Category Archives: Iraq

Snapshot of journalsts’ dangers in Iraq

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One of the “commenters”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2007/05/dmitry_chebotayev_russian_phot.php#comment-211984 in the “post about Dmitry”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2007/05/dmitry_chebotayev_russian_phot.php below wanted to know how many jour­nal­ists who had died in Iraq were for­eign and how many were Iraqi. Well, the Com­mit­tee to Pro­tect Jour­nal­ists has just such a list.
Of the 101 jour­nal­ists killed in Iraq, 79 were Iraqi. The oth­ers included 12 Euro­peans, three from other Arab coun­tries, two from the United States and five from all other coun­tries.
That the vast major­ity of jour­nal­ists killed — as well as the “38 media workers”:http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/Iraq/iraq_media_killed.html, which includes trans­la­tors and the like — are Iraqi is sig­nif­i­cant. Like the Iraqi civil­ians, the local jour­nal­ists there are the ones who are most affected by the vio­lence that per­me­ates their coun­try.
Four­teen jour­nal­ists died in 2003, the year of the inva­sion and the tra­jec­tory has been mostly point­ing up in the num­ber of deaths each year: 24 in 2004, 23 in 2005, 32 in 2006 and now 8 in 2007.
For a cap­sule account of each jour­nal­ist who was killed, here are the links:
* “for 2007″:http://www.cpj.org/killed/killed07.html#iraq
* “for 2006″:http://www.cpj.org/killed/killed06.html#iraq
* “for 2005″:http://www.cpj.org/killed/killed_archives/2005_list.html#iraq
* “for 2004″:http://www.cpj.org/killed/killed_archives/2004_list.html#iraq
* “for 2003″:http://www.cpj.org/killed/killed_archives/2003_list.html#iraq
(Note, the links include jour­nal­ists killed in places other than Iraq as well.)

Dmitry Chebotayev, Russian photographer, killed in Iraq

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Dmitry-Chebotayev-AP.jpgIt’s been a fatal week­end for for­eign cor­re­spon­dents.
On Sun­day, the day the plane car­ry­ing Anthony Mitchell of AP was found, Dmitry Cheb­o­tayev, a Russ­ian pho­tog­ra­pher for EPA and Russ­ian Newsweek was killed in Diyala province along with six U.S. sol­diers, with whom he was embed­ded.
As the Com­mit­tee to Project Jour­nal­ists said in a statement,

The Com­mit­tee to Pro­tect Jour­nal­ists mourns the death on Sun­day of Dmitry Cheb­o­tayev, the first Russ­ian jour­nal­ist to be killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led inva­sion in March 2003. Cheb­o­tayev, a free­lance pho­tog­ra­pher embed­ded with U.S. forces, was killed along with six Amer­i­can sol­diers when a road­side bomb struck a U.S. mil­i­tary vehi­cle in Diyala province, north­east of Bagh­dad.
Cheb­o­tayev was on assign­ment for the Russ­ian edi­tion of Newsweek mag­a­zine, report­ing on the efforts of U.S. forces to con­trol roads in Diyala province, Leonid Parfy­onov, edi­tor of the magazine’s Russ­ian edi­tion, told CPJ. Cheb­o­tayev had been in Iraq for more than two months.
…
Cheb­o­tayev, 29, had free­lanced for sev­eral news agen­cies, includ­ing the German-based Euro­pean Pressphoto Agency and the inde­pen­dent Moscow daily Kom­m­er­sant. A sam­pling of his pho­tos can be viewed on his Light­stalk­ers pro­file page. Light­stalk­ers is an online net­work of pho­tog­ra­phers and other visual jour­nal­ists that serves as a direc­tory, data­base, and resource cen­ter.
At least 101 jour­nal­ists and 38 media sup­port staffers have been killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led inva­sion in March 2003, mak­ing Iraq the dead­liest con­flict for the press in CPJ’s 26-year his­tory. Seven embed­ded jour­nal­ists have been killed since the war began.

