Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 4 - 2005
In Iraq, a Tug of War Over the Truth by Robert F Worth  ?
New York Times, April 24, 2005 In Iraq, a Tug of War Over the Truth By ROBERT F. WORTH BAGHDAD, Iraq - It is famously hard to get accurate information in the chaos of war. But in Iraq, where nearly every militia, political party and insurgent group has its own propaganda arm, truth is becoming more elusive every day. Last weekend, a political firestorm erupted here after reports that Sunni kidnappers had taken as many as 150 Shiite hostages in Madaen, a town just south of Baghdad. The kidnappers were said to be threatening to kill them, unless Shiites agreed to leave Madaen. It should have been easy to determine what happened. Either people were kidnapped and threats were made, or they were not. But it has not been that simple. Three Iraqi Army battalions searched the town and found no hostages. Days later, Shiite political leaders issued grisly photographs of several dozen bodies taken from the Tigris River, saying the bodies - some of which appeared to have been killed weeks earlier - were those of the hostages. Shiite political figures continue to insist on their version of events. Many Sunnis, meanwhile, have angrily called the allegations nothing but a ruse drummed up to justify invasions of Sunni towns. Forensic teams are trying to identify the bodies - many of them badly decomposed - but it is not clear that any amount of proof would satisfy either side. Reporters, meanwhile, are left to navigate between what sometimes appear to be Sunni and Shiite versions of the truth. It does not help that Iraqis - having lived for decades with the propaganda of Saddam Hussein's government - tend to rely on networks supplying rumors that reinforce grievances rooted deeply in history. "In the Middle East, as in the Balkans and Ireland, suppressed religious and ethnic groups have a kind of film playing in their minds of their own oppression," said Michael Doran, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. "In moments of political disruption, they are ready to add another scene to the pre-existing narrative." Iraq has become especially fertile ground for battles over real and perceived injustices, Professor Doran said, in part because of the variety and relative sophistication of some groups involved. Iraq's Shiites, who were brutally suppressed under Saddam Hussein, carry a narrative of massacre and oppression that dates back to the founding of their religion. And since the American invasion two years ago, Shiites have been the target of countless assaults by insurgents, who are mostly Sunnis. It is little surprise that they tend to see any new killings within the context of their legacy of victimhood. Iraq's Sunnis, the elite who supplied the nation's ruling class until Saddam Hussein fell from power, have their own narrative of displacement and injustice at the hands of the United States. After the American invasion, large numbers joined the resistance, including highly educated men who set up sophisticated propaganda machines. Following a model already in use in neighboring Saudi Arabia, they flooded the Internet with warnings about the desecration of an Arab land by American soldiers. Videotapes and leaflets appeared purporting to show the rape of Iraqi women by Americans, and the wanton destruction of Iraqi cities. By early 2005, the insurgents had mounted full-scale press operations, putting their own spin on daily events in an endless series of Internet postings. Even when they were announcing that they had slaughtered a group of Iraqi police officers, the message was usually the same: atrocities are being carried out against Iraq's Sunnis, and Islam required that they fight back. Meanwhile, Iranian military men and intelligence agents have filtered into Iraq over the past two years, Iraqi and American officials have said. They too spread their own versions of events in Iraq. All of these elements played a role in the Madaen kidnapping story. Soon after the first kidnapping reports emerged, members of Iraq's Shiite religious parties began repeating and embellishing them, both to reporters and members of Iraq's new national assembly. Jawad al-Maliki, a leading Shiite assembly member, told the legislators that the Sunni kidnappers' threats amounted to "a kind of ethnic purge." He claimed that the area around the town had been laced with mines, and that the Iraqi Army was busily defusing them. Other Shiite members repeated similar stories, and the number of Shiite hostages steadily grew, from 60 to 80 to as high as 200. After the Iraqi Army battalions searched the town and surrounding area last Sunday and Monday, it became clear that some aspects of the story were false. The town was not being held by Sunni insurgents, as some legislators had claimed. There were no mines. Nor were any live hostages found. Even so, days later, Iraq's new president, Jalal Talabani, emerged from a meeting with other Iraqi politicians to say that the kidnapping tales were true. He spoke of photographs showing murdered hostages found in the Tigris, south of Baghdad, and those photographs were made public the next day. But police officials in the area said almost all the bodies were dumped there over several weeks, before the hostage drama was said to have taken place. In an area where many Shiites have in fact been killed by Sunnis in the past, it was not clear why or when the victims were killed, and of course it was impossible to tell if the decomposed bodies were Shiite or Sunni or anything else. Still, the parties clung to their own version of the facts, while new rumors made the rounds. Falah al-Naqib, Iraq's Sunni interior minister, said the entire affair was an effort by Iranian intelligence agents to stir sectarian conflict. Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan, speculated on his Web log that the whole kidnapping story could have been fabricated by insurgents of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, which was skilled at spreading disinformation. The insurgents, Mr. Cole pointed out, want to ignite a war between Sunnis and Shiites. For that purpose, he observed, spreading rumors of a mass kidnapping might be just as useful as actually carrying one out. |