IRAQ:Amid Iraq's chaos and corruption, some are battling to protect press freedom, writes Lara Marlowein Baghdad
MY HOSTS at Support for Independent Media in Iraq (Simi) were an attractive middle-aged woman decked in gold jewellery and an ageing gentleman with impeccably dyed hair and a PhD. Both were former employees of Saddam Hussein's information ministry. It was almost like being under the ancien regime.
"I used to spy on foreign journalists," Maha Dhafir Majeed admitted, laughing sheepishly. "I kept files on them - when they arrived, who they saw, what they wrote . . ." For a moment I had visions of unearthing my file, like the protagonist in The Lives of Others.
Today, Majeed and her colleague Dr Kadhim al-Rikabi receive funding from the US state department, the EU and Unesco to defend press freedom in Iraq. It is, they tell me, a losing battle.
"There was a brief window of opportunity in 2003 and 2004 when you could tell the truth," says Rikabi. "As the government grows stronger, press freedom shrinks.
"Government corruption and the lack of public services are the two most dangerous topics for journalists," says Majeed. This year, Simi successfully campaigned against a draft law in the Kurdish region which specified "the most severe punishment" - which they understood to mean the death penalty - for "irresponsible" journalists.
In the aftermath of the invasion, the US budgeted $200 million and hired a former British paratrooper officer to set up IMN, the Iraqi Media Network, comprised of four television channels, a radio station and one newspaper. The British officer, whom I interviewed at the time, said IMN would be "like the BBC" and a beacon of independent journalism in the Arab world.
Then the US subcontracted development to their allies from the Maronite Lebanese network LBC. "That was when the corruption started," says Rikabi, who was a member of the original IMN board. "The Lebanese took a lot of money."
Rikabi prepared a documentary on corruption at the Iraqna mobile telephone company, widely known then as "Iraquna suraquna" ("Our Iraq; our thieves"). The head of the company bribed IMN not to broadcast it. In another incident, Rikabi was forced to sign a receipt saying a programme which cost $1,000 to make had cost $50,000. He left the network.
Iraqna is now under new management, but Iraq's main telephone system is worse than ever.
When I promised to telephone a US army sergeant who invited me to visit his unit, he e-mailed me back: "Ma'am, My Iraqna (telephone) is hit and miss, mostly miss out here . . ."
Earlier this year, Simi protested to US authorities when prime minister Nuri al-Maliki fired the director of IMN and appointed a director from the Supreme Islamic Council, which is allied with Maliki's Dawa party "in clear violation of CPA order number 66, written by the Americans", says Majeed. The Americans did nothing.
My initiation to Iraqi media issues was interrupted by a more urgent matter of corruption. My interpreter, a Sunni Muslim named Omar, is afraid to go to the Shia-run interior ministry to apply for exit visas for the journalists who employ him. A Shia officer meets him outside the ministry and stamps the passports; but he was leaving on holiday, and this was my last chance to obtain the precious stamp, without which one cannot leave the country. Officially, the visa costs 20,000 Iraqi dinars ($17). But ministry officials demand a "gift" of between $100 and $150.
Omar and I were discussing the exit visa when we arrived at a checkpoint in Karrada with posters of Imam Ali and Imam Hussein glued to the cement 'T-walls'. "Shhhh!" he warned, lest the Shia policemen hear us speaking English and decide to check our identity. If I sit quietly in the back seat with my headscarf, sunglasses and black robe, they don't seem to notice.
"In Karrada, they're all Badr Brigade," Omar explained as we drove on, referring to the militia founded in Iran in the 1980s. Though Badr assassinated former Sunni officers and scientists after the regime fell, the US welcomed them into the Iraqi police and army. A militia is not a militia, it seems, if it refrains from attacking US forces.
Omar and I were treated to a tour of the Green Zone the other evening, courtesy of a US employee. Five years ago, the protected Zone had a country club feel to it, with surreal juxtapositions of lawns, flowerbeds and Saddam's bombed-out palaces.
Today the Green Zone is almost as sinister as the rest of Baghdad. US forces use the approaches to the July 14th bridge for target practice every morning, and it is a field of rubble. Shelters with "duck and cover" stencilled on them dot the landscape, to protect inhabitants from al-Mahdi rockets.
There are no more garden vistas: each embassy, the CIA, the UN, hides behind its own high blast walls, mirroring the segregated Shia and Sunni communities outside.
US troops fired ordnance at one of Saddam's four giant hands at the Crossed Swords monument. The hands were cast in Basingstoke to commemorate Saddam's victory in the Iran-Iraq war. Now broken bronze panels litter the ground, and Iraqis with access to the Green Zone have pillaged many of the thousands of Iranian helmets that formed the base of the sculpture.
As the sun set, a solitary American in Ray-Bans, flanked by body guards, walked the length of the parade ground beneath the crossed swords. Sparrows chirped in the undergrowth. And moody Omar went into a sulk. "This was a public place," he finally said. "We had picnics here. I loved to come here as a child."