Mike Ferner
Voices in The Wilderness

BAGHDAD — Directly across the Tigris River from the offices of Al-Mada newspaper sit some of the most heavily bombed hulks of presidential palaces and government buildings from the U.S. invasion of last year. On this side of the river, concrete blast walls and razor wire extend past the paper’s offices located on Abu Nuwas Street in central Baghdad.

Zuhair Al-Jezairy, assistant managing editor, ignores the scenery as he escorts his guest past a small parking area into a modest courtyard dotted with palm trees. Sitting on the back porch of a gracious, 100 year-old house renovated into newsrooms and offices, he explained the logistics of publishing a morning daily in Iraq.

“We depend on car travel to distribute the paper,” he says, after confirming with his circulation manager that the workday begins at 3:30am for the four drivers. “We take first to the central Baghdad distribution center, and then to other main cities-from Basra in the south to Mossul in the north, all by 10:00.” He acknowledged this schedule routinely results in speeding violations and “last month two accidents.”

In production since last July, Al-Mada’s circulation is around 10,000, with occasional peak runs of 20,000 copies. “We are limited by our presses, and plan to install more of them soon,” the wiry, 58 year-old newsman stated. The mention of press capacity leads to the first discussion of the ousted Saddam Hussein government.

“Many presses belonged to the old government and religious parties, and several newspapers got access to them right after the war,” he said, adding that “the intelligence services had the modern printing presses. All the other ones were older, from the 1970’s.”

Not long after the former government was toppled by the U.S. invasion, he said that newspapers sprang up by the score. “Under Saddam Hussein there were only three main papers, one for the Ba’ath Party, one for the Kurdish party, and one for the government, but they had essentially the same news and layout. Right after Saddam’s government fell we had over 100 papers, but some of them lasted only for a few issues.”

This explosion of newspapers magnified the shortage of printing presses and a shortage of journalists. Al-Jezairy recalled that “there had been two waves of emigration of intellectuals, in the late 1970’s and again during the Iran-Iraq war and the sanctions.”

He recalled that in 1976, the government decreed that media and culture should fit in with Ba’ath Party ideology. Writers and others were required to sign a form stating they were joining the Ba’athists or at least refusing to join any other political organization, “forcing many journalists to leave.” Those who stayed were eventually circumscribed by the Saddam Hussein dictum, “It is not necessary for writers to report everything they know.” Al-Jezairy left Iraq in 1979, remembering that Hussein was nominated for president on July 18 of that year. “I left a few days before,” he smiled grimly.

Covering the Lebanese civil war and other hot spots kept him busy for several years, earning him the nickname “correspondent of the boiling point,” as he worked under contract for such newspapers as Al-Hayat, Al-Hurria, and Al-Safeer.

The next stop for the soft spoken journalist was as senior producer for Associated Press Television News, a job that took him to the United States three times in the mid 90’s. “Once was to do a feature on Islam and the West, one to cover the U.N. financial crisis, and one,” he said, barely repressing a laugh, “was to cover the O.J. trial in Los Angeles.”

Keeping his hand in electronic media means he also produces television documentaries on subjects like Saddam Hussein’s family, a four-part series now airing on Al-Arabia TV; a documentary on Africa; and one on his own return to Iraq from London last year.

Returning to the vagaries of journalism in today’s Iraq, Al-Jezairy explained that “the older generation of reporters came from literature. Most of the newer generation had a two-year training in Baghdad University’s media college where they learned to write only short reports-and under Saddam Hussein they had to depend on his phrases to praise war and soldiers. That’s my problem with reporters today, they can’t criticize. But that is beginning to change now and the cover is coming off.”

Answering the frequent question, “was the war worth it?” Al-Jezairy responded, “To me it’s a complicated feeling. As a writer and human I can’t accept the war as a way to solve a problem but it was unfortunately the only way to get rid of Saddam. Most of the people I met think yes it deserves the high price of war and the situation after. There are some worries that the occupations will take longer time than they expected, and the American solders with their tanks in the streets increasing their daily problems.”

Two other difficulties his reporters face are a lack of official sources and an abundance of rumors, both worsened when the government fell last April and documents were looted and burned. “Even official sources often do not have documents. This makes it difficult in many things, for example, when many people claim to own the same home. Even new owners print their own documents sometimes.” His paper tries to overcome this problem by requiring that reporters get confirmation from three sources.

Al-Mada’s biggest story so far, and one of the biggest to rock post-war Iraq, is dubbed the “Oil for Loyalty” series, a take-off on the UN’s “oil for food” program allowed under the sanctions.

Oil for Loyalty chronicles corruption of international proportions. “It has affected people from Nazis to Communists, to churches, to members of parliament, to elites in France, Bulgaria, Hungary, Jordan, Switzerland, and the son of the symbol of Pan Arabism, Gamal Abdel-Nasser,” enumerated the feisty editor. “Some people were our friends, but we have to tell the truth.”

The paper kicked off the story in February by publishing a list of 175 people who benefited from Saddam Hussein’s illegal largesse. A small and often undocumented network of top administration officials rewarded political parties and individuals around the world for loyalty to the Hussein government with “coupons” for millions of barrels of Iraqi oil smuggled out of the country under the noses of UN inspectors and sold on the open market, using a special account in Iraq’s Al-Rafidain Bank. He said his paper could likely prove even wider complicity in the corruption but for the lack of official documents.

“The story had been unofficially known for some time by many people, but never proven until the government fell last year,” Al-Jezairy said. “Since we broke the story we have been threatened with lawsuits from many, many people around the world; the Iraqi Governing Council has begun meeting weekly on the subject to try and get some of the money back; and the international press has been very interested. Sometimes we give over 20 interviews a day and might have five or six journalists waiting in the office.” He added that he has been interviewed by only two American journalists, however.

Asked what he saw in the future for his paper, Al-Jezairy quickly answered, “new printing presses,” followed by a description of the kind of issues Al-Mada will be known for. “We will cover the effort to get rights for women and other important political stories. There is a lot of interest in Saddam Hussein’s family, and in crime. Several other papers concentrate on this, but not Al-Mada.”

Ferner spent the month of February, 2003 in Baghdad and Basra, with Voices in the Wilderness, a Chicago-based campaign to nonviolently resist economic and military warfare against Iraq. He returned recently to write about the current situation in Iraq. He is a member of Veterans for Peace and works for the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy.

© 2004 by Mike Ferner