Warfare and dual vision

Elisabeth Eide

 

February 2002. I switch to BBC World to get the latest news, a routine I have followed for many years as a necessary supplement (sometimes corrective) to Norwegian media. A guerrilla organisation in Nepal has revolted. The reporter’s voice tells that the government is crushing the uprising. And here we find this special expression; mop up, applied to describe the job that has to be done. It is related to flush out, both of them have been used time and again by the military and political leaders in the U.S. during the war in Afghanistan. The reporter in this case appropriated such an expression. In Nepal a cleansing is going on. As in Afghanistan, where the ’cleansing’ seems to develop into a long-term project.

            Before, a frequently heard expression was to ’smoke out’ the enemy. It is still used, together with the new, more sanitary ones. Smoke out is an expression from the hunting discourse. One puts fire to one of the entrances of the fox’s hideout, and thereby forces the fox to escape through the other one. And the fox is a smart animal: The enemy is tacitly understood to be smart as a fox – and thereby more respected than an enemy who will be mopped up. The smoke metaphor does not in the same way imply a negative estimation of the enemy, of the ’unknown Other’.

            The dirt (connected to mop, applied to the rebels) on the other hand, or the human waste/excrements (connected to flush) has to be cleaned up, flushed out. Between the lines we understand that it is the pure cleaners, the larger Western ’we’ that has to do the job. The introduction of these metaphors in international war rhetoric represents one of several contributions to a representation of the Others as worthless human beings. Such a dehumanisation is efficient in warfare. And in this process of spreading the word, reporters may also be seduced.

 

The Barbarian Other

During the same week BBC showed a heartbreaking reportage from Bagdhis province in Northwestern Afghanistan. The people there have been starving for a long time, and the situation has worsened after September 11th, says the reporter. We see that people do not have much food, even if clothes conceal the lean bodies. Families eat a grass stew of sorts. We are told that a desperate family father has promised his nine-year-old daughter and obtained the bride price – to try to keep all his dependants alive. The reporter suggests that others may do the same thing.

            In one of BBC World’s own trailers that week – where they demonstrate their superiority when it comes to reporting from all corners of the world – just a short fragment of the Bagdhis reportage is cut out: Hunger is rampant in Afghanistan; ”and now they are selling their daughters”. It may be read: Oh yes, those barbarians, this is the way they are. Whereas the full reportage contextualised the desperate acts of the hunger-stricken Afghans, the BBC-trailer only showed an irrational deed. With such trailers and metaphors of cleanliness journalism may contribute to an increased gap between a presumed us and the ’distant Others’, communicating their lives as having a lower value than Western victims or Western élite soldiers.

 

The Hierarchies of Orientalism

The exiled Palestinian Edward Said, writes of an orientalist way of representing the Other (Said 1995). According to Said this representation is built on political hegemony. Researchers, writers, travel writers and journalists who travelled to the world East and South of Europe, represented the Others as belonging below ‘us’ on an imaginary ladder of evolution. They were despots, we democrats, they despised the individual and enhanced the collective, while we defended the individual; they lived in a static and unchangeable past while we were continuously developing, both technologically and spiritually. According to Said this way of representation also was well fit to legitimise colonial injustices and military violence.

            The Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiongo writes that the many denigrating representations of the ‘West’s Others’ contributed to the way in which the Others, in this case African people, saw their own cultures as a “Wasteland of non-achievements” (Shohat & Stam 1994). If media representation of the non-western Others are often linked to cleansing operations and 'barbarism', we may glimpse the contours of two consequences. The Media representations may stimulate negative self-images among the Others, and dehumanisation may make it easier to gain public acceptance for a view of the necessity of Others dying for ‘our’ freedom.

            Also in Norwegian journalism there is a hierarchical tradition in which the ‘non-European Other’ is represented as less ‘developed’, more threatening, as ‘problematic population growth’, as primitive and superstitious. It might be labelled a ‘missionary discourse’, since the message derived from many texts have to do with an ‘us’ having to contribute to ‘their’ enlightenment, as well as material needs. This meets with opposition from more symmetrical approaches, but it is still an important tradition (Eide 2000, 2002).

            The ‘non-European’ human being has from the early colonial days till our time been described as ‘barbarian’, as a contrast to ‘our’ civilisation and thereby easier to despise. Thus the Other becomes less human, more abstract, remote and inferior. How did these representations take shape? Among others by the way the representing and powerful people may operate with binary oppositions, our classical music against their folk music (‘ethnic music’), our art versus their crafts, our religion versus their superstition (animism) (Shohat & Stam 1994). This perspective of the power of definition is important for an analysis concentrating on the media representation of the Others.

 

An early dual vision: Montaigne

Christopher Columbus and his seafarers returned to Europe with tales of the ‘wild’ in what they thought of as India. These narratives legitimised their own injustices (atrocities?) and gradual colonisation. The French philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne represented an early voice that accused the colonisers of double standards. After having studied several of their stories, he wrote an essay; Sur le Cannibalisme, in which he combined comparison and reflection.

I think there is more barbarity in eating a live than a dead man, in tearing on the rack and torturing the body of a man still full of feeling, in roasting him piecemeal and giving him to be bitten and mangled by dogs and swine (as we have not only read, but seen with fresh memory, not between old enemies, but between neighbours and fellow citizens and what is worse, under the cloak of piety and religion) than in roasting and eating him after he is dead. (English translation, Shohat & Stam 1994: 82).

 

Montaigne was of course referring to the Christian torturers and their barbaric treatment of the victims of Inquisition, the ones that in the view of the church leaders were witches, heretics or non-believers, another variety of the ‘clean’ against the ‘unclean’. Almost twenty years ago I visited a very special exhibition in Rome, showing utensils of torture applied during Inquisition. It made a strong impression, and taught me that it is dangerous to see your brother’s faults (or barbarism) while not seeing your own. If we are to cultivate a dual vision it seems necessary to learn more also about our own history of 'othering',  and the media need to fulfil their responsibility of enlightenment. We also need to see ourselves as objects, whether we are journalists, researchers or ‘experts’, to adhere to what Pierre Bourdieu calls critical self-reflection. At times this amounts to seeing our own ‘uncleanness’. Or to see that a conflict is not as purely ‘we/them’ as the actors claim. In many families suffering from starvation, no one is willing to sell a daughter.

