The court ruling on Tuesday in which the Guardian was ordered to pay the Iraqi prime minister damages of 100 million dinar (US$87,000) is part of a wider crackdown against media outlets designed to discourage scrutiny of public officials, one of the country’s leading journalism bodies said.
The Journalists Freedom Organization, which has lobbied for press freedoms for the past six years, says the Iraqi media have been inundated by writs from officials in recent months and have lost official access and status to state-backed organizations.
“Legal cases have flooded from all sides into publishers and media outlets throughout Iraq,” one of the organization’s members, Jabar Dharad, said. “This is a very effective tactic to silence dissent. A key reason for the diminishing status of private media here is that parliament hasn’t passed a law to protect journalists in Iraq. They are deliberately delaying doing so.”
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and several of his ministers have launched at least four legal actions against foreign press outlets over the past year. The Guardian, the New York Times and the wire service AP have all been served with writs, while Al-Jazeera has been forced out of Iraq, allegedly because of an anti-government bias. Local outlets are also being targeted, with representatives from the staunchly anti-government Al-Sharqiya channel now banned from all government events and buildings and the Al-Baghdadia channel, made famous by the shoe-throwing antics of its former reporter Muntazer al-Zaidi, also under threat of a boycott.
However, the pervasive threat of lawsuits against companies that often do not have the means to fight them, or enough confidence in the Iraqi justice system to try their luck in court, troubles many outlets more than the risk of a government blacklist.
“They know we are unlikely to take them on,” said the editor of one of Iraq’s leading independent newspapers, who would not be identified for fear of reprisals. “No one is going to take on an intelligence agency, or the prime minister, and win in court. The powerful will make sure of this. Our pockets are the easiest way to stop us and they know it.”
Media freedoms have improved substantially in Iraq since the tyrannical decades of Saddam Hussein, when all information was controlled by cronies of the former dictator, such as Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, who was the information minister during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
But in recent months Iraqi journalists have noticed a shift in the attitudes of officials and a heightened sensitivity that has seen reporting become increasingly difficult and, in some cases, dangerous.
“Freedom as a word exists in Iraq, but in application it has been totally lost,” Dharad said.
Since 2003 attacks have increased against journalists and so have restrictions against publishing.
“The government media has become very strong. State-controlled press is by far the strongest on the ground. Independent newspapers have folded in large numbers because they are not funded by the government like the government papers,” he said. “We are seeing a new approach by the security forces of assaulting journalists, who are being prevented from covering incidents, especially live reports from the scene of explosions. Journalists are also being assaulted in parliament.”
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