He last logged into Light­stalk­ers five days ago. His loca­tion is listed as Baqoubah, Iraq, and his travel log shows that he worked in Rus­sia, Ukraine, Lebanon, Syria, Chech­nya and Iraq. My friend Bill Put­nam, another pho­tog­ra­pher, offered advice to him regard­ing embed­ding in Iraq. It’s another sad day for jour­nal­ists in the tight-knit world of Mid­dle East cov­er­age, after the loss of Anthony on Sat­ur­day.
Six sol­diers and a jour­nal­ist killed in one blast makes me sus­pect it was an awfully big IED that hit a Bradley fight­ing vehi­cle, rather than a humvee, which holds five guys, tops. I’m just spec­u­lat­ing, though.
I hope I don’t have to do any more posts like this. Rest in peace, Dmitry and Anthony. You will be missed.

Moral Shame and Humiliation

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George Packer has another great and heart­break­ing story out in this week’s _New Yorker_. It’s about the Iraqi trans­la­tors and work­ers who signed up for the Amer­i­can rebuild­ing project in Iraq but who are now being thrown to the wolves by the United States. I men­tioned this “a cou­ple of posts back”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2007/03/language_in_iraq_on_the_radar.php, but George’s “full story is worth a full and thought­ful read”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/26/070326fa_fact_packer?printable=true.
As he puts it:

Between Octo­ber, 2005, and Sep­tem­ber, 2006, the United States admit­ted two hun­dred and two Iraqis as refugees, most of them from the years under Sad­dam. Last year, the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion increased the allot­ment to five hun­dred. By the end of 2006, there were almost two mil­lion Iraqis liv­ing as refugees out­side their coun­try — most of them in Syria and Jor­dan. Amer­i­can pol­icy held that these Iraqis were not refugees, that they would go back to their coun­try as soon as it was sta­bi­lized. The U.S. Embassies in Dam­as­cus and Amman con­tin­ued to turn down almost all visa appli­ca­tions from Iraqis. So the fastest-growing refugee cri­sis in the world remained hid­den, receiv­ing lit­tle atten­tion other than in a few reports from orga­ni­za­tions like Human Rights Watch and Refugees International.

Of course, the rea­son the Iraqis are being treated like this is because the Bush admin­is­tra­tion refuses to admit that Iraq isn’t a abat­toir of its mak­ing. And there is insult to the injury the Iraqis are fac­ing. At least one Iraqi employee of the U.S. embassy in Bagh­dad was refused entry to the U.S. because he had paid a ran­som to kid­nap­pers, vio­lat­ing the “mate­r­ial sup­port” clause of the Patriot Act.
One of the heroes of the story is a USAID worker named Kirk John­son, who grew dis­il­lu­sioned with life in the Green Zone and asked to be trans­ferred to Fal­lu­jah. I think I met John­son when “I was in Fal­lu­jah in Nov. 2005″:http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1126748,00.html, but I’m not sure. Regard­less, he has been a dri­ving force in get­ting the U.S. to open its doors more to Iraqi refugees, with the high­est pri­or­ity given to those who worked for the U.S. and are now in the most dan­ger.
“This is the brink right now, where our part­ners over there are run­ning for their lives,” he said to George. “I defy any­one to give me the counter-argument for why we shouldn’t let these peo­ple in.” He then quoted some­thing Pres­i­dent Ger­ald Ford once said regard­ing his deci­sion to admit a hun­dred and thirty thou­sand Viet­namese after the fall of Saigon: “To do less would have added moral shame to humiliation.”

Failure to Communicate

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A for­mer trans­la­tor in Iraq, Dustin Lan­gan, wrote me today to tip me off about an inter­est­ing read in _Radar_, about the lack of good trans­la­tors in Iraq. He was recruited by MZM Inc., one of the com­pa­nies con­nected with the “Duke” Cun­ning­ham cor­rup­tion scan­dal, to work in Iraq from 2003 to 2004, and he has some good points to make.
One that is per­son­ally dear to me is the treat­ment of the Iraqi trans­la­tors. As he says:

[Iraqi trans­la­tors] have been treated ter­ri­bly. They’ve been killed. They have not been pro­tected. They have not received visas or any­thing. They’re being killed at very high rates. The result is many peo­ple now in Iraq think if you work with the coali­tion you’re an idiot, because you’re work­ing with some­one who doesn’t care about you, and then you’re killed.

I’ve known a few ‘terps, as they’re called, and my friend George Packer has made this “one of his major concerns”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20061127&s=packer112706. It should be one that makes every feel­ing Amer­i­can — whether you sup­ported the war or not — ashamed at how we’re treat­ing these peo­ple.
Any­way, it’s a good inter­view. Thanks for the tip, Dustin!

