(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has called on the Iraqi police and US-British coalition forces to set up a commission to establish the exact circumstances surrounding the 28 October 2003 death of Ahmed Shawkat, editor of the weekly “Bilah Ittijah” (“Without Direction”), in the northern city of Mosul. The Associated Press said Shawkat was shot dead on […]
(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has called on the Iraqi police and US-British coalition forces to set up a commission to establish the exact circumstances surrounding the 28 October 2003 death of Ahmed Shawkat, editor of the weekly “Bilah Ittijah” (“Without Direction”), in the northern city of Mosul.
The Associated Press said Shawkat was shot dead on the roof of his office. Two men had reportedly followed him up to the roof when he went there to make a phone call.
His daughter Roaa Shawkat, who also works for “Bilah Ittijah”, said Ahmed Shawkat had issued “calls for democracy and our people don’t understand the meaning of democracy – maybe the Islamists have taken a stance against him for that reason.”
Ahmed Shawkat had reportedly received threatening letters telling him to close down his newspaper. His daughter described him as a man of integrity. “He used to write against the resistance, against the Americans, against the local government and the former government. Some people clearly did not like this independence of spirit,” she said.
In a report issued in July, entitled “The Iraqi media: a new but fragile freedom,” RSF voiced concern about harassment and threats against Iraqi journalists because of the intolerance of political parties used to settling ideological differences through violence (see IFEX alert of 23 July 2003). Explicit threats from various political groups, accusing journalists of being either “saddamiye” (sympathetic to Saddam Hussein’s return) or “traitors” under the thumb of the Americans, have resulted in considerable self-censorship by the Iraqi press.
The often aggressive and brutal attitude of US soldiers and frequent arrests of journalists have reinforced the tendency to be prudent and apply self-censorship. On 28 October, Samer Hamza, a cameraman with the Arabic-language television network Al-Jazeera, was detained by US soldiers near a Baghdad police station that was targeted during a day of intense violence on 27 October. He was finally released on 29 October without being given any official explanation for his arrest. The US army reportedly suspected him and his driver of having advance knowledge of the attack.
His arrest brought to four the number of known cases of journalists arrested and briefly detained by US forces in October. Al-Jazeera cameraman Salah Husein Nussaif was arrested by Iraqi police in Shahraban (about 100 km from Baghdad) on 3 October and spent three days in prison, in the custody of both the US army and Iraqi authorities, before finally being released after an Al-Jazeera lawyer intervened. He was never told why he had been arrested. Agence France-Presse photographer Patrick Baz and a Reuters journalist were detained in similar circumstances for several hours on 19 October in a police station in the city of Fallujah. The Iraqi police said they were acting on the orders of the US army, which was looking for someone who had filmed an attack on one of its convoys in Fallujah.
