WORSE THAN A CRIME, A BLUNDER
The media: Paul Johnson
thinks the Iraq regime will regret hanging Bazoft
IN AN ideal world, everyone should think 12 moves ahead, like a good chess-player. The thought struck me with particular force when I read about the Farzad Bazoft affair, which has damaged all involved, Britain and Iraq included, and not just Bazoft himself and the nurse who foolishly did him a favour. In the first place there was clearly not much thinking ahead by the Iraqi officials who invited him to an expenses-paid official trip to their country. This was a personal invitation made in the light of the knowledge that Bazoft was an Iranian, not a British citizen, albeit pro- vided with United Kingdom 'travel docu- ments', a freelance desperate to make a big name, and a man with a reputation for adventrous, not to say reckless reporting. A strange fellow, you might think, to ask to a country with a lot of dark secrets and notoriously paranoid about protecting them. All the invitation proves is that Iraq was keen to get favourable publicity in the Western media.
By agreeing to accredit Bazoft, the Observer did not think very far ahead either. Bazoft was a man likely to get into trouble and Iraq might have been made for a man with his propensity. But I hesitate to criticise the Observer. I certainly don't blame it for not knowing, or bothering to check, on whether he had a criminal record. After all he was a freelance. Newspapers, particularly Sundays, cannot afford to employ as staffers all the repor- ters they use, and sensible editors make the maximum practicable use of freelances. In Its great days, under David Astor, the Observer had probably the most remark- able collection of foreign correspondents of any newspaper in the world. Some were staffers but most, I think, were stringers and freelances, paid modest retainers if they were lucky. They included some rum peo- ple, such as Kim Philby; indeed it was widely believed that Astor actually prefer- red his correspondents to have 'problems' of one kind or another — it made them more interesting to handle and was likely to generate more original and heterodox material. The last point, I fear, is almost Certainly valid. It cannot be emphasised too strongly that balanced, well-adjusted, stable and secure people do not, on the whole, make good writers, including good journalists. To illustrate the point you have only to think of a few of those who have been both good writers and good journal- ists — Swift, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dickens, Marx, Hemingway, Camus, Waugh, just to begin with. It would be difficult to think of a more mixed-up fellow than James Agate, were it not that the name of Ken Tynan instantly springs to mind; yet each, in his day, was the best dramatic critic in the world. The principle applies just as much to foreign correspondents as to any other kind of newspaper writer. No professor of journal- ism, operating from theoretical principles, could possibly have picked Henri Georges Stephane Adolphe Opper de Blowitz as a suitable person to represent the Times in Paris. Yet he was perhaps the best corres- pondent the paper ever had. Where, I believe, not only the Observer but all other newspapers should do some heart-searching — and hard thinking — is about the instructions editors give to jour- nalists who represent them abroad, espe- cially in such tricky areas as Iraq. Perhaps editors should get together and devise guidelines, as they recently did about privacy. It is obvious that in some countries today the kind of journalistic probing into security matters now so fashionable in the Western media is unacceptably perilous. The Bazoft case also indicates the relative powerlessness of a Western government to
protect a journalist who falls foul of local secrecy-mania. Britain has plenty of lever- age in Iraq, even with the present regime, but it failed to help Bazoft at all — not for want of trying either — and it will be lucky to get Mrs Daphne Parish out of gaol. It is not enough in my opinion for an editor to tell an accredited freelance, let alone a staffer, 'You are pursuing this story at your own risk.' Good reporters are almost by definition risk-takers, and they are often young, competitive, inexperienced, heed- less of the consequences, and so in need of protection by their elders and hierarchical superiors. It is sometimes appropriate to issue a definite order to lay off a story.
Saddam Hussein should also have done a little thinking ahead. His motive in execut- ing Bazoft was to issue a 'hands-off' warning to the Western media. It is unlike- ly to have this effect. It will lead to more attention of precisely the kind he does not want. The difference will be that Western newspapers and television networks will be more, inclined to employ well-paid covert Iraqi sources for the material than to send in their own people. The net result will tend to be more hostile coverage. In any case the Bazoft affair has been a public- relations disaster for the regime. Now that Egypt has largely washed its hands of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Hussein has made Iraq the principal 'protector' of Arab rights and aspires to the role once played by Colonel Nasser, trying in the process to acquire an armoury of exceptionally nasty weapons. Now at one bound he has forced the world to look closely at his iniquities and has put himself right in the top rank of the Most Wanted dictators, alongside Kim Il Sung, Castro, Gaddafi and Mengistu. What he has not yet grasped, though the fall of Ceausescu should have warned him, is that being listed as a global hate-figure is much more dangerous than it used to be. The age of Nasser, when a Middle Eastern dictator could cock a snook at the West knowing he had Comrade Khrushchev or Brezhnev behind him, is as dead as the colonel. Russia is not only getting out of the aid-to-terrorism business but in- creasingly sees itself as a 'civilised' state (ie, white, Western and Christian) menaced by an angry arc of Muslim vio- lence and unreason. Anyone who doubts this should ask the Israelis, who are de- lighted by their growing friendship with Russia and her former satellites. The next time the Israelis find it necessary to carry out a pre-emptive strike against one of Saddam's Satanic mills they are likely to have the tacit approval not only of Washington but of Moscow. And it's worth remembering, on this point, that Moscow now has a large, increasingly independent and assertive media community, which identifies itself with persecuted journalists. In short then, hanging Bazoft, as Boulay de la Meurthe said of Bonaparte's murder of the Duc d'Enghien, 'is worse than a crime — it's a blunder'.
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