Guilty, guilty, guilty

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Just before 11 p.m. Beirut time (GMT +0200), Sad­dam Hus­sein was found guilty and sen­tenced to death by hanging.

“Long live the peo­ple, down with the trai­tors, down with the con­quer­ers!” shouted Sad­dam Hus­sein after the ver­dict was read. “Damn you and your court.”

Right this moment, Bagh­dad is under an uneasy and indef­i­nite cur­few. I just spoke with my old TIME col­leagues who are there, and they reported a lot of vio­lence around them. How­ever, CNN is report­ing only spo­radic, cel­e­bra­tory gun­fire. The two bureaus are in dif­fer­ent parts of Bagh­dad, how­ever, so they may both be right.

Any­way, yippee. I guess we can all agree the inva­sion, the destruc­tion, the loot­ing, the thou­sands of Amer­i­cans slain, the tens of thou­sands wounded, and the pos­si­bly hun­dreds of thou­sands of Iraqis killed, the destruc­tion of the Iraqi state, the col­lapse of Iraqi soci­ety were all worth it.

Well, if the GOP main­tains its edge in Con­gress, I’m sure some­one in Wash­ing­ton will think it was worth it. (I’m look­ing at you, Karl Rove.) But they may be the only ones on the planet.

Did any­one really think this would come out any other way? I cov­ered this trial for a bit before I quit the Mesopotamian char­nel house, neé Iraq, in March and the Amer­i­cans have stage-managed this trial from the get-go. The trial is con­sid­ered a joke in Iraq and around the region. No one took it seri­ously. And now, Sad­dam Hus­sein, a man who no doubt deserves harsh pun­ish­ment for his crimes, will be brought to American-brokered jus­tice. I can not empha­size enough how many Iraqis will see this as either revenge by Saddam’s ene­mies and an unjust, pre­or­dained out­come (most Sun­nis), or a process that took too long and could have been avoided if the bas­tard had just been strung up when the Amer­i­cans caught him in Decem­ber 2003 (pretty much every­one else in Iraq.)

Not much room in there for a cel­e­bra­tion of the Iraq’s shiny new rule of law.

And now, two days before the Amer­i­can midterm elec­tions, Sad­dam gets the death sen­tence. Already cel­e­bra­tory gun­fire is echo­ing across Bagh­dad, but soon after, Iraq will likely be an orgy of vio­lence and blood as insur­gents and sup­port­ers of Sad­dam respond. Will the ver­dict be worth the deaths from that vio­lence, too?

So, to review: Amer­i­cans invade Iraq, destroy the gov­ern­ment, catch a butcher and put him in a show trial that was already marked by inter­fer­ence and show­boat­ing by all sides, and then watch glee­fully as he’s sen­tenced to death two days before the polit­i­cal party that started this fiasco face almost cer­tain defeat.

Sev­eral ques­tions: For Iraqis, the ques­tion now is what hap­pens in the appeal process. An auto­matic appeal starts 10 days from today, and will likely take a cou­ple of months. Then, 30 days after the end of the appeal process, Sad­dam will die by hang­ing. (I don’t expect his appeal to be successful.)

For Amer­i­cans, there needs to be some soul-searching, start­ing with the ques­tion I asked above: Was this ver­dict, as sat­is­fy­ing as it may be to some, worth the dis­as­ter that is Iraq? Are Amer­i­cans still will­ing to send their sons and daugh­ters there to keep Iraqis from each oth­ers’ throats for a few months more?

For the White House, they’re now anx­iously watch­ing the vot­ers, ask­ing the ques­tion, Do Amer­i­cans still feel Sad­dam was a enough of a threat to reward the GOP now for get­ting this ver­dict? Will it rally the GOP faith­ful? Pos­si­bly. The whole GOTV thing, for me, is the big vari­able in this elec­tion. I just don’t know what will or won’t moti­vate GOP and Demo­c­ra­tic vot­ers to get out there.

That said, I think I know what they’re telling them­selves in the West Wing, but I sus­pect (naïvely hope?) that most vot­ers kind of fig­ured what the ver­dict would be and have already fac­tored that into their polit­i­cal choices. This electorally-timed ver­dict will do lit­tle to change their minds. Nor will it do any­thing to change the dynamic on the ground in Iraq. In fact, look for the vio­lence to get worse in the next few day as Sunni insur­gents weigh in with their opin­ion on the ver­dict and Shi’ite death squads respond.