 

Identification?

Every war to a certain degree presupposes that the warring parties do not understand or see the situation of the Other, and that they bar themselves from the possibility of even slight identification with their potential victims. This must be true for the terrorists who directed their planes towards World Trade Centre and Pentagon, and also for the ones who planned the retaliation against one of the most war stricken peoples of this world. And for the ones who still plan other wars.

            The media may to a certain degree contribute to degrees of identification across borders, countering the enemy images of the politicians; or they may strengthen the lack of feeling of coexistence already existing ‘out there’, among warriors who are taught to look at their adversaries as non-human. A one-sided focus in the media on what divides ‘us’ and ‘them’ contributes to the ‘Other’ not being seen as an individual. A fresh example is the strong focus in Norwegian and other Western media on raging Pakistanis taking to the streets after the first U.S. bomb raids over Afghanistan. They shouted, they burned flags and in general conducted themselves in a way easily apprehended in the West as ‘non-civilised’.

One may ask: Were they just more spectacular than the majority, or were they representative of the population at large? Was this kind of reportage followed up by interviews with sober-minded Pakistani intellectuals who might have contributed to the analysis of the situation? Did the audiences learn that Pakistani men and women are able to articulate themselves in other ways than shouting and waving their fists? In this case, the media to a large degree seem to have repeated the ‘horde angle’ from the streets of various Arab capitals so much applied during the Gulf War of 1990-1991. The Other is represented as aggressive and irrational, as a shouting, non-reflecting collective, corresponding to mainstream Orientalist traditions.

 

Who is allowed to speak?

This ‘horde tendency’ in reporting is also linked to the question of who is allowed to speak, and thereby contribute to the definition of a situation through the media. Who is invited to speak by the reporters in a war situation?

When the powerful speak about peace/people down below know/there will be war/ When the powerful denounce war/ the draft papers are already written.

During the prelude of the Second World War Bertholt Brecht wrote this poem. It may be seen as a comment to the fact that the leaders had to seduce their peoples – among others through the media – by pretending that the great powers wanted to secure peace on Earth. Are such seductive measures still necessary? It may rather seem as if the strong focus on conflict in the media to a certain extent excludes or marginalises peaceful strategies and the persons who support these strategies. If most media focus one-sidedly on warfare and articulated, distinct belief in war and force as The solution (as opposed to negotiations, pressure and diplomacy), just speaking or writing about peaceful solutions may be perceived as acts of subversion from the leftist margins of politics or as naïve tendencies to be disregarded.

            Was the war against Afghanistan unavoidable? Two journalists of the Washington Post describe the negotiations that took place between the U.S. government and the Taliban, concerning extradition of Osama bin Laden (Ottaway & Stevens 2001). These took place until late summer 2001. The Taliban were complicated negotiation partners, but might one still have achieved something? This question is asked by several of their sources. An important reason why these negotiations came to a halt, according to Ottaway & Stevens, was a lack of cultural understanding shown from the U.S. representatives, who totally rejected the proposals of compromise put forward by the other part – and also their way of reasoning. Of course, now we will never know if an extradition (or a co-operation leading to the capture of bin Laden) would have been possible before September 11th. This perspective – the possibility of a peaceful solution – was almost invisible in the Norwegian press. We know, however, that even after substantial warfare in Afghanistan – in which some thousand civilians and some thousand prisoners have been killed – the U.S. and their allies have not been able to capture bin Laden or Taliban-leader Mullah Omar.

 

Arafat and bin Laden

New images of the Enemy were quickly spread after September 11th. In Israel, on the West Bank and in Gaza, Israeli soldiers posted a constructed image of Osama bin Laden and Yassir Arafat together. For many Israeli citizens this may have functioned to strengthen their particular view of terrorism, while for the Palestinians they may rather have contributed to increased sympathy for bin Laden than hurting Arafat.

            For the situation in which people live, or are forced to accept, contributes to they way in which they think. Therefore, it is important that people who work with journalism, as practitioners or as researchers, learn to know the premises for other ways of thinking, from other locations – and that we learn to see the world with other eyes than our own. More than twenty years ago I was reminded of this necessity when visiting one of the largest Palestinian refugee camps, outside of Amman, Jordan. There, I met people who would not believe that Adolf Eichmann, tried and convicted in Jerusalem in 1961 for mass murders of Jews, was guilty. For how could it be true that the Jews had suffered as history tells, when they themselves – later – were able to cause so much suffering for them, the Palestinians? I was shocked. The irony of history may be cruel indeed. On both sides of a war one sticks to untruths and part-truths making it more difficult to see the world also from the position of the Other, and thus become more knowledgeable.

 

The first casualty – and the Others

“The first casualty when war comes is the truth”, U.S. senator Hiram Johnson said in 1917 Knightley 1989). It is an abstraction – the first casualties are invariable ordinary people.  Most of the people, who died during the first world war, lost their lives at the battlefield. They were soldiers. In modern warfare most of the casualties are civilians. This fact is a challenge for the media, in addition to the ones posed by the truth being avoided or concealed by political and military leaders. The fact that most casualties are civilians should inspire – and has inspired – reporters to think more of the civilians and their suffering, and to think in a more universal manner when it comes to human lives; that all human beings, all victims are of equal value. It seems unnecessary to repeat this self-evident fact, since it is also stated in the UN Charter of human rights. But when Western media are estimating what the U.S. risks at the brink of a new ‘operation’ (mark the surgical metaphor, in frequent use), they have repeatedly pointed at U.S. losses in the Vietnam War, without mentioning how many more Vietnamese were (and still are, by Agent Orange) killed.

                Such an asymmetrical representation of the value of human lives we witnessed when BBC on March the 14th 2002 told that eight U.S. soldiers were killed and 49 wounded in “action” in Afghanistan, in addition to “several Afghan allies”. The latter ones – killed or wounded – were not counted. Is it so much more difficult to keep track of the ‘local’ casualties?

            Modern wars challenge the abilities of the reporters to look behind the technology of warfare, to look for civilian casualties, both the ones directly hit by acts of war and the ones that are forced to flee, or are traumatised or damaged for life in other ways.

