Journalists under threat ‘from our failure to use real words’

EVERY second day an American soldier is killed in Iraq, but this and almost daily attacks on US forces are not reported in the West, Middle Eastern correspondent Robert Fisk told the World Association of Newspapers congress in Dublin yesterday.

He warned that Anglo-American authorities in control of Iraq had set up a legal committee to organise press censorship.

The aim, according to one diplomat, was to eliminate the "wilder" stories that might provoke incitement or ethnic hatred.

The failure to ask "why" the September 11 tragedy had occurred was a very sinister moment in journalism, Mr Fisk said.

Almost every newspaper in Ireland, Europe, the US, Africa, South America and the Middle East has a representative at the three-day Dublin event, which runs until tomorrow.

The 1,200 delegates include publishers, senior executives and editors from 85 countries.

Mr Fisk said journalists were under threat from ever more lethal weapons and ever more cynical governments, "from our failure to use real words, from those who will try to smother or censor our questions, as well as our

answers".

Beirut-based Mr Fisk, who has reported on Mideast affairs for 27 years, said they had been reporting Saddam's mass killings since the late 1970s, when the US government did not want anything but good relations with the Iraqi regime.

In 1982, after the reporter's front page report on a hospital train ferrying dying Iranian soldiers gassed by the Saddam regime, a British Foreign Office official had told his editor Mr Fisk's story had not been "helpful".

The same week of his train report, Mr Fisk said the US who were supporting Saddam sent a special delegate to meet Saddam in Baghdad to reopen the American embassy.

"His name was Donald Rumsfeld."

He said: "I recall all this because of the way in which any of our reports during this last war that suggested the Americans may have been bombing civilians rather than military targets were immediately attacked by governments as reports from 'behind enemy lines', written by journalists who were supposedly acting as Saddam's propaganda henchmen, duped by his secret services into lying about Anglo-American air raids."

Opening the congress, Gavin O'Reilly, president, National Newspapers of Ireland, was upbeat about the future of the industry and rejected warnings that technology posed a dire threat.

Despite the advent of other media, people were reading more newspapers than ever.

The World Association of Newspapers awarded its annual press freedom prize, the 2003 Golden Pen of Freedom, to the Belarusian Association of Journalists for resisting what was described as the most repressive regime in Europe.