Institute for War & Peace Reporting

When I was a young journo working in the Middle East for the Christian Science Monitor, I was lucky enough to work for an extremely wise Foreign Editor called Geoffrey Godsell (of blessed memory) who always stressed that what the CSM wanted was not to have its reporters competing with people working for other international news dailies who sought to be a complete “newspaper of record” in every 24-hour period… No. Geoffrey used to stress over and over that it was more important to seek to understand the events I was writing about, even if that should take a bit more time.
“Leave chasing the so-called ‘scoops’ to the others,” he’d say. “Who knows in any given 24-hour period what will be of lasting importance, anyway? We want you to give us the stories of lasting importance.”
All of which is, I guess, a long-winded way of saying that I may be late, but I try to be good. I feel a bit late in having discovered a great new news source that covers a lot of the things that I’m interested in: Iraq, the Balkans, ICTY, Afghanistan, etc. But now that I have discovered it, I want to share the good news with you (if you don’t already know about it, which maybe you do.)
I’m referring to the excellent website of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, where you can get good, street-level reporting in English and a variety of other languages on all the above topics, and more.
Plus, they have a well-compiled page called the Iraqi Press Monitor, that provides a handy daily digest of the Arabic-language press in Iraq (plus, quite frequently, cartoons from Iraqi newspapers).
Anyway, today, I was cruising around the blogosphere, still a bit concerned that Riverbend still seems too depressed to post stuff for us… I had this feeling of “I want more, quality news and views from Iraq”. And where’s Anthony Shadid, anyway, just when we need him?? I’ve kind of had it with nervous-nelly gringos writing from inside the Green Zone or from dartingly short forays outside of it.
(Okay. I admit I’m even more of a nervous nelly than most of those gringo journos working there now. I haven’t even been to Iraq since the war; or indeed since 1981. But I’ve been writing this book on Africa, and the other one on Israel/Palestine. Gimme a break, already!)
So okay… I’m looking for news on Iraq, preferably by native-born Iraqis, and what I find is the IWPR.
In addition to their daily press digest, referred to above, what they also have up on their website is a weekly collection of stories–mainly ‘hard news’, but also some ‘soft news’ and ‘opinion’– produced by Iraqi trainees in a journalism training program they’ve been running there. And much of it is really, really good.
For example, if you go to this page and scroll down a bit, you’ll come to the latest week’s-worth of stories by the trainees. The most recent ones I found there (13 July dateline) were pretty interesting and wide-ranging. But last week’s collection (6 July) looked even better to me, in good part because they had a variety of different stories describing the street-level reaction to Saddam’s first court appearance.
Like this one, “Saddam’s TV Appearance Brings Popularity Surge: Support for the former dictator appears to strengthen after his self-confident debut in court”, written by Dhiya Rasan, from Baghdad. Rasan’s lede was:

    Safaa Mansour, a host for Radio Dijla in Baghdad, was astonished by an impromptu poll in which 125 out of the 200 listeners who called in said they were against the trial of former president Saddam Hussein.
    “Some callers burst into tears…. One woman said she was ready to sacrifice her son for Saddam,” Safaa, host of a popular new radio programme, told IWPR. “The callers called into doubt the legality of the court and the interim government. Some said Saddam was the legitimate president, despite the [human rights] violations which happened under him.”

Just one snapshot of Iraqis’ response to the Saddam appearance? Yes, certainly. Which is why it was great that IWPR had snapshots from other parts of the country, too.
From Wisam al-Jaff in Samarra (theme: “Protest against the trial descends into violence and looting in Samarra… “)
From Naser Kadhem in Dijail (theme: “The people of Dijail suffered years of repression and now find little cause to feel sorry that their former president has ended up in court… “)
From Sarhang Hama Ali and Shabaz Jamal in the Balisan valley, northern Iraq (theme: “In a highland Kurdish village poisoned in a chemical attack, some say execution is too good for the man who ordered it…”)
And from Dhiya Rasan (again), in Tikrit (theme: “Tribal leaders from Saddam?s home area try traditional mediation methods to win leniency for him… ”
By the way, the links above are all to English-language versions of those stories. If you go to IWPR’s Iraq program home-page there, though, you can also find Arabic – and Kurdish-language versions of the same stories.
So anyway, thanks, IWPR, for all your great work… And, erm, sorry it took me so long to find the site. (I have, however, now put a link to it up on the JWN sidebar there.)
JWN readers, tell me what you think!

