Panel 2: "Die Realität des Krieges – Abbild oder Konstrukt?" Alltag – Distanz - Wirkung
Hazem Al AminDid the world truly change after Sept. 11? For me it did, and in a big way. I did not arrive at this conclusion from extended thoughts about the wars that resulted and will result since that date, nor from analyzing the changes that affected the policies of countries and alliances. These are purely personal sentiments that I felt due to visits that I made to a number of countries that are involved in this monumental event, beside America. They are also due to encounters that made me believe that something devilish had touched the minds, and marginalized what we used to consider as the essence and nature of things.
Still, the small entity that is me, who always used to believe that the world was steered by some rational power, and that America, the guardian of this planet, can only be fully conscious as it sways the minds of smaller nations. But this America appears to have truly lost confidence in its power and rationality. How is it possible that children like me could move stealthily into the heart of that system that had guided them and to cause havoc to its mind and soul? And who are those small devils my brothers in the sleeping cells? As for the alert America and its fascinating presidents, its vigilance became for me monotonous long nights, and later sleeplessness and burdens brought about by enormous responsibilities that a minor was troubled with.
Following 9/11, I began to view people, where ever I encountered them, at airports, on the borders of countries, during round table discussions, at security offices, in the desert as well as on the mountains, with greater anxiety. That date brought closer to my convictions facts that I tended to dismiss. The other secret and invisible life of many entities is stronger than the life that they exhibit to us. The argument of the man whom I met in the Jordanian desert while I was working there became more forceful, and Al Jazira's airing of videos to leaders of Al Qaeda after the event became alive with flesh and blood. For example, our colleague, Ahmad Zeidan, (who later became one of the stars of the post 9/11 world), had sent us a documentary on the wedding of the son of Usama Bin Laden, which he had attended. He filmed that wedding and sent portions of the footage to Al Jazira, which he also acts as their correspondent. After 9/11, we went back to look into the details of the wedding. Bin Laden wore in it a traditional Yemeni robe and carried a dagger on his waist. Moreover, his inner circle was from Yemen. We associated that with his deprival of the Saudi citizenship. We didn't make such interpretation when we saw the film for the first time on Al Jazira. We did it after 9/11.
We paid particular attention to how militant Islam used the video technology in transmitting its messages. We recalled an earlier technology that the Islamists of Egypt had used in the 1960s, 70s and 80s for the same purpose, as well as to ferment discontent against the government and society. At the time, they used simple voice cassettes, which peddlers in the souks of Egypt used to switch on a high volume. That method resembled the start on a new relationship between militant Islam and modern technology. The dangers of using modern technology for its unintended aims began to loom.
But the tape of the wedding of Bin Laden's son and the daughter of one of his lieutenants, Abu Hafs Al Masri, was not just a tape that was made for a passing event. It included several messages to several parties.
Zeidan told me that the shooting of the film was practically directed by Bin Laden. He determined the location of the camera that was intended to shoot his images as he recited a poem that was written for the occasion, (the poem included lines in which Bin Laden admitted for the first time his responsibility for the bombing of the USS Cole in Aden.) Moreover, Zeidan told me when I met him in Islamabad that Bin Laden was careful to review how the camera caught his face, and that after he checked the footage, he did not like it. He saw that the size of his neck damaged the image he wanted to portray. Bin Laden then had the scene shot again. He recited the poem to the camera, in the absence of an audience. He was alone with the camera. The cheering of the audience, which appeared on the original footing, was rearranged through montage. Had we known about Bin Laden's attention to such details when we first saw the film on Al Jazira before 9/11, we would probably have ridiculed the leader of Al Qaeda. But since then, Ben Laden's demeanor during the taping of that film has inspired different thoughts in us.
I will present portions here of the footage of the first film that was aired by Al Jazira immediately after the American and international coalition attack on Afghanistan began, in which Bin Laden appears next to Ayman Al Zawahiri and Abu Geith, threatening America with more strikes: There is an effort to establish an image of Usama Bin Laden; it is the one in which he began the first portion of his speech that is released to the world within the video tape that was aired by Al Jazira…There is no doubt that the propagators of that image are aware of the sensitivity of the moment and its ability to impact the sentiments of Arabs and Muslims. The matter is not dependent on the portion in which Bin Laden threatens America, but also on his body language. He appears calm and in control of his emotions when he proceeds to explain the logistics involved using penetrating techniques of speech…There is no doubt that the man has a deep admiration of himself. Isn't such situation familiar in cases of struggle and rebellion? Che Givara, who was so in love with himself, began to film most parts of his life. And may be it was the images that he took of himself that led to his capture and killing. But if Givara's admiration of himself brought about his killing, what would Ben Laden's love of himself bring to him?
