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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 3 - 2004 (mainly Iraq)
U.S. losing battle against rumors by Colin Freeman U.S. losing battle against rumors Whatever happens, the word on the street tells a different story Colin Freeman, Chronicle Foreign Service Thursday, April 29, 2004 ©2004 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback | FAQ URL: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/04/29/MNG0I6CPJB1.DTL Baghdad -- Word has it that British F-16 fighters strafed those three police stations destroyed in Basra last week, killing scores of innocent men, women and children. The strikes apparently were ordered by ex-President Saddam Hussein, who, after a year as a highly paid CIA consultant, is being groomed for a triumphant return to power, along with sons Odai and Qusai. Meanwhile, as the summer heat arrives, many women won't join their families in sleeping on the roofs of their homes. That would risk the prying eyes of U.S. troops, whose wraparound sunglasses have special night vision that can see through nightgowns. Thus the world turns, at least as spun by the Iraqi rumor mill -- where gossip, urban legend and conspiracy theories battle daily with what occupation officials insist, with ever-increasing weariness, are "the facts." No matter that British forces in Basra do not own F-16 jets. No matter that the dead bodies of Odai and Qusai Hussein were paraded on TV last year. No matter that even top-of-the-line Ray-Bans don't provide anything remotely close to X-ray vision. Argue these points with many Iraqis and the only response is likely to be an indulgent smile, a roll of the eyes and a gentle headshake at the naiveté of the foreigner. While some tales, like the one about U.S. soldiers having air-conditioned underpants, are simply street-corner entertainment, many contribute directly to the country's endemic violence. Last week's car bombings in Basra, in which at least 74 people died, were an example. As crowds gathered outside the three wrecked police stations, British troops who arrived to help were stoned by angry mobs convinced that British aircraft and helicopters had fired rockets. An Arab TV reporter found a fragment of a shell with U.S. Army markings on it, providing locals with what seemed like conclusive proof. As is often the case, the shard of evidence contained some truth -- but the conclusions were wildly wrong, according to the British. "The car bombs were made up partly of the old munitions that litter this country everywhere," said a British spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority's southern office. "Some of them are unexploded U.S. Army shells, so that may explain why one shrapnel fragment had U.S. markings. The bombs might also have contained rockets as well, and yes, there were helicopters flying in Basra that day. But the eyewitness accounts of F-16s with British Royal Air Force markings -- that is just out of the question." Every occupation press officer has similar stories, stretching right back to when troops first arrived and were welcomed as liberators. Reports soon had them giving pornography to young children, raping teenage girls, drinking beer in mosques and, of course, spiriting Hussein to a luxury retirement in exchange for U.S. control over Iraq's oil. Bitter experience over the last 12 months has shown that in such a volatile country many rumors cannot simply be dismissed out of hand. After the Basra bombings last week, press officials spent much of a subsequent news conference quashing each rumor, even digging out the exact times that British forces helicopters had been flying in Basra that day. Yet as a debunking exercise, it did little good. When Hussein's hated sons were killed last year, occupation officials decided that the only way to confirm their deaths was to allow TV cameras to film the mutilated bodies in the morgue. Critics charged not only ghoulishness but hypocrisy, saying such footage would never be shown in the United States. Yet without it, many Iraqis would have remained convinced the two were still at large. The large number of rumors dictates that most go unrefuted most of the time. "We could spend hours at every press conference debunking rumors, but it would seem like we were lecturing people," said a British spokesman. "A while back, there was talk that 30 British soldiers had been killed in the city of Amara, yet when we investigated, we found there hadn't even been any kind of incident at all." The most pernicious stories circulate in the areas most resentful of U.S. occupation. In Fallujah last month, Iraqi police officers told The Chronicle they were convinced U.S. troops were responsible for the guerrilla attack on their station in February that killed 20 officers. "They wore kaffiyehs (men's head scarves) round their faces, but they were definitely Americans," said Hamid Jassem. "They do it to make us think we need the Americans to stay here." Occupation officials now reluctantly accept that in some areas, all ills will inevitably be pinned on them. But some also blame the impact of 24-hour news channels in a country that, until recently, had to rely largely on word of mouth. "People still believe what they hear on the street here, because that was all they used to have," said one coalition press officer. "That means false reports travel very quickly, and a station like Al-Jazeera or Al Arabia can quickly pick it up. That then gets picked up by BBC monitoring, which then gives it a certain credibility even though it is attributed to somebody else." On Tuesday, when Al-Jazeera lost live coverage of the Fallujah battles, it switched to a telephone interview with a Sunni cleric in Baghdad, 30 miles away, who said of the U.S. forces, "They are killing children!" Arabic print journalism, the coalition press officer said, differs from the fact-based agency reports that dominate the news pages of most Western press outlets. "Arabic journalism and writing tends to allow a certain amount of interpretive freedom, which can mean literary references, quotes from the Koran and so on. It is less statements of facts, and more discursive and roundabout." Objective reporting is no cinch for the Western media here, either. At any given incident, most Iraqi witnesses are prepared to swear on the Koran that their account is correct -- yet their accounts invariably differ completely from those of U.S. troops. "Often you ask a guy who says he was an eyewitness, but it turns out later he simply heard from a friend," said Majid Al Kubaisi, a press translator. "It is a big problem. It also means that when the foreign soldiers do something really bad, the Western press won't think it's true." One solution, occupation officials say, would be to increase the number of courses training Iraqi journalists in fact-gathering and objectivity -- skills not rewarded in Hussein's time. But while it might make life easier for the coalition press staff, there is no plan to make such courses compulsory. Such a policy, they point out, would smack of press control -- even before it had been through the Iraqi rumor mill. ©2004 San Francisco Chronicle |