5 thoughts on “Institute for War & Peace Reporting”

  1. There is a dearth of native voices on news about Iraq and plenty of other places. Anything IWPR furnishes to fill the gap is welcome and (I suspect) far more comprehensive and reliable than what the CIA gathers or (against enormous prejudice and bias) can transmit to policy-makers.
    Sad that the IWPR has no section on Israel and Palestine. People who read neither Hebrew nor Arabic have limited means to know how the local populations perceive or opine on events. What do Palestinians and Arabs really think and say to each other about the prospects for peace? The few glimpses offered by existing sources are not encouraging.
    Any opinion about the US government’s own World News Connection? It seems to be a successor to the old Foreign Broadcast Information Service. In pre-Internet days, FBIS offered about the world’s only weekly digest and indexed archive of news appearing in local media around the world.
    It would be great to find a sampling of Arab World views of Iyad Allawi, his career, and the prospects for his government. Does the press favor his government or does it give “equal time” to the insurgents?
    How weird a 13-Jul-04 NYT article by J. Gettlemen on the life of Zarqawi. The sources suggest he is little more than a coarse thug, not any sort of political leader. What share of the violence could emanate from such a loner? And, if we are to believe some IWPR / IPM articles, local Fallujans deny he is in town, but defend his actions and even justify bombings of civilians. The question I’d have is whether journalists’ inquiries can ever be candid. Can the journalists protect their sources from reprisals? Or can a journalist who asks “unfriendly” questions face dismissal or “disappearnce”?
    If truth is the first casualty of war, a journalist’s search for “truth” or “fact” may be a difficult task, except in terms of supplying what the audience wants to read, see, or hear. For instance, access to or presentation of the Iraqi transition government or its opponents (patriotic insurgents or wicked terrorists?) can hardly be separated from a journalist’s nationality, culture, or employer. Even if a gringo achieves a breakthrough scoop outside the Green Zone, there will be debate over whether he reported truth or was a dupe. Think of the debate over the stories of Arnett in Iraq or Matthews in the Sierra Maestra in the 50s).
    You recently wrote of the incidence of Post Trauma Shock Syndrome among troops. Might there be a parallel “Cognitive Dissonance Burn Out” among journalists whom, even if numbed to violence, suddenly realize they can no longer write stories that support the Party Line their editors want? Do they incur writer’s block (Riverbend), quit, or simply follow the lead of Remington who, after asking to leave Havana for lack of anything stirring to illustrate, was told by W.R. Hearst, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” ?

  2. Good questions, John, all of them…
    One thing I can certainly attest to is that working as a journalist in a war zone–espeically in a civil war–is really, really difficult and stressful. It is very difficult to stay grounded and keep your integrity, not least because a lot of what goes on in journalism involves cultivating sources, which can often mean getting into cat-and-mouse games with some v. dangerous people. I had a number of colleagues who were killed in the line of duty in Lebanon, some just by being in v. dangerous places, other because they got too close to sources, or whatever.
    There is also, as I know, a degree of PTSD for journos, too. When I would go to my dad’s home in England on leave, I would sometimes dive under the bed when a loud train passed his cottage. Then, after I quit Beirut, I developed a couple of strange psychosomatic symptoms… Cognitive Dissonance Burnout? Yes, quite possibly. People react to stressful situations in many different ways. Many of my colleagues did a fair number of mind-altering substances.
    As for present sources. I find the World News Connection almost useless for the Middle East, though I used to be a big fan of the daily FBIS publications in paper. MEMRI I distrust. It was started by an ex-Mossad guy with the ideological intention of ‘showing’ how bad the Arab world is… and the selection that he makes of things to translate is ncessarily, er, selective in that direction.
    The wire services generally do a pretty good job, and have some VERY smart, native-language speaking people working for them. (I read ’em on AOL.) English language media produced in the Arab world and Israel are often good value (Daily Star, Ahram weekly, Haaretz, etc.) But I really like the fresh voices on IWPR on Iraq and those other issues they cover… We search on…

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