I had the opportunity to tap the influence that the several films that Al Jazira aired to the leaders of Al Qaeda and its activists after 9/11 in several parts of the Arab and Islamic worlds.. I was in Jordan when the tape in which Al Ghamidi, one of the perpetrators of 9/11, appeared. Amman is one of the traditional cities where the sympathies of the population tend to identify the militant speech of Bib Laden with the increasing feelings of oppression that their relatives in the West Bank and other occupied Palestinian areas are enduring. During the night that the film was aired, Amman was unusually quiet. The city was galvanized by the face of that young man, who was less than 20 years old. His wearing of the Palestinian headdress touched a deep sentiment in the hearts of the city's population.
Al Jazira capitalized on this mood. It determined that endorsing the views of the youths of the Afghani Jihad will find echoes in East and West. Didn't the interest by Western public opinion in the station tempt its directors? Toward its audience in the East, the station adopted the prevailing views while its competitors were chained to the regimes. The task was facilitated by a chain of bearded reporters some of whom had worked with the Afghani jihad, at least in the capacity of aid workers. Moreover, Al Jazira is rooted in a Gulf Salafite background, and its administrators are aware that attracting additional audience demands providing programs that appeal to the majority of the public in that area. In addition, the logic of the markets has eased the burden of the institutions from any other commitment, as it is difficult to say now any where in the world that any consideration exceeds that of the competition to attract audiences.
I will not enter too much in the details of the make up of Al Jazira whose performance intrigued me so much that I made a deliberate effort to establish contact with many of its staff. In Kabul, we were a small group of journalists staying at a hotel on to of a hill that overlooked the city. Al Jazira correspondent was among us. We all used to tease him that his real assignment was to wait for the delivery of the next video tape from Bin Laden from one of the surrounding mountains. But the teasing involved some envy, especially when its origin was the correspondent of a rival TV station, many of whom hoped that the tape would be delivered to them instead. But Bin Laden always chose Al Jazira.
There is a considerable difference between the performance of Al Jazira and the foreign policy of the state of Qatar. The small state of Qatar, whose powerful neighbors: Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, have always been a source of concern to it, has exaggerated normalizing its relations with Israel, preempting the delayed peace process. This has exposed it to criticism by the forces that are opposed to the peace process which have a strong presence on the Arab street. In adopting a popular line, Al Jazira covered for the policies of the country from where it transmits. And while Qatar will be the main base from where the United States will launch its anticipated attack on Iraq, Al Jazira is one of the windows through which the regime in Baghdad addresses the world. Moreover, Qatar is the only Arab country that has no peace treaty with Israel yet maintains an Israeli commercial office in its capital, Doha. And to balance this Israeli presence, Al Jazira endorsed the suicide operations. Still, Al Jazira, which has antagonized most of its neighbors, has never discussed a single issue concerning the country from where it transmits.
Today, the Bin Laden tapes have become outdated and they have lost much of their appeal. The Qatari station, which survives on what remains from credit it was able to accumulate during the war, has received nothing new for the past few months, causing its audience to decline. It is now waiting for a new war that would allow it to appeal to the sentiments of its audience, just as it had done before. It is likely that Iraq will be the next destination for Al Jazira, and it is also likely that the popular line of Al Jazira will attract a wider audience, mainly because of Iraq's proximity to the Arab heartland compared to that of Afghanistan. Moreover, striking Iraq now was not preceded by 9/11. Still, it is said that the Americans are anticipating the role of Al Jazira in their war preparations, and that the closure of their offices in Amman was a step in that direction since it is expected that Jordan will be the destination of many Iraqi refugees. Moreover, the probability that the Americans were behind closing down Al Jazira offices in Amman assumes credibility if one observes how the Americans have depleted much of the ethical values of the media.
Yet the performance of Al Jazira poses a disturbing question on the values that were produced by the societies of the developed world: Is it morally acceptable to allow the product of human civilization to those who might use it to spread hate among nations and cultures? A negative answer is truly frightening. Its model today is the disregard with which the current American administration is dealing with many of the issues, which reached the extent of bombing Al Jazira offices in Kabul without providing any explanation for such action. It is a sort of messing with human values which are supposed to be protected from the demagogy of Taliban. But now we are confronting another kind of demagogy, or a Texan popularization, that is more dangerous to Western values than any threat Taliban may pose. On the other hand, an affirmative answer involves a different kind of responsibilities, especially on our Eastern societies, which were neither influenced by the communication revolution nor by the liberal culture before it.
