Friday January 02, 2004
Manufacturing Reality
One good thing about television is its persuasive power; once seen by one’s own eyes, no one denies what has been seen. Thus, when the BBC TV’s now famous program “Panorama” telecast “The Price of Victory”, a documentary on Iraq, on 28th September 2003 at a late hour (10:15 pm), those who saw it could not deny what they watched: a tale of humiliation and degradation of the now liberated Iraqis.
It is one thing to read that Iraq is fast turning into another West Bank; quite another to watch it happening: the midnight knocks, the abusive language of the American soldiers and the frightened faces of women rushing to cover themselves, all exposed through a medium that could not be discounted.
The enforcement of collective punishment, that most repressive ploy of the Zionists Palestinians have withstood for over fifty years, is now a daily reality for Iraqis. The documentary showed American soldiers kicking down doors in the middle of the night, shouting four letter words and taking prisoners—men who have simply disappeared from the face of earth, leaving behind sobbing relatives, grieving wives and mothers, and crying children.
“Iraq under occupation is hell,” said one Iraqi, “those who had come to liberate it, have quickly turned it into a colony.” This was confirmed by a remark of an American soldier who told the BBC crew that Iraqis “understand no language but that of force”. When the man in charge of this vast experiment in humiliation, Paul Bremer, was asked by the “Panorama” program team if the Americans kept records of how many Iraqis they have captured or killed, he replied: “I don’t know. We don’t keep numbers.”
This reply sums up the American occupation: no numbers. Neither of the barrels of oil being pumped out, nor of men, women and children taken into custody or killed. No numbers at all. A civilization obsessed with numbers has no need to keep numbers of those who are vanishing in Iraq!
The documentary showed American soldiers manhandling women wearing hijab, calling them names and pushing them around. It showed Iraqi men being grabbed by American soldiers. It had clips of men receiving violent beatings in the streets of Baghdad. This documented evidence of the fruits of liberation has, however, produced no discernable reaction in the international media. It was a BBC initiative that was aired and that now gathers dust on some old shelf. This, too, is somehow in keeping with the nature of things as they unfold.
Those who watched the BBC documentary recoiled with horror, but those who are going through these torments and humiliations on a daily basis have no support system. Their brethren in faith and millions of other human beings who had come out on the streets against the unjust invasion have simply disappeared from the daily realities of Iraq. This has been largely achieved through a massive media “black out” of what is going on in Iraq.
This massive effort is only second to the one organized during the invasion of Iraq. That strategy, in turn, was a large-scale version of what had been employed in Afghanistan. During the Afghan invasion, the media was manipulated to downplay the mass murder of thousands of victims of US aggression. It was not a total success because of various factors and although Western media in general ignored the numerous tragedies, alternate media and the internet provided plenty of information into the making of that tragedy. The documentary, Massacre in Mazar by the Irish director Jamie Doran, for example, was screened in June 2002 before a select audiences in Europe. It documents events following the November 21, 2001 fall of Konduz, and presents a powerful testimony from Afghan witnesses that US troops collaborated in the torture and killings of thousands of suspected Taliban prisoners near Mazar-i-Sharif. The film prompted demands for an international commission of inquiry on war crimes in Afghanistan and received widespread coverage in the European press, with major stories in the Guardian, Le Monde, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Die Welt and other newspapers, but that was all; it was subsequently “blocked out”.
The case of Iraq is, however, different. Here, the US control over information was ensured through the technique of “controlled access”; only the embedded journalists were allowed to visit places of importance and take pictures. This did not prevent a handful of “independent” journalists struggling against a massive institutional effort to block the flow of information, but the overall result was a near-complete control over the coverage of events.
Since the fall of Baghdad, this mechanism has been perfected. The information about what Americans are doing in Iraq is not a part of the daily realities of the North American public. As a result, the American public is not counting body bags; at least not yet. One has to go to the alternate media to discover the steady rise in US casualties, but the information about the missing and dead Iraqis is more difficult to find. There are the usual “Weblogs” and occasional independent accounts of what is happening inside Iraq, but this trickling does not produce any reaction; it simply vanishes in the massive onslaught of other news. Those who planned the invasion and those who are now signing millions of dollars in “contracts”, certainly know the power of media and also the methods to control it.
Even the media in the Muslim world has become part of this effort which attempts two things: (i) it hides the terrible daily suffering of Iraqis by simply not reporting what is going on, and (ii) it is trying to legitimate the occupation through a clever use of language. Thus the resistance against occupation is insurgency, and those who are sacrificing their lives for the sake of their honor, freedom and dignity are insurgents. Insurgency, by definition is an uprising against a legal authority! This reminds one of the 1857 heroic effort of the Indian Muslims against British occupation which was called a “Mutiny” by the British—a word that found its way into Pakistani textbooks.
This effort may seem to succeed for now, but there is nothing more definitive about history than its cruel impartiality to the application of its own laws. And history tell us that such efforts are doomed simply because there is no substitute for truth. In this ultimate sense, no matter what the media moghuls achieve through a clever use of language, fabricated realities disappear instantaneously as soon as they come into contact with truth. What such ploys do achieve, however, is short-term gains: ratings at the polls and deceptive market trends. Both of these are now becoming increasingly important for those who now face elections.
In the final analysis, it is the resistance in Iraq that will ultimately define the contours of 2004 and beyond. It is the strength of these men and women which will shape the future of Iraq now quickly disintegrating. What this resistance is missing at present is a “political wing”, dedicated young men and women who can formulate and project this legitimate struggle against an illegal occupation. Given the atrocities of American occupation, this may not be possible within Iraq, but there are enough Iraqis and others concerned with Iraq outside the occupied land who can come forward and organize a political front that can mobilize the world for an end to occupation.