Al-Jazeera: view from the inside
By Steve Dow in Sydney
The Age (Australia)
March 30 2003

On al-Jazeera television, a reputed audience of 45 million in the Arab world are being fed a daily diet of bloodied Iraqi corpses, civilians crying and unfettered live speeches by officials.

Al-Jazeera's reporter in Australia, Sydney-based journalist Salef Saqqaf, 45, says that is the way the viewers like it. He says many Arabs can balance this picture by also watching CNN, which ignores the bloody bodies and instead has reporters embedded with United States troops on the battlefront.

Saqqaf says that viewers of the Arab network, established in 1996 by Qatar's ruling family, understand that the Iraqi Government will not allow journalists to travel with its own forces in the manner the US and Britain does.

"They know exactly the matter of military strategy or location is something even in peace time they (the Iraqi Government) don't want anybody to report on," he says.

The respective American and Arab network coverage of conflict in Iraq has been likened to two wars - one in which American viewers are spared the suffering of Iraqi civilians and instead focus on battlefield scenes, and another where Arab viewers continually see grieving Iraqi parents and trips to hospitals. An al-Jazeera reporter, though, is travelling alongside the likes of CNN with the United States military.


Jordanian-born Saqqaf, who migrated to Australia in 1985, is part of al-Jazeera's global network of 90 world correspondents outside Qatar. He freelances and still does occasional work for SBS radio.

Saqqaf will head al-Jazeera's Australian operation when it opens an office here, probably later this year. For almost three years, he has been a one-man band, filing reports from his home in Sydney - among them, stories on drought and the bushfires - using camera operators and editors hired for specific jobs. The station has about 20,000 Australian viewers through Optus and Foxtel.

Al-Jazeera has 10 reporters inside Iraq, from northern Iraq to Baghdad, Mosul and Basra. It broadcasts in Arabic, but there are plans to establish a dual channel broadcasting in English, to take advantage of the growing Western interest in the network, dubbed the "CNN of the Arab world".

Attempts to launch an English-language version of the al-Jazeera website went awry last week when hackers attacked the site, preventing access by internet users.

Saqqaf concedes both American and Arab networks are prone to reporting propaganda. Consider, he says, the reports of early success by the United States military. "We heard the Iraqis surrendered, Umm Qasr (had fallen), and two days later (this was proved untrue). One of the al-Jazeera correspondents in the south, he was travelling with that troupe, with the journalists from CNN, and he reported the same as the others reported, and two days later they discovered: oh, no, it was wrong."

Beyond reporting on a peace demonstration, he says, al-Jazeera has had no particular interest in Australia's involvement in the war - the network's coverage always mentions United States and British troops, but rarely Australian.

He is critical of the Australian media's coverage of the Arab world.

"Generally I don't think the Australian media is covering all the aspects of this conflict in Iraq," he says. "That has been the same with the Palestinian issue. They are concentrating on the surface... They talk, for instance, about the conflict between Iraq and Kuwait, and when Iraq invaded Kuwait... they're not looking at the historical aspect of why that happened...

"It's easy to say, 'Oh look, Iraq (has) lots of mass destruction weapons.'

"For Arab countries, mass destruction (is) something they're proud of. And when Iraq started (becoming) a country which had mass destruction weapons, around 15 years or 20 years ago, they think: 'Yes, it's our right.' It's (a source of) pride, because they want to compete with Israel."


This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/03/29/1048653900135.html