 

The ownership of words: terror and revenge

Everybody’s right to be valued represents one challenge; another one is the designations applied when people are represented. What about terror and terrorism? In the U.S. an interesting debate has taken place in Minneapolis between a group calling themselves “Minnesotans Against Terrorism” (MAT) and the Minnesota newspaper Star Tribune – about the application of the word terrorism. MAT attacked the paper for not applying the noun terrorism often enough. The editor replied that he preferred to describe what happened, for example in the Middle East, so the audience could judge for themselves. But when asked, the editor made it clear that he reserved the word terrorism for “non-governmental groups”. MAT, on the other hand, felt that he represented a double standard, since all attacks aimed at innocent civilians should be called terrorism.

            FAIR (Fairness in Accuracy and Reporting), a network of media critics, asked MAT whether the bombing of Hiroshima should be called terrorism. They responded negatively, although the city had no military targets. The usage of weapons of mass destruction during World War II against an evil power that had engaged in mass homicide, was not something this organisation could condemn, was the official answer from MAT. In other words, the killing of civilians by a large powerful state stops being terrorism when it happens to fight an ‘evil power’. In our age of globalisation, one needs to be up front when the power of definition is distributed, and thus be able to distribute labels of good and evil.

            FAIR on the other hand felt that the only consistent definition of terrorism was that it has to do with planned murder of civilians to obtain political goals, regardless of the killers being supported by a state or not, and regardless of the methods of assassination. But this definition is hardly used by any mass medium, writes FAIR. For if it were, the writers of world history would have to apply terror not only when describing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also the U.S. support of a row of regimes in Latin America and the attacks on infrastructure in Iraq – or as a description of both sides in the war between Israel and Palestine.

Or as a description of several parts of the last war in Afghanistan?

 

Technology = truth?!

One special characteristic of modern media development is that “what is technology becomes truth”, writes the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique (Ramonet 1999). When newspapers and TV channels contribute with war graphics or represent the war as a Playstation game, we are left calm and safe assured of ‘our’ marksmanship, which may develop into a feeling of facticity. The graphics are impressive and distinct and make an impression of systematic order. Technology also influences journalism in other ways. In modern warfare what Ramonet calls ‘directification’ increases. Incidents (or pseudo-incidents, as when journalists trigger some warriors to fire their kalashnikovs[1], or the plain fact that the journalist is there talking to the camera, to us) are transmitted directly, momentarily, and thereby create a separate illusion of truth – at the same time as the direct transmittance partly makes the reporter abundant, since the ‘facts’ may be transmitted via hi-tech, and less by good old-fashioned legwork.

Everything is subordinate to the ‘network’. Ramonet also shows how the news anchors, sitting with a “wall of screens” behind their backs, communicate an impression that “we are everywhere”. And the ones who “are there” manage a truth of sorts by their mere presence, on behalf of ‘us here, at home’, tucked inside our safe, not-very-challenged frames of interpretation.

 

Robert Fisk: I deserved the beating

War and conquest, occupation and harassment need to be faced by a point of view that works both inwards and outwards. To understand the present world, we who are based in Europe may need to work ourselves out of a one-sided Eurocentrism, where we see ourselves as bearers of a moral excellency. We also need to see ourselves also as the Others, ‘down there’ see us. An extreme case of this exercise of introspection is shown by Independent’s reporter Robert Fisk, who is beaten almost unconscious by raging Afghans in a refugee camp near the Afghan-Pakistani border, in December 2001:

And even then, I understood [them]. I couldn't blame them for what they were doing. In fact, if I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdullah, close to the Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find (Fisk 2001, for the full article, see elsewhere in this book).

 

Robert Fisk is forced to reflect over the fates of these refugees. He tries to put himself in their place, to enter the thoughts of those who have tried to survive there for years, and of the new-arrivals, who are brutally traumatised after having seen their closest kin killed or maimed for life. Any line between ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ is hard to draw in this case.

Edward Said writes that the voice of the intellectual is a voice in opposition, critical of the high and mighty; a voice that consequently needs a restrained and precise consciousness and a comparative perspective, so that the victim will not be blamed, which often happens, while the real powers are encouraged to put their will through (Said 2002).

            When one’s own nation and allies are at war, media researchers and critics need the entire sobriety and critical attitude recommended by Said. Which questions should then be posed to the media in such a situation? At least some of the following:

We have been fooled before. Do we learn from experience?

Do the media learn from the way important facts often drowned in previous wars? Is it part of the collective consciousness to remember how the warring parties produced outright lies to gain support. The examples from the second Gulf war (1991) are well known. In Afghanistan, representatives of the ‘coalition forces’ have repeatedly denied civilian casualties before being forced to admit them after evidence has been produced  (Herold 2001, Lamb 2001, Parry 2001). The bombing of Al-Jazeera’s house in Kabul, of a group of elders on their way to the Loya Jirga, and of the wedding in Urozgan, were not easily admitted. Some international press reports brought the information. On the occasion of American soldiers killing four soldiers from the Afghan national army, the U.S. have consistently told the media that the Afghan soldiers were aiming at them.

            It is also necessary to issue warnings against special highly-strung reactions towards the war coverage. From Brasil a message was spread over the Internet in the days following September 11th, indicating that the cheerful Palestinians in the streets shown on TV was a ten-year-old videotape. This was a false assumption. On the other hand, Dagens Nyheter (Sweden) interviewed the woman who was especially focused in this news item, and she told that she was misinformed, claiming that if she had known about all the innocent people dying in Manhattan she would not have cheered at all. The Norwegian media did not interview her. Another myth spread by some of the war critics, was the ‘news’ that several thousand Jews, who had their work at WTC, should have avoided coming to work on September 11th.

 

We do not always know …

Do reporters – during times when the situation is acute and demands to be first with an issue are strengthened – have the courage to say that there are a lot of things they do not know? Some Norwegian media – at an early stage after September 11th – were eager to examine their own role in the coverage of terror/war. This signified a reflexive attitude supporting a critical public sphere against claims of being unambiguous and clear. But simultaneously we observe that certain media present as facts ‘information’ which we do not really have access to.