Jihad (Ghassan) El Zein
Although I have never been a war correspondent, over my thirty-year career as a journalist, I have been a reporter in many countries that were in a state of war. Add to this, of course, the "military" experience I acquired, not just as a Lebanese journalist, but as a resident of Lebanon during the 1975-1990 civil wars. After all, civil war transforms every citizen into a military target and makes daily living a kind of "military" existence between home, school and workplace regardless of whether workplace is a newspaper, a fruit-and-vegetable shop or any other profession. But that's another story.
In 1973, I was a member of a team sent to Damascus by a weekly magazine to cover the city during the October war between Israel on one hand, and Syria and Egypt on the other. Those in the audience who know the geography of Syria would know that Damascus was no more than 50 kilometres from the frontlines. Damascus was very much a battle zone in terms of military engagements and Israeli air raids.
In 1982, I had the chance to live through the siege of Beirut, as the occupation Israeli army encircled the city and battered it. For four months, the residents of West Beirut, where the PLO forces were concentrated, could only move within an area of three-kilometre square. At the height of bombardments, the area would narrow down to less than one kilometre square in the vicinity of the Ras-Beirut headland.
I had visited Kabul after the Soviet invasion in 1980. We were transported from Tashkent by military airplanes. I did not have the chance to visit Afghanistan again. However, I conducted an interview with Mullah Omar through the Afghan embassy in Islamabad in 1998. The ambassador sent off my questions by fax or internet. Some of the questions were answered quickly. Other questions Mullah Omar chose to answer in writing a few weeks later. I remember that the Taliban deprived the Afghanis of the Internet. The interview was published on 25 December 1998 and then re-published on 26 September 2001 in "An-nahar" newspaper where I am working. In 1975, I had had the opportunity to travel with fighters from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Eritrea. This is the organization to which the current Eritrean president, Essias Afourqi, initially belonged. We travelled by boat from Eden and spent one week on the desert coastline of Eritrea. We walked with the camels at night, and hid from Ethiopian airplanes during the day, until we reached Sudan.
I also spent a few days in Belfast immediately after the signature of the Good-Friday agreement. I spent most my time there on the divide line between Protestants and Catholics, and its famous walls of separation. I must add to this list of war-related reporting, a few visits I made to the north of Iraq, as a war zone, in the seventies and then in the mid-nineties.
What can I conclude from all this about war?
During the second Gulf war that was caused by Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, Jean Baudrillard wrote his famous essay: "The Gulf War Did Not Happen". If it did not happen, it was perhaps because the powerful media that went to cover the war had overshadowed it and, in some ways, replaced it.
There is no doubt that it is necessary to ask questions about the reproduction and construction of the reality of war. I think that all modern wars are re-made and manufactured in the media. Had these questions been unnecessary, we would not need historians. Historians would be replaced forever by journalists empowered by the telecommunication revolution. Unfortunately, even a crime as unambiguous as the attacks on New York will still need to be elucidated by historians. This is not just the result of the professional shortcomings of journalists, but even more the effect of the complexities of world politics. The "event" has happened but the background and the motives will remain a source of interest to the scientists of history and politics.
For a long time, September 11 was likened to Pearl Harbor in the context of American history. I will not dip into the debate over whether this comparison is justified or not. However, from the point of view of media history, the comparison is interesting. Did the intensive presence of the media on September 11 lead to a unanimous agreement over what happened? In Pearl Harbour, the media was almost absent and the question therefore did not arise. And yet the effects were the same. In relation to September 11, despite the TV coverage of the event, the ambiguities and the debate persisted.
In today's world, it is possible to shed light on the political objectives of warring sides. But the disagreement over objectives and facts will remain. Take one of the most notorious massacres in 20th century that is Sabra and Chatila. Even today, twenty years after the event, there are no agreed-upon many facts in the common version of what has happened. Fortunately, some essential facts are of course indisputable. The responsibility of Israel Defence Army for preparing and allowing the massacres to happen is no longer in doubt. The participation of the members of the Phalangists and Israeli-allied Lebanese forces in south Lebanon has also been demonstrated beyond doubt. But when it comes to individuals with the exception of Ariel Sharon and Elie Hobeika who was recently assassinated, the picture becomes far less clear. Who were the Israeli officers who were inside the camps? How were they hidden? Were they only watching?
All of these are facts that still need investigation. Nevertheless, there has been progress, especially in establishing the political responsibility for the massacres, thanks to the efforts of journalists and non-journalists in the Middle East and in the West. I was at my house in West Beirut which was less than four kilometres away from the camps when the events were unfolding. Rumors first began circulating among a frightened population that massacres in some Moslem quarters were being perpetrated. Later, it transpired that something ugly had happened only in the Palestinian camps.
