that he has been told by management to ‘stop being so aggressive towards the Israelis’ in his reporting. After considerable pressure from the NUJ and two weeks after being sacked, I was finally given an exit permit so I could leave Qatar and booked on a flight to London.

Counter attack
On 14 February, the US government launched its own Arabic-language satellite channel called al-Hurra, meaning ‘the free one’. The aim of the channel is to meet the challenge of re-educating an Arab and Muslim audience into believing that the occupation in Iraq is just and legitimate. Al-Hurra has a budget of $62 million and has attracted some high calibre Arab journalists, including former al-Jazeera staff.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell is on the Board of Directors.

Al-Jazeera is planning to float on the stock market in a years time, so has to get its house in order and fast. Already many among its Arab and Muslim audience have noticed some subtle and some very obvious changes in the way the news organisation is reporting, particularly on the occupation of Iraq. Interviews with prominent Iraqis opposed to the occupation and those suspicious of US presence in Iraq have all but disappeared from the news channel. Ibrahim Hillal, al-Jazeera’s editor in chief gave his reasons for not broadcasting over six Bin Laden tapes in the channels possession ‘we don’t want to become the fanatics’ channel’.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq have to date cost the lives of
over 35 journalists from across the world.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq have to date cost the lives of over 35 journalists from across the world. The majority of those killed or maimed were travelling across the country independently and didn’t receive the same protection as their colleges who were ‘embedded’ with the military.

Many journalists were also killed during the bombing of Afghanistan or captured and detained without trial including Sami Al-Haj who is still being held in a US military prison in Guantánamo. The vast majority of journalists however never gained access to the country as the Taliban had banned all foreign reporters. Instead new organisations ended up broadcasting from neighbouring Pakistan and setting up satellite dishes on the roof of the Marriot hotel in Islamabad.

The invasion of Iraq has had a massive impact on the British media, from the fallout of the Hutton Inquiry and the crushing impact on the BBC to the harassment and brutal treatment of al-Jazeera journalists and other Arab reporters working inside Iraq.

Al-Jazeera, by failing to support many of its journalists who have and are literally coming under fire every day for doing nothing other than their jobs, are guilty of trying to prevent independent thinking journalists from reporting the truth. By not standing up to the harassment dished out to the news network by the US administration and other governments al-Jazeera is doing its journalists and its audience a huge disservice.

The Muslim and Arab world needs a strong and independent al-Jazeera, a news organisation that will inform its audience and treat them as intelligent people. A news organisation that is in a position to challenge some of the one dimensional Western news coverage of the Middle East and its people.

The world’s biggest superpower and military machine is doing all it can to silence independent thinking journalists and attack press freedoms on every level. The suffocating impact of US foreign policy on al-Jazeera and other media organisations around the world is a blow to the very democracy that the US claims to be a champion of.

Shaista Aziz is a freelance journalist and a peace campaigner.

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