MEDIA: Groups Protest U.S. Expulsion of U.N.-based Iraqi Reporter

By Haider Rizvi Reprint | | Print |

Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 20 2003 (IPS) - The telephone rings. He picks it up. ”Hello.” No one answers. Five minutes later, he receives another phone call. The caller is silent again.

”This happens every day,” he tells fellow journalists who stop by his office to say hello. ”The phone keeps ringing all day.”

Instead of going out and posing tough questions to diplomats, like many others, Mohammad Hassan Allawi, prefers to stay in his fourth floor office in the U.N. building in New York and watch television coverage of the day’s events.

”Mohammad, it’s all about your country. Why don’t you ask questions?” a colleague asked him on his way out of a news conference recently. Smiling, he says, ”You know that I am an Iraqi.”

Last week, Allawi, 38, who has reported on the United Nations for the past two years, received a letter from the U.S. mission here asking him to leave the United States within the next two weeks. The mission charged that Allawi was ”harmful to the security interests of the United States”.

He strongly denies these charges.

Shocked and angry, members of the U.N. Correspondent Association (UNCA) are protesting the expulsion.

”This action is unprecedented,” says Tony Jenkins, president of UNCA, in a Feb. 18 letter to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. ”No journalist accredited to the U.N. has ever been expelled.”

”Even at the height of the Cold War when the intelligence services of several nations, including the United States, recruited journalists or used press credentials as cover for agents, no U.N. accredited journalist was expelled,” he added.

U.N. officials say that despite the order, they have decided not to strip Allawi of his media credentials. ”For us, he’s a professional journalist. Why should we do that? We don’t have any evidence,” one official told IPS.

”Allawi is a member in good standing of our association,” Jenkins told the U.S. Secretary of State in his letter, demanding evidence to support the mission’s decision. ”We cannot accept the recourse by any member government to unsubstantiated and anonymous rumours and slurs to smear one of our members.”

Allawi is not the only journalist to have been caught in diplomatic crossfire as a U.S. military attack on Iraq looms.

A day after Allawi received his letter, some of his U.S. colleagues found themselves in a similar situation. On Feb. 14, the Iraqi government ordered the entire Fox News team to leave Iraq. But after negotiations between Fox and Iraqi officials, only correspondent Greg Palkot was ordered out, while three Fox technicians were allowed to remain.

Palkot is now reporting from Jordan.

Press freedom advocates say that such incidents could lead to a new trend in diplomatic battles where journalists could become easy targets.

”We are deeply concerned that journalists have become pawns in this escalating conflict (between the United States and Iraq),” says Joel Simon, acting director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) a New York-based independent group that monitors violations of press freedom worldwide.

”With tensions rising, it’s imperative that information circulate as freely as possible,” he told IPS.

UNCA president Jenkins points out that the U.N. Headquarters Agreement prohibits the United States from imposing any impediments on ”transit to or from the headquarters district of representatives of the press accredited by the United Nations”.

The agreement, he adds, requires the U.S. secretary of state to personally approve any order of expulsion against an accredited U.N. correspondent. But, reportedly, the letter received by Allawi was not signed by Colin Powell.

The U.S. mission did not return calls for comments.

Allawi, a father of five, has one week left to pack and leave for Baghdad.