ENEMIES WITHIN
John Simpson on un-British
attempts to muzzle reporting of the Gulf war
SOMETHING moved in the darkness: a shadow, succeeded by another and then by a whole group of shadows. From a room on the fifth floor of the Rasheed Hotel in Baghdad I peered at them through the foggy lens of an inferior Russian telescope. I could just make out a man in a black balaclava and black fatigues directing others, similarly dressed, to positions around the shabby yard which lay behind the hotel. Occasional bursts of tracer and the flickering light from a big fire on the outskirts of the city made it possible to see what happened next. A truck with a highly sophisticated missile system mounted on it backed into the yard, followed by a second. Soon the missiles were up and ready, Moving their heads around con- stantly like Medusa's snakes, they picked up the faintest radar signals from the sky, prepared to strike at any aircraft or missile which might threaten the place they were guarding.
But what was the place they were guard- ing? I had seen it a thousand times: it was
just a deserted scrapyard at the back of the hotel. There seemed to be nothing there. Yet surely only something very important indeed would warrant the stationing of missiles of this sophistication under condi- tions of such secrecy. My friends and I speculated about it: could the entrance to Saddam's main bunker and command cen- tre be here, right beside the Rasheed itself? The black figures and their missiles remained on duty for more than seven hours. Then, half an hour before a sullen dawn broke on the horizon across the River Tigris, the black figures and their missiles withdrew. The yard below was as empty and broken down as ever, edged by its wooden huts, their windows smashed. The sirens began to sound the all-clear.
When I came back to London I half expected that some hawk-faced figure from Military Intelligence would attempt to debrief me on what I had seen during almost five months spent in Baghdad. No one has. Perhaps allied intelligence, having access to the best in satellite pictures, isn't
particularly interested in unskilled observation. That would be a pity; unskil- led observation might have advised the American military to avoid hitting a target last week which may or may not have been a military communications centre, but was certainly used as a public air-raid shelter. Now the New York Times has been car- rying reports which imply that the Rasheed Hotel is regarded as a military target, by virtue of whatever may lie under the deserted scrapyard outside. Clearly the satellites had seen what I saw. But in this case the military mind has understood that there are other criteria than purely military ones when it comes to deciding where to attack. Better perhaps, in terms of public opinion, to let the bunker at the Rasheed alone than to risk killing Western journal- ists or the hundreds of civilians who nightly pack into the insufficient, bad-smelling shelters under the Rasheed.
The anger aroused by the deaths of several hundred civilians in the air raid shelter in the Baghdad surburb of Amiriya lasted a shorter time, even in Jordan and other Muslim countries, than the anger of British MPs and the tabloid press over the way the deaths were reported on televi- sion. This is not altogether surprising. Similarly damaging episodes in the past have been followed by attempts to switch the concentration onto the manner in which the event has been reported. Whether this is a matter of political ex- pediency or a private transfer of guilt is hard to say. After 13 unarmed demonstra- tors were shot and killed by the Parachute Regiment in Londonderry in January 1972 I was accused of treason by a little-known Conservative MP for reporting that Catho- lics in Northern Ireland were starting to refer to the day as 'Bloody Sunday'. I had done nothing but state an objective fact: yet by attacking me the MP felt, perhaps, that he had shifted onto other shoulders some of the unease he himself felt about the shooting.
Now accusations of treason are being made again. The Sun has spoken darkly of 'The Enemy Within'. Other newspapers, together with various Conservative MPs, would like all British broadcasters to be withdrawn from Baghdad on the grounds that they are simply giving voice to Saddam Hussein's propaganda. It is hard for any- one who has been in Baghdad since the war began to recognise in their descriptions of the ruthless and effective Iraqi machine the rather feeble efforts of the Baghdad au- thorities to stop Western reporters saying and doing what they want.
There is less restriction on the move- ment of journalists in Baghdad now than there was in the early days of the war. There is a minder to ensure that you do not film potential targets, though recently the Ministry of Information has eased some of the restrictions on what may and may not be filmed. Back at the Rasheed Hotel, a censor will examine your pictures and read your script, and will strike out anything he doesn't like; but it isn't difficult to get around the restrictions in one way or another. The notion that Western journal- ists are allowed to see only what the authorities want them to see, or that the authorities somehow dictate their reports for them, is a simple misunderstanding of the situation. Access to security informa- tion certainly isn't easy to obtain, so that discovering what other functions the build- ing which housed the public air raid shelter in Amiriya may have performed was ex- tremely difficult. But there was never any serious doubt that a large number of ordinary civilians had died there in the American missile attack: and that was the real issue.
Amiriya is a largely middle-class area, in a country where the middle class tends to be highly Westernised and usually distinct- ly pro-British. This explains the circumst- ance which some tabloid newspapers found so suspicious: that on hand among the relatives outside the air raid shelter were several who spoke good English. My ex- perience has been that most middle-class Iraqis are instinctively opposed to Saddam and everything he has done; even if few of them would risk the murder of their entire families by saying so in public. The people of Amiriya are, or were, probably among the West's main friends in Iraq: they will certainly come out onto the streets and dance with the greatest fervour if and when Saddam is overthrown. President Bush himself made it clear, soon after the bombing, that the allies' quarrel was not with the Iraqi people; and yet, to read the British tabloids and to listen to the House of Commons, you might imagine that all Iraqis were our enemies. And not only Iraqis.
Things used be done differently in Bri- tain. In 1940 Churchill was persuaded by the argument that the BBC, instead of becoming simply our national medium of propaganda, should be allowed to broad- cast with relative freedom about British military disasters — of which, at the time, there was no shortage. Characteristically, he cloaked his decision in a splendid principle: that a nation fighting for civilisa- tion should use the weapons of civilisation, not the weapons of darkness and dicta- torship. The result was that people in Britain and all over the occupied world found the BBC believable when it spoke of Allied successes, because they knew it had been frank about Allied reverses.
Judged by this standard, the kind of thing we have been hearing from some MPs and some newspapers is distinctly depressing. The national life of the country was at stake in 1940, and yet the civilised principle of openness and frankness was upheld.
No one can say that our national life is seriously threatened by the war with Iraq; we won't be invaded, nor will an alien ideology be forced upon us if we lose — and there is a powerful case for saying we can't lose anyway. And yet, despite all this, the traditional virtues of moderation, of keeping calm in a crisis, of allowing others to have their say and defending their right to say it, have not been much in evidence recently. Instead we find voices demanding a curb on free reporting, and headlines that sound as though they come from the Volkischer Beobachter, sniffing out traitors. Fifty years ago people would have described it as profoundly un-British.
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