            In March and April 2002 U.S. soldiers and Norwegian élite troops fought side by side in the Paktia province. In various media one could read that they fought against several hundreds (some wrote several thousands) Al-Qaida soldiers who stayed there. Others claimed that these forces might as well have been remnants of the Taliban forces, and others that it might be forces belonging to rivalling commanders who used the U.S. forces to rid themselves of their local enemies. Paktia has been one of the provinces where many commanders have resisted being on the payroll of the U.S. or the new Afghan government, and the rivalries continue (January 2003). Washington Post told on March 14th 2002 that their correspondents had hardly seen any dead bodies in an area where the military had earlier claimed to have killed many. In situations like this, working at the mercy of one warring part, a good portion of reserve is necessary.

 

Myths of war

Which myths are able to survive since they fit the ‘frame of truth’ belonging to one of the warring parties? I shall here mention three central myths from the war in Afghanistan:

 

1. Bombing for women’s liberation. This has been a crucial part of the arguments for the U.S. war against Afghanistan, maybe the most crucial one. When it became evident that U.S. and their allies would not easily catch the Al Qaida and Taliban leaders, pointing at the miserable situation of Afghan women under Taliban became necessary to produce the image of victory. ‘Now the burkha disappears, the women have got their freedom’; in the fall of 2001 this became one of the main narratives about the ‘success’ of the war. In his speech to the U.S. Congress, President George W. Bush declared that “Today women are free…” when commenting the situation in Afghanistan. To the degree that the media accepted such allegations as face value, it certainly helped the new leaders in Afghanistan to build up legitimacy and conceal their violent past. But images produced from the 8th of March celebration in Kabul showed the same light blue burkhas that we remember from the Kabul of Taliban. And during the meeting of the grand Afghan National Council (Loya Jirga) in June 2002, the minister for Women’s Affairs, Dr. Sima Samar, was threatened by male delegates for having ‘insulted Islam’.[2] Reporter Jonathan Steele called these delegates ‘closet Taliban’, but the situation is even more complicated. Also among the ‘U.S. friends’ (for example in what used to be the ‘Northern Alliance’) there are people who harbour strong negative feelings towards women.

            On the other hand, saying that the change of power in Kabul has not meant any difference for women in the capital and other larger cities, would also be a mistake. But many women still fear for their future and have taken up a waiting attitude. This might have been better reflected in the reporting. Besides, very few commentators have been concerned with the consequences of the argument ‘bombing for women’s liberation’. Saudi-Arabia is to a large extent Afghanistan’s ideological and practical master teacher. In this country they have for long had a ‘vice and virtue’ police with the same tasks as Taliban’s Department for the prevention of vice and protection of virtue.[3] Death sentences are passed at an average of almost 200 a year, and according to Amnesty International, stoning and beheading as punishment for infidelity is usual. An almost total segregation of the sexes is practised, and women are not allowed to drive a car. But in the eyes of the U.S. leaders – and in some Norwegian media – Saudi Arabia has been considered a ‘moderate’ state in the Middle East, and the atrocities inside its borders have only to a small extent been highlighted.

The women being silenced – again: Which voices were heard in the media at home about Afghan women? A part of a critical media analysis (and of a dual vision, reflexive journalism) is to see through the representation of ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’. In the war against Afghanistan President Bush and his allies quickly appointed the Northern Alliance as “our friends”, and the media did not sufficiently analyse who these ‘friends’ were and where they came from. However, ‘out there’ lived persons who could have told them – if they had been asked. The radical women’s organisation RAWA, who contributed to one of the most shown TV-documentaries about the Taliban (Beneath the veil) by secretly videotaping an execution at Kabul stadium[4], seemed to lose attention as a source of information regarding the years of mujahideen rule in Kabul, in spite of having first-hand experiences. RAWA has expressed strong critical views on the Northern Alliance when they, aided by U.S. bombing, took power in Kabul. These views may have corresponded badly with the dominating images presented of 'friends' and 'enemies' during and after the capturing of Kabul in November 2001. To this day, RAWA operates illegally both in Kabul and other Afghan cities, as I could witness when visiting the country in March 2003.

            In general, women’s voices are often ignored both in peace and war. An American media professor has introduced the notion “symbolic annihilation” (Tuchman 1978) to illustrate the general marginalisation of women in the media. This war is no exception. On November 7th 2001, Afghan Women’s Network, an umbrella organisation for 19 women’s organisation in and around Peshawar, issued an appeal of stop to the warfare – also the warfare of the U.S. forces and their allies.[5] They asked the international community to take the situation of Afghan civilians into consideration. Their pleas attracted little media attention. It is also striking that none of the large newspapers of Oslo covered the 8th of March rally in Oslo or interviewed one of the main speakers, the leader of Afghan Women’s Network, Khurshid Noori. It seems as if the media, with a few exceptions, were more concerned with the myths and allegations about Afghan women than listening to them, at least when what they said did not correspond with the general ‘wisdom’ of the war.

 

2. Accurate targeting: The myth of surgical accuracy during U.S. bombardment is a remnant from the Gulf War. In its aftermath, it was solidly refuted. According to Pentagon’s own statistics, only around seven per cent of the bombs over Iraq were of the ‘smart’ category, from which one would expect a great accuracy, and even among them, twenty per cent missed their target (Ottosen 1994). No single source has been able to produce an accurate number of the civilian casualties from the recent war in Afghanistan (starting October 7th 2001), but even conservative estimates today reckon the number already in 2001 exceeded the number of Americans being killed in World Trade Centre and Pentagon. In addition come all those who lost their lives when fleeing the bombardment, or due to lack of humanitarian aid, or due to the miserable conditions of the new refugee camps being filled beyond capacity. UN sources reckon that between 100 000 and 200 000 people became refugees as a result of the bombing, while before October 7th, there were already almost 900 000 internal refugees in Afghanistan. Among people living under such extreme conditions, the death rate is far beyond the ‘normal’ one, which is in Afghanistan among the highest in the world.

