MEDIA-MIDEAST: Bombs Raise Fears of Campaign Against Arab Paper

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 13 1997 (IPS) - The first major bomb threat at the United Nations and an attack on an Arab paper’s London headquarters have sparked worries that an unknown group is targetting independent press coverage of the Arab world.

U.N. and New York security officials cleared out offices Monday after they confirmed that at least one live parcel bomb — believed to be the first bomb to have entered U.N. headquarters in the building’s five-decade history — had been mailed to the U.N. office of the Lebanese-founded daily ‘Al-Hayat’ (Life).

Al-Hayat’s Washington offices were targeted Jan. 2 with five letter bombs, all apparently mailed from the same location in Alexandria, Egypt. The start of a new round of attacks on the independent, Saudi-owned paper is leading some experts to wonder whether the Arab media itself is being sent a warning.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan criticised the attack as “a reminder of the dangerous conditions under which many journalists work,” and said it threatened both the United Nations and the principle of free expression.

U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard confirmed that two parcels bearing the same postmark, each described as “a greeting-card-sized envelope”, were discovered by U.N. security officials. At least one was confirmed in a security scan to be a live bomb, while the other was also suspected of being an explosive.

“From what I heard, it was the type that would explode upon opening,” Eckhard said of the bomb. He said that the New York bomb squad moved the envelopes to the U.N. garage, where they detonated them peacefully in explosive-proof containers.

Hours earlier, a similar greeting-card bomb exploded in Al- Hayat’s main London offices. Two persons were injured.

Only the London attack alerted the United Nations to the threat of a bomb in its New York headquarters, U.N. officials said. “It was the incident in London which triggered extra surveillance,” Eckhard said. Al-Hayat’s U.N. correspondent, Raghida Dergham, had warned U.S. authorities of a possible threat to the building after the London bomb exploded and asked for tightened security.

Now, Dergham told IPS, the central mystery is why al-Hayat has been targeted so frequently this month.

“Before, we thought it could be just one incident,” Dergham said of the Jan 2 attack on the Washington office. “Now, we don’t know how long this will go on…We don’t know why we are being targeted. We don’t know what the message is.”

Although no group has taken credit for the bombings, security officials have said that the Egyptian postmark and targeting of al- Hayat may point to an Egyptian-based fundamentalist group upset by the daily’s coverage of Islamism. One group, the Gamaat al- Islamiya (Islamic Organisation), has previously targeted foreigners and intellectuals in its war against Hosni Mubarak’s one-party state.

In one telling sign, the only packages bearing the same postmarks that did not arrive at al-Hayat ofvices were sent in early January to Fort Leavenworth prison in Kansas. Fort Leavenworth is a maximum-security prison where Mohammed Salameh, an associate of Gamaat holy leader Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman who was found guilty of the 1993 bombing of New York’s World Trade Centre, is serving a life sentence.

“We have declared our opposition to terrorism in all its forms,” Dergham said of al-Hayat. But she added that the paper has had many enemies, including Arab governments resentful of the paper’s detailed coverage of subjects ranging from corruption in Jordan and power struggles in Iraq to crimes in Saudi Arabia.

Al-Hayat, which was founded in the 1940s in Lebanon, is owned by Saudi Prince Khaled bin Sultan, the son of the country’s defence minister, and is edited by Jihad Khazen, a personal friend of Egyptian President Mubarak. The paper is praised in the Arab world for its generally independent and probing coverage of events in all the Arab countries save Saudi Arabia itself.

“It’s actually the best Arabic-language newspaper in terms of Arab affairs,” said Joel Campagna, a Middle East researcher for the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based press rights group. “There’s no other paper like it in terms of its independence, and its investigative work is incisive.”

He argued that fundamentalists may not even want to attack the paper, since it is one of the few Arab outlets that has printed messages by banned Islamist groups, like Algeria’s Islamist parties. The paper has criticised both Islamists and governments which seek to repress them, Dergham noted.

The exception to such even-handedness, Campagna added, is Saudi Arabia. Both Prince Khaled’s ownership and the repeated threat to curtail the paper’s access to the oil-rich Gulf markets have dampened any criticism in al-Hayat of the Saudi monarchy, Campagna said.

Nevertheless, the hardline Gamaat al-Islamiya seems the most likely opponent of the paper. The Gamaat is suspected of involvement in the failed 1995 assassination attempt against Mubarak during the Egyptian president’s visit to an Organisation of African Unity summit in Ethiopia, and it has targeted other officials and groups which it deems to support Mubarak.

Abdel-Rahman, the Gamaat’s lead cleric, has been in a U.S. prison since he was found guilty last year of leading a conspiracy to destroy several U.S. installations. Among them was the United Nations, which was believed to be the target of a 1993 bomb plot in which several Sudanese workers living in New York were accused of trying to drive an explosives-rigged car into the U.N. garage.