Newspapers sprout in once-barren Iraq
Saddam takes beating in freed media
Moni Basu - Staff
Friday, May 23, 2003
Baghdad, Iraq --- Adib Shaaban al-Ani spent a dozen years as press secretary for Odai Hussein and edited Babil, the newspaper owned by the deposed dictator's son.
"Odai was not a human being. He was a sadist," said al-Ani, who can now write about the horrors of the Saddam Hussein regime freely in his own newspaper, Assaah (The Hour).
In a recent editorial, he wrote, "The dictator has gone, and with him his corrupt system."
Despite the chaotic postwar atmosphere, Iraqis are already enjoying media freedoms that were unimaginable not only in the 24 years of Saddam's repressive rule but also in the eight decades since the British created this nation.
Baghdad still lacks critical services --- water, electricity and telephones --- and lawlessness prevails on the gun-infested streets, but within the weeks since Saddam's demise, at least a dozen independent newspapers and television, and radio stations have sprung up across the capital.
Previously banned books have also surfaced in market stalls around the city.
Gone are the days of kowtowing state-run newspapers that filled their pages with ingratiating praise of Saddam and his regime.
Readers until recently could not turn to the foreign press: Newspapers and magazines from abroad were banned, as were satellite dishes.
During the war, Baathist newspapers stopped printing, and state-run television and radio stations went off the air. When American forces proved victorious, the media vacuum was filled by existing anti-Saddam papers in the northern Kurdish areas and by Arabic language newspapers published abroad, such as Al-Hayat.
Since then, assorted local newspapers have blossomed, representing left and right, Kurdish and Arabic, Sunni and Shiite.
New radio stations broadcast contemporary Western music, and U.S. military forces have two stations of their own.
Imad al-Bakri, editor of a former state-run sports weekly called Baath Riyadhi, said he reorganized his staff after the war to create The New Sportage.
"It's the same people but very different articles," he said. "We could not speak freely before say, for instance, about the mistakes made by the Olympic Committee."
Not all the new newspapers will last, al-Ani predicted, because of their narrow agendas "like the man who started a newspaper to tell the world about how he was victimized by Saddam" or papers that sought solely to seek revenge on Baath Party members.
But the atmosphere of free expression is one that information-starved Iraqis are quick to relish.
"We had many newspapers and weekly magazines here before the fall of the regime," al-Ani said. "But they could never cross the red line. They could never speak ill of the regime."
If there was little criticism of anyone inside Iraq, the opposite is true these days, including stinging commentary on the American reconstruction efforts.
An eight-page, twice-weekly broadsheet called Al-Sabah (the Dawn) ran a political cartoon of an Iraqi man yelling at an American soldier: "Forget democracy. We want our gasoline!" referring to the immense shortage of fuel and mind-boggling waits at Baghdad's pumps. Many Iraqis blame the Americans for being too slow to return Baghdad to some measure of normalcy.
On a recent afternoon on the highly commercial Sa'adoun Street, several men crowded a newsstand to read the headlines. Assaah carried an exclusive about a man who posed as Saddam's body double for years.
London-based Azzaman, which began publishing a Baghdad edition, regularly publishes color photos and news about Madonna, Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears.
In its debut edition last week, Al-Muajaha (Face-off) published a front-page feature called "The Dictator's Corner."
The column's writer plans to profile dictators and the heinous acts they committed, the idea being that Iraqis can then compare Saddam to some of the men he rivaled in notoriety.
First billing went to Haiti's Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who died in 1971 after years of repressive and corrupt rule.
"Eventually, I want Saddam to read it," wrote the author, convinced the Iraqi dictator is alive and well, "hiding in some hole."
The lack of government has magnified the need for the fledgling papers, al-Ani said. Because television and radio require often nonexistent electricity, Iraqis are depending on the print media to deliver.
"Every Iraqi is thirsty to hear news about their salaries, about electricity, when clean water will be restored, when the security situation will improve, how they will get food and when the sanctions will be lifted," he said. "Our aim is to inform people at a very important time."
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