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European News Organizations Are Reducing Presence
in Iraq
By Jacques Steiberg
The New York Times
Saturday 02 October 2004
Citing the ongoing danger and unpredictability of the
Iraqi insurgency, news organizations from France, Germany, Italy and other
European nations have recently scaled back their presence in Iraq.
While most American news organizations with offices
in Baghdad have yet to follow the Europeans' lead, several American editors and
producers said yesterday that the most recent spate of violence had prompted
them to order additional precautions, including relying more on Iraqi
freelancers.
Representatives of the remaining news organizations
acknowledge that they have sometimes struggled to provide readers and viewers
with a full picture of life on the ground in Iraq, in part because they have
restricted their correspondents' travel. When those reporters do venture out,
they risk not only their own lives but also the lives of those Iraqis who agree
to be interviewed by them.
"It is a situation that is assessed once, twice a
day," said Paul Slavin, a senior vice president of ABC News in New York. "And we
will not hesitate to pull people out if the situation really deteriorates. Right
now it's extremely dangerous, but within the range of tolerable."
Westerners in particular have been the target of
kidnappers in recent weeks, including two Italian aid workers, since released;
two French journalists, their whereabouts unknown; and two American engineers,
who were beheaded.
Those developments were part of the reason the German
Foreign Ministry recently said it had become too dangerous to remain, leading
several German newspapers and television stations to pull out of Iraq
altogether. About 10 days ago, for example, N-TV, a 24-hour German news channel,
withdrew the correspondent it had had in Baghdad for the last 18 months. "I told
him to come home, not to be a hero," said Volker Wasmuth, the station's foreign
editor.
A German public television station, ZDF, said that it
had recently recalled its Baghdad correspondent, and that while it would
continue to maintain an office there, it would be staffed only by Iraqi
reporters.
To cover the Iraqi insurgency, the newsweekly Der
Spiegel had been sending reporters from either Cairo or its headquarters in
Hamburg on brief, special assignments, as an alternative to establishing a
permanent bureau. But, the magazine said last week, it has halted even those
brief tours.
The news organizations directly affected by the
insurgents' attacks on Westerners have also made adjustments in staffing.
The newspaper Le Figaro - the employer of Georges
Malbrunot, one of the French journalists kidnapped in August - withdrew its only
other reporter in Iraq around Sept. 20.
The other French journalist taken hostage was
Christian Chesnot of Radio France, a state-owned network, who had been traveling
with Mr. Malbrunot. Mr. Chesnot had been sent to Iraq while a freelance reporter
working for Radio France, Nicolas Henin, left on vacation. Radio France has
since told Mr. Henin that he may not return, and that it would assign no one
else to Iraq.
Two other French television networks, the state-owned
France 3 and the private TF-1, have also pulled their remaining staff out of
Iraq during the last 10 days. Not all of the French television networks have
followed suit, though. France 2, a network that is also state-owned, said last
week that its correspondents would remain in Baghdad, though for how much longer
was unclear.
"We want to be in Baghdad as long as the French
journalists and their Syrian driver will remain hostages," said Arlette Chabot,
executive editor of France 2. "We want to be there as a sign of solidarity and
of friendship. We want to be in Baghdad as long as they are not freed."
The departures of the European correspondents follow
those earlier this year of several dozen Japanese journalists. They had
chronicled the arrival of Japanese troops in Samawa, in southern Iraq, but
nearly all had left by early spring, as the insurgency worsened. Only two
Japanese newspapers, Asahi and Mainichi, have correspondents in Iraq.
For those news outlets that remain in Iraq, the
constraints on normal reporting are often formidable.
The lone correspondent in Baghdad for The Daily
Telegraph of London, for example, is not permitted to venture beyond the city
limits without the permission of the newspaper's foreign editor, Alan Philps.
"Wherever possible," Mr. Philps said, "no one leaves
the hotel without us knowing."
Ethan Bronner, deputy foreign editor of The New York
Times, said the five staff reporters now in Iraq - roughly the same number
assigned there in recent months - had experienced frustration at their travel
limitations inside the country.
"Our reporters feel they cannot wander
unaccompanied," Mr. Bronner said. "There's even concern about not returning to a
place they've been, for their own safety and for the safety of the people
they've been visiting.
"It's not possible to report the way we'd like," he
said, "or the way we're used to."