The massacres of Sabra and Chatila are a good illustration of the ability of the media, through persistence and political pressure, to produce ethical results and establish responsibilities during wars. However, countless examples can be given in which authorities have been able to cover up or make investigation extremely difficult. The media is sometimes simply incapacitated. At others, it is complicit. The subject of this session calls into question the role of the media rather than that of political power. And this leads to a more difficult question about the extent to which the media is independent in the West. The same question of course arises in many cases in Asia, Africa and Latin America. This, in no way, diminishes the importance of the long journalistic traditions in countries like Egypt and Lebanon, to cite examples from the Arab world. There are questions too about the new challenges posed by satellite TV stations such as Al Jazeera which is the most striking media phenomenon at the moment. The station, which has emerged from the oil geopolitics of Qatar, is now playing an important role in the Arab world.
The re-production or construction of the reality of war is a question facing primarily the dominant Western media. We are only streams which flow in or out of the Western media ocean. Wars are often associated with the rise of the national discourse. Even civil wars are no exception because they reflect the division of society into two allegiances which compete for legitimacy through their own "nationalist" discourses, regardless of whether the basis of that "nationalism" is religious or ethnic.
An exceptionally powerful American nationalist discourse has emerged after September 11. The crime was exceptional and therefore the reaction had to be exceptional. What I find extraordinary, even today, is not so much the emergence of this discourse but its domination of the anti-terror war. Let me explain what I mean by going back to the first few days after the crime of September 11. In one of his first statements after his re-appearance in public, President Georges Bush announced, among other things, that the attacks on New York and Washington threaten our "way of life". I did not think back then that the American president had in mind the Americans only, when he talked about "our way of life", or even the Western world only. I thought that "way of life" included all of us, modern-day inhabitants of the planet. And so I was among those who believed that the American nationalist discourse would soon decline or at least would eventually co-exist with a more universal discourse on September 11.
Such a discourse would see September 11 as a crime which does indeed threaten the way of life of all the inhabitants of the planet, especially those living in cities. These have been my feelings ever since I watched CNN by coincidence as it covered the first strike on New York a few minutes after it happened, and then watched the second strike live. I saw this crime as one which threatens our way of life, in Beirut as in New York as in Vienna or any other city. Just imagine the kind of terrifying chaos that would sweep the world if this kind of "weapon" became common crashing passenger-loaded airplanes into civilian targets in order to settle a political score. Humanity, and not just America, cannot let this happen.
That is why I ask myself what may, admittedly, be a naïve question. Why is it that the nationalist American discourse remains so much more dominant than the "international nationalism" discourse, if I may use this term. I would have thought that the American administration has a vested interest in promoting such an "international" discourse. On the contrary, the administration is insisting on a form of nationalism which is beginning to raise serious problems with the other part of the Western world, namely Western Europe. Why else is the debate raging on the subject of similarity and difference between Europe and the United States? And I have not even mentioned all the complications of the dialogue between America and the Arab and Moslem world, I would like to conclude by saying that I feel that, as a citizen of Beirut, I share a common interest with any citizen of any other country in taking a stand against the crime of September 11.
This common interest is born of a sense of threat to a daily way of life and is therefore unaffected by any religious, cultural or political difference. It is possible, that September 11 may turn out to be the opening shot in an international civil war that the American nationalist discourse is still unable to understand. I am not using the term international civil war simply because I am under the influence of the Lebanese civil war. I come from a place which has suffered the worst kinds of national and religious wars, not just civil wars, and I mean by that the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Lebanese civil war is not the only experience that has marked the Lebanese since, as Arabs, we are also part of the Arab-Israeli conflict. There is consensus among the Lebanese for example that their own civil war has erupted as a result of the mounting regional conflict. Nor do I see international civil war as an incarnation of a clash of civilizations. I see it as a conflict within the same international civilization. It is the outcome of the threat to a common way of life in the world today. There is no more dangerous threat than the one generated by September 11.
The foremost criticism of the predominance of the American nationalist discourse is that it places America at odds with the world, even when it comes to matters over which America agrees with the world. On the positive side, I can see some progress in the US internal debate in the area of civil liberties. There is some progress, even if limited, brought about by Democrat senators and others who are questioning the post-September 11 slogans. In our own region of the world, there is a palpable progress in questioning the thoughts and actions of fundamentalist Moslems. But it is not the democrats amongst us who are benefiting from this progress. Rather, it is some of the despotic regimes who have a long history of antagonism to Islamic fundamentalism.