 

3. Humanitarian assistance – stopped by whom? When did assistance reach the needy ones? A third myth is that during Taliban the humanitarian aid work was much more complicated than after the U.S. started their warfare. It is impossible to confirm or contradict this myth. It may be closer to the truth to say that humanitarian assistance was not easy during Taliban, but the armed, self-appointed ‘custom officers’ and commanders now having it their way at border posts and highway checkpoints, were not there then. The new refugee flow after the bombing, and the U.S. need for border control to catch up with Al Qaida, created a situation with partly closed borders. The closure of the borders in the north-west between Turkmenistan and Afghanistan had serious consequences, since the people in those areas depended on cross-border assistance, living in areas strongly affected by drought and hunger. The ones who had enough strength, found their way into the overcrowded refugee camps in Herat, where many died. Others stayed behind, and no one knows how many of them died and are still dying in these areas, but reporters from British newspapers have suggested the numbers are substantial (Lamb 2001).

 

Non-disclosure better than truth?

According to Aldous Huxley the greatest triumph of propaganda is to kill the truth by silence. It may well hold true that telling lies is a poorer strategy than holding one’s tongue on certain issues, simply because a lie is more easily exposed? An important question, therefore, is what space is allotted to what exists underneath and behind the daily news. Events and circumstances, which may contribute to explain acts of war, might easily drown in the daily routines of press conferences of the powerful and the sorties of the warriors. This also corresponds with a more general tendency in the media of clustering, in which the coverage of one event often becomes so massive that it threatens to overshadow others. In December 1989 the media coverage of the fight against Ceaucescu and his fall in Romania to a large degree overshadowed the U.S. invasion of Panama, which took place at the same time.

            This has to do not only with events, but also with background information and historical knowledge, that is, with whether the media should provide for the citizens of a society a foundation for explanation and interpretation of the events that become news. Some of this information has found very little attention in the Norwegian press.

 

Bin Laden and his background: It is more than likely that bin Laden is one of the main brains behind the terror of September 11th. But what about the larger scene? 15 out of the 18 suicide bombers were of Saudi Arabian origin. How important is this fact in a contribution to explain what happened on September 11th? In Norwegian newspapers we have to a very limited extent read about the humiliation of Saudi-Arabia represented by the presence of permanent U.S. military presence (20 000 soldiers), established during the Gulf War. Little emphasis has been made of the fact that Osama bin Laden proposed a strategy for helping Kuwait out of Iraq’s claws, based among others on forces with experience from Afghanistan – as an alternative to inviting in the U.S.

            How important are these historic events and facts to understand the motivations behind the acts of terror on September 11th? How was the potential created that made it easy for bin Laden to recruit young men who are willing to sacrifice their lives and take with them several thousands of innocents? In the war between Israel and Palestine we have observed this at close range: The more manifold and massive the oppression, the more suicide bombers, and then again, more blind attacks on the Palestinian refugees, this seems to be the conclusion of peace-longing writers, both of Palestinian and Israeli background.

 

Sudan and Libya: Next question is: Given that Osama bin Laden is as central a person to the recent history as presumed; What options were there, prior to September 11th, for the U.S. and its Western allies to get hold of him at an earlier stage? Two French journalists show that both governments of Sudan and Libya were eager to co-operate with Western forces to find him – at the time when he resided in Sudan (and financed/supported a terrorist group in Libya, aiming at President Ghadafi, who had denied him asylum (Brisard & Dasquié 2001).) But nobody seemed interested. The problem by then was that British MI5 had connections with bin Laden’s terrorist group, they were seen as possible allies against arch enemy Ghadafi, according to the French journalists. Five months before the terrorist attacks on the U.S. embassies in Dar-es-Salam and Nairobi[6] in September 1998, Ghadafi contacted Interpol to institute a search for bin Laden, suspected for murder and illegal possession of arms. Nothing happened.

 

Al Qaida = Taliban? After September 11th, the media have concentrated little effort on in-depth analysis of the relationship between the Taliban and Al-Qaida and in-between the Taliban themselves. Bin Laden had close ties with the supreme Taliban leader Mullah Omar, but several sources suggest that there were other Taliban-leaders who did not appreciate their friendship nor the Arab presence and influence in Afghanistan. And if one is to believe the two above mentioned Washington Post-journalists, the negotiators of Taliban were willing to surrender bin Laden – provided certain conditions were met – in their meetings with the U.S. negotiators. The journalists quote experts who claim that the U.S. was not able to see what kind of concessions was required to actually deliver the man. That the Taliban regime seemed to crumble so easily, may among others be due to the fact that many outside of the firm centre (which did not include even the whole government) were what may be labelled as ‘situational Taliban’. Some joined their ranks because they were tired of the contradictions plaguing the previous mujahideen government, some because they were Pashtuns and did not like the Tajik dominance in the government. Still others joined because they believed that Taliban would provide peace and security by disarming all warriors and put an end to highway robbery which had made all travelling extremely dangerous.

            Do all these people deserve to die due to their choices, their delusions? Many (also here we do not know the exact number) ordinary Taliban soldiers have died due to subhuman prison conditions. Some of them are not Afghans, but this does not necessarily mean that all of them are members of Al-Qaida. Without nuances the U.S. and their allies' ‘license to kill’ has been enlarged to comprise all those who have supported the Taliban. If we for a moment try to put ourselves in the place of the Other and tries to imagine how poor Pakistani families have delivered their young boys to religious schools to give them a future of sorts, we may perhaps be able to see that also on this other side of the war, there are victims. This perspective has been rather absent in the media coverage of the war. A good exception is a Newsweek cover story on mass graves for hundreds of Taliban soldiers who were suffocated during transportation after the fall of Kunduz in november 2001. The Americans were there with team 595 from Fifth Special Forces, and Newsweek asks a timely question of whether this is not also 'our'  responsibility. This was followed up by a film documenting that General Dostum, one of the central Northern Alliance commanders, were responsible for the killing of more than 3000 soldiers, presumably buried in Dasht-e-Leila, near Shibergan (……).

 

Background and foreground

Discourse analytic Norman Fairclough applies a scale between what ‘is there’ and what disappears in a model for examining media texts. The scale starts with ‘absent’, via ‘presupposed’ and ‘backgrounded’ – to what is foregrounded. All texts are combinations of such explicit and implicit meanings (Fairclough 1995:106). Also in what is ‘not there’ or overshadowed, one may find meaning. The lowest step is absence. Often, the historical context will be absent from media representation, for example Afghanistan’s past or the fight for control over the oil resources in Central Asia.

