RIGHTS: War Correspondents Lost a Battle in the Gulf

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Nov 30 1998 (IPS) - War correspondents saw a new era open up for their profession in the 1991 Gulf War, when the old partiality or neutrality dilemma, was left behind by new concerns over the role of journalism in conflict situations.

For the ethical debate on reporting armed conflicts takes a back seat when journalists find they are physically barred from witnessing the fighting.

How the profession should confront this lack of respect for journalism was one of the main concerns expressed recently in the First World Meeting of War Correspondents in the Cuban capital.

“A glimpse of the communication of the future was given on January 17, 1991,” the day when a US-led broad international coalition attacked the Iraqui forces occupying Kuwait, said Mexico’s Gerardo Arreola in a contribution sent to the meeting in Havana.

After the Vietnam war, the Gulf war was paradoxically “the war which had the greatest and best material resources for information to date, and the one that had the biggest news silences,” said Arreola, one of the three correspondents sent to the Gulf by the Notimex agency.

“Verification of the facts, a mainstay of journalism, was apparently thrown out without so much as a murmur,” when the United States imposed military control on the information.

The meeting of 71 war correspondents from 25 countries, covering some 50 armed conflicts, was organised by the Jose Marti International Journalism Institute last week.

This was the first meeting of its kind since the first war correspondent breached the action in the Crimea in 1854, said Guillermo Cabrera, journalist and director of the Jose Marti Institute.

Meanwhile, the debate on the neutrality of the journalist, and the stance to be taken when national interests or sentiments are involved or information is manipulated, was already underway a hundred years ago.

Cuban authorities screened the documentary “Cangamba” directed by Miguel Fleitas, a classified film unseen before on the island showing Cuban presence in armed action in Angola.

“The spectre of partiality is present everywhere,” Cuban journalist Roger Ricardo, a veteran was war correspondent in Angola and various armed conflicts in Central America, told IPS.

Ricardo, editor of the official Cuban newspaper “Granma,” quoted the Argentine-Cuban commander Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who said journalists “must be objective, but not impartial.”

“We are living through a process of retrogression of the role of the journalist and their safety,” said Ricardo, who, like his colleagues, survived the fighting in Central America armed only with a tee-shirt marked “Press. Don’t shoot.”

Today, journalists have become an “objective to be eliminated, target of the dirty war of narcotrafficking, the mafia and gangsterism,” said president of the Latin American Journalists’ Federation, Mexico’s Luis Suarez.

Australian Barry Low stressed war correspondents should not allow their emotions to carry them away, interfering with their capacity to understand the historical and political processes.

“Journalists think they can change the world, and they can, but they are more effective when they are unaware of their power.” said Lowe, who covered the fighting in the former Yugoslavia.

The role journalism can play in the course of a war was stressed by director of the Office of Historical Affairs of Cuba’s State Council, Pedro Alvarez Tabio, in homage to US journalist Herbert Matthews.

In February 1957, Matthews published a report in three installments in The New York Times entitled “Cuban rebel visited in hiding,” a report that forced dictator Fulgencio Batista to lift press censorship surrounding the Cuban guerrilla.

However, Alvarez said it was “purile” to retrospectively describe this interview with Fidel Castro as a “determining” element in the development of the war and the rebels’ triumph in 1959.