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Live from the front from indexonline 
Live from the front wartime reality TV 4 April 2003 The debate over the legality and appropriateness of al-Jazeera TV's decision to broadcast film of dead British soldiers - on the day that Index on Censorship honoured the station for their special contribution to the free exchange of information during years of crisis in the Arab world - will keep lawyers and journalists arguing for a long time to come. Rohan Jayasekera comments. Entirely by coincidence, on March 26 Index on Censorship honoured the Qatari-based satellite TV station al-Jazeera with a special award for its courage in circumventing censorship, exactly at the moment the network was facing a storm of condemnation for broadcasting film of dead British soldiers. The reaction against al-Jazeera was intense. The two dead men were thought to have been prisoners of war, summarily executed by Iraqi forces. And the row built on the station's earlier rebroadcast of footage of US army POWs being interrogated by Iraqi captors, which was condemned in Washington as a breach of the Geneva Conventions. Indeed Air Marshall Brian Burridge, the commander of British forces in the Gulf, quickly said the broadcast of film of the dead men was "deplorable" - which it might be - and a "flagrant breach" of the Geneva Convention - which it was not. Not flagrant, anyway. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 were drawn up in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when Russian prisoners in Germany and Allied POWs in Asia had been barbarically treated. Accordingly the third Convention sets out very detailed rules on how POWs should be treated, but summarises the spirit of the law in Article 13: "Prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated." Article 13 goes on to say that prisoners must be protected against "insults and public curiosity," and Article 14 says that they are entitled in all circumstances "to respect for their persons and their honour." This clause was drawn up to prevent captured soldiers from being dragged into town squares so angry populations could vent their anger on them. Allied airmen downed during the mass bombing raids that ravaged Germany and Japan during the war were frequently abused in this way. The clause was not intended to restrain the media, although German propaganda broadcasts to Allied troops in the field made a habit of naming captured soldiers (real and fake) in attempts to persuade them that surrender was a safe and more comfortable option than fighting on through the mud and blood. Since then the world of the media, and the way of warfare, has changed utterly. Yet the issue remains one of whether the captured troops are subjected to "insults and public curiousity" by the simple fact of publishing a photo of the precise moment of their professional humiliation as soldiers. Some argue that the entire debate is completely theoretical because the Geneva Conventions apply to states, not individuals or organisations like journalists and TV networks. To others it still a question as to whether al-Jazeera, an independent state broadcaster owned by the Qatari government, or the British BBC, an independent state broadcaster funded by a form of tax on viewers - are not technical extensions of their states. And the British and US military could be said to have a legal responsibility to ensure that the 'embedded' journalists attached to their units do not breach the Geneva Conventions while nominally under their control. "Of course," as Anthony Dworkin, expert in international law and armed conflict, has sensibly pointed out, "the very act of putting POWs in an unnecessarily degrading situation - irrespective of whether it was seen by the outside world - would in itself be a breach of the law, but it is a separate question whether photos are a violation or simply depict one." Some British media approached this by blurring the faces of pictured POWs so they cannot be recognised. The US excludes its treatment of suspected al-Qaida members in Guantanamo Bay from the Geneva Conventions with the twin legal fictions that the US base on Cuba is 'not US territory' and that the prisoners are so-called 'illegal combatants'. But while the well-known photos of the prisoners, bound, hooded and forced to kneel in the presence of guards indisputably denies them "respect for their persons and their honour," because they are unrecognisable under their hoods, the theoretical argument goes that as long as they are not identified, they cannot be the subject of "insults and public curiousity". At this point journalists wrench the whole matter back from the lawyers. For them it is a matter of independent editorial judgement. Full stop. After British Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed "horror" and the decision to broadcast footage of the corpses and British officials asked al-Jazeera not to screen it again, the channel defiantly reserved the right to use its editorial judgement on the matter. Senior producers at the Qatar-based satellite channel would make an editorial judgment about the footage on any given day, said an al-Jazeera spokesman, based on "newsworthiness and relevance" but would not just rebroadcast it "for the hell of it". But the debate among journalists on this subject is no less arcane than the lawyers' one. For starters, from a journalistic point of view - from a human rights point of view - it's actually vital, even a professional duty, that the Guantanamo Bay prisoners be identified so their rights can be protected. And as awful as the footage of the two dead British soldiers screened by al-Jazeera was, it moved the poor men from the unspeakable limbo of "missing in action" to "killed in action" - the place from where their loved ones can move on. Index on Censorship had the opportunity, through the Agence France Presse news agency, to publish for a fee, a screen shot of the al-Jazeera footage that has effectively been banned from the British and US media at the request of their defence chiefs. An in-house debate on whether or not to do so covered the editorial and ethical difference between print and internet publication; our readership in print has different expectations and sensibilities to our online readers. We wondered whether the blurry screen shots offered up by AFP would identify the POWs to someone who knew them and in the case of the dead men, whether the notification of their next-of-kin (still to come at that point) would make a difference to the issue. Timing of publication was seen as highly relevant, as was the issue of readerships; who would see it once published. It would have been entirely reasonable for al-Jazeera to assume that the next-of-kin of the dead British soldiers would not be among the likely viewers of an Arabic language satellite TV station viewable by subscription only in the UK (One of the banned al-Jazeera screen shots was subsequently published in the magazine.) Then there's the question of good taste, where the rules are made up as you go along. Al-Jazeera's quest to present the savage reality of war in Iraq to its viewers has led it to show the most appalling footage of dead women and children. The British media also reserves the right to present such realities in the manner it sees fit - from the scorched corpses pictured by one paper, or the war latest run alongside a cheesy photo of a 17-year-old blonde dressed only in tanga knickers and flak jacket, to keep 'our boys' morale up'. Which brings us right back to "insults and public curiousity," and "respect for their persons and their honour". And the most degrading and humiliating footage seen on TV on 26 March was the scenes of desperate starving Iraqis fighting to get to food aid in Umm Qasr, broadcast by all sides bar Iraqi state TV. |