            The next step is what is presupposed when addressing a certain audience. This is what the writer and the reader of a text are supposed to share, agree upon. For example when several media presuppose that the audience share a certain view of the U.S. (or a larger ‘we’) represent the good, common sense, civilisation – versus the Other’s barbarism, in the ongoing war. The above mentioned article written by Robert Fisk tries to break this presupposition – by analysing a seemingly ‘barbarian’ attack on his own person – and surprises the reader by saying that he – in their place (being poor refugees suffering from deprivation and bombardments) would have done the same thing. Another tacit presupposition is when the politicians (often helped by the media) represent a conflict as being impossible to solve without violence or outright war, and thus assume that the fight against terror has to be won with rough cleansing utensils ('mopping' and 'flushing', with heavy weaponry), not at the negotiation table. In this way, the peaceful alternatives are marginalised. An example from the Norwegian press: In an article about the failure of interrogation in Guantanamo Bay, a reporter writes about unqualified interpreters and leaders of interrogation:

This failure results in the military prosecution authority not having sufficient evidence against the individual prisoner to present a valid accusation for war crimes (Dagbladet 24.04.2002).

 

Implicit in this innocent sentence there is a presupposition: That all prisoners of Camp X-ray on Cuba are 'guilty': it is only the incompetence of the prosecutors that causes a problem. This way of explaining the story is surely widespread in U.S. media. But here it seems as an explanation authorised by the reporter.

            Next step is those events or persons that are visible, but still backgrounded. A perspective that has been backgrounded from October 7th 2001, when U.S. and allies began their bombing of Afghanistan, is the Afghan women’s perspective. To point at the burkha-clad women in the streets of Kabul and use these images to defend an attack served a purpose, but if one had interviewed more women, other critical perspectives might have occurred, as I have shown above. It would also occur to audiences that not all Afghan women are illiterate and totally at the mercy of their men – there are many strong, highly educated and articulate women in Afghanistan.

            And at the top of the ladder: the perspective that is foregrounded. In Norwegian media, especially after Norwegian units were mobilised in support of the U.S., this perspective remains largely Western. With the TV medium playing a dominant role, as happens especially during representations of warfare, also the reporters themselves are heavily foregrounded (in dangerous situations, clad in bullet-proof vests). Often these are the only voices we get to hear, or they may be supplemented with the voices of elite persons.

 

 

Invisible killings: Uranium weapons

To report on the more invisible and long-term sides of a war represents a special challenge. The reports on the consequences of the usage of depleted uranium (DU) during the Gulf war, were filed several years after the war was ‘concluded’[7]. Some reporters and experts have linked the substantial increase in cancer cases in the Basra area, Southern Iraq, to the massive usage of missiles armed with DU, in the spring of 1991. In addition, doctors report significant increase of stillborn or deformed babies. That the U.S. has used some kind of uranium weapons also in the war against Afghanistan, now seems established. According to Le Monde Diplomatque they may have used newer and larger bombs with more varieties of uranium than was used during the wars in Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo (Parsons 2002). The uranium dust may not be seen, and the medical consequences are mostly not immediate. Thereby the media face the extra challenge of illustrating and explaining these phenomena. The Japanese journalist Akira Tashiro, born and raised in Hiroshima, is one of the few media persons who, through broad-based investigative journalism has documented alleged results of DU, both on war victims, soldiers and people living in the war zones – in Iraq, Kosovo, Serbia and Bosnia – and on workers employed at the factories producing DU-weapons. He concludes:

My primary finding is that, while DU munitions are certainly not comparable to bombs involving nuclear fission or fusion, they are made of radioactive waste and are similar to nuclear weapons in that their effects on human bodies persist long after the end of the battle in which they are used. My coverage of this story removed whatever doubt I may have had. These weapons are cruel and inhumane and should be banned (Tashiro 2001:142).

 

Defence politicians and military spokespersons have tried to transfer the burden of proof to the critics when it comes to eventual dangers caused by the usage of DU arms. They have emphasised that the soldiers taking part in the Gulf war were also exposed to other poisonous pollution. Tashiro argues that he has found health damages also among people working at the factories where these weapons have been produced. The Norwegian press has to a very limited extent covered the use of DU weapons. A timely question might be if the burden of proof should be the responsibility of the warriors – and ought one not to ban these weapons when the medical consequences of the usage is at least strongly disputed, that is; let the civilians who do not even know what they may risk, have the benefit of doubt?

            One journalist in Norway, Ingeborg Eliassen in Stavanger Aftenblad – a large regional newspaper – has worked systematically on this case, interviewing Norwegian veterans from the Gulf war. Of hundred interviewees 47 had health problems ten years after the war. Her reporting has contributed to a debate about the usage of DU in warfare, but her stories were little commented upon by nation wide media (Ottosen 2001).

            Although it is still denied by some war officials, it seems more than likely that uranium weapons have been applied in the war against Afghanistan. Uranium Medical Research Centre reports from two field trips to Afghanistan, that they found "abnormally high concentrations of Non-depleted Uranium (NU)” in the urine of a number of people in several areas of the country (Durakovic 2002, 2003). A question in need of investigation, and also asked by Parsons above, is whether the U.S. have partly replaced DU by other, experimental kinds of Uranium enriched weapons.

 

The bombing of Al-Jazeera

Philip Knightley holds the Vietnam war to be the last ‘uncontrollable’ war when it comes to media coverage. Censorship was not fully in place, it was easy also for young freelancers to travel in Vietnam gathering evidence of the war. Thus, this war represents in the history a negative example for the U.S. regarding media control. Increased vigilance, pool-arrangements and censorship have been the remedies for "improvement".

            Which media have been considered ‘clean’ in the corridors of the powerful? Which media have been considered threats? In recent history we have seen how national media have been bombed during war. The bombing of the Yugoslav TV station in Belgrade was part of   U.S. war strategy against the regime in Belgrade. Bombing the Palestinian TV-station in January 2002 must have been an essential part of Ariel Sharon’s strategy. In Afghanistan, the Taliban did not even have a TV-station, since they rejected live images as blasphemy. But the Arabian channel Al-Jazeera was able to send images from Kabul and other Taliban-controlled areas – in one period this TV- station was the only one on the Taliban scene.[8]

            The bombing of Al-Jazeera’s house in Kabul in mid-November 2001 went by largely unnoticed by Norwegian media, even if a BBC-reporter (William Reeve) staying in the same street, almost got hit. Spokesmen of Al-Jazeera naturally reacted strongly and claimed they had alerted the U.S. about their whereabouts in Kabul, to avoid an attack. Still, their house was bombed. BBC has worked to find out more about the background of this event. The U.S. have repeatedly claimed that there were Al-Qaida members residing in the same building as Al-Jazeera, but without being able to prove their allegations. Rear Admiral Craig Quigley tells BBC that if “there is a legitimate target near a broadcasting unit, this fact will not prevent us at all when it comes to take out our legitimate target. Not at all.”[9] The question remains: May an Arabian TV- station be considered a ‘legitimate target’?

            BBC’s correspondent says that this new Pentagon policy increases the dangers of war reporting drastically, since war coverage often has to do with being near the warring parties. Besides, it was not only al-Jazeera being threatened by the bomb attack, but several international TV-stations – German, Australian and Turkish, all transmitting their stories through Al-Jazeera’s office. Al-Jazeera spokesmen say they forbade their correspondents every kind of contact with Al-Qaida, but that they, while Taliban were still in power in Kabul, had to have a certain contact with the regime. During the Gulf war CNN’s Peter Arnett was praised and became famous for reporting on the U.S. bombardment of Baghdad. Is this the kind of reporting that the U.S. does not want in the future? BBC writes that with these new warnings from Pentagon, news agencies fear that the U.S. military intelligence may after September 11th see this kind of legitimate journalism as a ‘military significant’ activity, especially if the reporting indicates contact with the ‘enemy’. The situation repeated itself in Baghdad, with the killing of two reporters from Al-Jazeera, and here, also other, Western journalists came under attack. During the Nordic TV days in Bergen in June 2002, a representative of CNN refused being in a panel together with a representative of Al-Jazeera, an obvious attempt at marginalising this TV-channel, probably one of the freest and most modern in the Arab world.

            This piece of history sheds light on the declared and official plan of the U.S. of investing some billion dollars in an Arab TV-channel which might better communicate their own ‘truths’. These plans have also been largely ignored in Norwegian media, but are strong evidence of how highly warring parties estimate the media. In Afghanistan, the U.S. forces have created their own radio station at the Baghram base (outside of Kabul), from where they broadcast continuous stories of Taliban atrocities and of the need of their own presence, to the Afghan population.

 

Poverty, oil humiliation

Simplified ‘truths’ always represent misinformation, regardless of where they originate. Poverty is not the only – may be not even the most important – cause of terrorism. Lack of prospects for the future may be more relevant, as seen with the Palestinian suicide bombers. To observe a rich and powerful state in the Middle East becoming more of a puppet for the U.S., pursuing an impotent Middle East policy and accepting permanent U.S. bases, has been provocative seen with the eyes of Saudi Arabian opposition.

            Humiliation, personal and national, may be an underestimated factor in explaining the high proportion of Saudi Arabian men behind the terror of September 11th. Psychologist Evelin Gerda Lindner holds that ethnicity is a less important factor behind violence and war than humiliation. She tells of her fieldwork in Somalia, where she was at first met with a lot of scepticism:

I started talking to people about my experiences – and of theirs. I then understood that they see us from the West as arrogant and collectively responsible for the bad treatment they have experienced. Their messages were clear: “You colonise us, and then you introduce a so-called democracy, which is alien to us. Then you are surprised at seeing dictators seize power. Then you give them weapons, so that they can kill half of us, and then you come here to ‘measure’ our suffering. (Hammersmark 2001)

 

This kind of humiliation is, the way the psychologist sees it, an important cause of political extremism and terrorism. She emphasises how Nelson Mandela has turned the humiliation of the victim into something positive. But as important it is to see how the world may avoid situations in which some leaders exploit feelings of humiliation and of ‘lost future’ to recruit new members of terrorist networks. These perspectives have not been highlighted much in the mainstream media.

            The ‘great game’ in Central Asia – the fight over oil resources – is one out of several explanations for the heavy engagement of the U.S. in Afghanistan. The roots of today’s realities are complex. But the U.S. dependency on Saudi Arabian oil, and its corresponding vulnerability needs to be examined more in-depth. If the Saudi royal family should be overthrown, this might cause a catastrophe to the energy supplies of the U.S., that is, if they do not secure alternative reserves, as in Central Asia. Here the reserves of Turkmenistan and a pipeline through Afghanistan have great value. The American Oil Company UNOCAL has now contracted their rights in the area. For them it must have been of special significance to do business with one that knows both the company and the Afghan scene, as president Karzai in Afghanistan does. According to Le Monde Diplomatique (Abramovici 2002) Karzai for a period served as a consultant for the Texan Company when they negotiated with Taliban in the 1990s. It does not necessarily for ever guarantee his friendliness to the USA, but all the same it is interesting information – however not brought forward by the Norwegian media.[10]

 

 

 

‘Our’ soldiers participate

In the beginning of March 2002 the U.S. began a new offensive against Afghanistan after some weeks of lull. They carpet bombed an area in the south-east of Afghanistan, in which an unknown number of Taliban and Al-Qaida-soldiers – according to BBC with their families – were hiding, and where there were also civilian Afghans. Norwegian soldiers were now mobilised to take part in the war. Such a direct involvement ought to require a high degree of national consensus – as a support to the politicians who are responsible for the decision-making. The challenge for Norwegian media increased accordingly: Were they to be a ‘natural’ part of such a consensus?

            What we have seen so far (June 2003) is not a one-sided patriotic coverage. Critical questions have been raised concerning what it means to be under American commando and concerning the extreme secretiveness surrounding the Norwegian participation. But a critical coverage of the wider context, the new Norwegian war strategy (part of Nato’s ‘out-of-area’, and also linked to deployment of Norwegian soldiers in Kyrgystan), is to a large extent missing in the mainstream press. The stories to be expected, of Norwegian heroic mine clearers, have been printed, while the Afghan (Other) mine personnel having long-term contracts (more than three months) and receiving far less salary – are backgrounded, according to the logic of the ‘Norwegian angle’. In the beginning the strength of the Norwegian units were underlined without critical questions by some of the mainstream media, and politicians have not been much challenged by the reporters.

On the first day after the news were broken, the story about the Norwegian contribution in Afghanistan, is accompanied by photos of winter clad soldiers with backpacks and arms, or more lightly clad soldiers with advanced equipment. They may be interpreted as reassuring messages to ‘us at home’, communicating that the soldiers are especially trained for their purpose: “The Norwegian special soldiers are among the very best in the world when it comes to war operations in areas like Afghanistan” (VG, Norway’s largest newspaper, March 5th 2002). Norwegian media have not in general shown a hysterical-patriotic attitude, but the politicians were invited to tell how worried they were for ‘our’ soldiers “down there”. Apart from speculations about these troops taking part in combat, there has been little coverage, since the military and political leaders are keeping the details of the ‘mission’ very secret.

Globalisation and provincialism?

In May 2002 the Ministry of Defence invited a group of Norwegian journalists for a week’s press excursion to Kyrgystan and Afghanistan. Their aim was to give an account of the “Norwegian contribution” in the two countries. The trip was strictly planned, leaving little room for journalistic improvisation. The journalists contributing with stories from the two countries, refrained from launching a meta-perspective telling the readers what kind of ‘guided tour’ they had joined. Sometimes playing with ‘open cards’ – informing the reader about your methodological dilemmas may help the readers better understand what limitations are behind the journalistic expressions.

            We live in a part of the world in which people who want to, have plenty of access to the global-hegemonic media, CNN or BBC World – and to a great number of other international media. But the proportion of people turning to these channels regularly is small. We experience that part of the nuances in the coverage of the ongoing war found in larger Western media (for example British, German or French press, at times also The Washington Post or The New York Times - and in the media of the rest of the world) do not trickle into Norwegian media. A future challenge for Norwegian media, in the era of globalisation, is to avoid the provincialism represented by simplification and shallowness. Does the fact that Norway is a small country mean that we are less well informed and thereby less able to function as active participants in a democracy when it comes to the great and serious questions of the world’s future?

 

 

Literature:

Abramovici, Pierre: ”L’histoire secrète des négociations entre Washington et les talibans”, Le Monde Diplomatique januar 2002

Bourdieu, Pierre & Wacquant, Loïc J.D.(1993): Den kritiske ettertanke, Samlaget, Oslo

Brisard, Jean-Charles & Dasquié, Guillaume (2001): Ben Laden La Vérité Interdite, Editions Denoël, Paris

Durakovic, Asaf (2003):

Eide, Elisabeth (2002): ’Down there’ and ’Up here’ – ’Europe’s Others in Norwegian feature stories, doctoral thesis. Oslo: Unipub, University of Oslo

Fairclough, Norman (1995): Media Discourse, London: Arnold

Fossum, Egil (1989): U-landsjournalistikk og kildekritikk, i Vaage, Odd Frank (red.): Massemedier og u-landsdekning. Cappelen, Oslo

Hammersmark, Marit: ”Ydmykelse, følelsenes atombombe”, i Apollon 4/2001

Heger, Anders & Vogt, Karin (2002): Bruddet, Oslo: Cappelen

Herold, Mark W. (2001): “A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States’ Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting”, Znet, Desember 2001

Knightley, Philip (1989): The first casualty, Pan Books, London

Lamb, Christina: “They call it the Slaughterhouse”, The Sunday Telegraph, 10.12.2001

Montaigne, Michel de (1907): “Sur le Cannibalisme”, i Essais de Montaigne, Tome 1, Chapitre 3, Libraries de Paris, Firmin-Didot et Cie, Paris

Parry, Richard Lloyd: “War on Terrorism. A Village is Destroyed. And America says nothing happened”, The Independent, 4.12.2001

Ottosen, Rune (2001):

Ottaway David P. & Stephens, Joe: “Diplomats Met With Taliban on Bin Laden. Some contend U.S. Missed Its Chance”, Washington Post 29.10.2001

Parsons, Robert James: ”America’s big, dirty secret”, Le Monde Diplomatique mars 2002, eng. utgave.

Richard Alexandre: “La CIA aurait rencontré Ben Laden en juillet”, Le Figaro 31.10.2001

Ramonet, Ignacio (1999): La tyrannie de la communication, Galilée, Paris

Said, Edward (1995 [1978]): Orientalism, Penguin, London

Said, Edward: ”Thoughts about America”, Al-Ahram Weekly, 2.03.02.

Shohat, Ella & Stam, Robert (1994): Unthinking Eurocentrism. Multiculturalism and the Media,Routledge, London

Tashiro, Akira (2001): Discounted Casualties. The Human Cost of Depleted Uranium, The Chugoku Shimbun, Hiroshima

Tuchman, Gaye (1978): Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media, Oxford University, New York

 

 


[1] Reporter and writer Åsne Seierstad says she witnessed this type of falsification on several occasions during her stay in Afghanistan the autumn of 2001.

[2] She is no longer a minister, and she was also dismissed as Vice President. At present she is the head of the Afghan Human Rights commission.

[3] According to Aftenposten 18th of March 2002, a group of Saudi Arabian girl students were burnt alive when their boarding school caught fire. The vice and virtue police would not allow them out, since they were not properly clad.

[4] The documentary is produced by the British-Afghan reporter Saira Shah, and was presented three times in Norwegian Public Broadcasting (NRK) during the fall of 2001)

[5] Excerpts from the appeal of Afghan Women’s Network: "Military actions in Afghanistan should come to an immediate halt. The anti-terror campaign should not be fought at the cost of the human rights of Afghans by these being limited or violated." …"Afghanistan should be supported in a peace process and attempts at nation building in such a way to secure the respect of all ethnic and religious groups, women and children. Afghan women must be secured a participation in the peace process. The creation of a future government in Afghanistan must come as a result of the solidarity of the people, without any form of foreign interference.

 

 

[6] This may be seen as a turning point: From now on the West starts the hunt for bin Laden.

[7] It is of course false to say that this war was ever ‘over’, since Iraq has experienced continuous bombing of its territory since 1991 till this day.

[8] During the weeks between September 11th and the change of regime in Kabul, also Reuters and AFP had stringers in Kabul.

[9] In an interview with BBC’s Nik Gowing 08.04.2002.

[10] My investigation here is built on electronic search in the archives of Norway’s leading newspapers, for Karzai combined with oil.