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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 April 2000 Issue No. 478 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 April 2000 Issue No. 478
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Heritage Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters
A stone's throw away
By Nadia Abou El-Magd"Poisonous, hostile, destabilising." These are just a few of the many invectives which have been hurled at Al-Jazeera, the satellite news channel, broadcasting from Qatar, which many commentators believe has started a media revolution in the Arab world.
"We've been described as the stone that stirred the stagnant waters, creating currents and waves in the Arab media... Some said we are like a matchbox that started a fire that hasn't been extinguished yet," Hussein Abdel-Ghani, chief of Al-Jazeera's regional Cairo bureau, told a news conference on Monday. The conference was part of the celebrations marking the inauguration of the office in the new Free Media Zone, making Al-Jazeera the first Arab channel to move to the 6th of October City.
"I would like Al-Jazeera to be described as a flower that is blooming among other flowers, as the Chinese proverb goes," Abdel-Ghani continued.
Since it started broadcasting in November 1996, no other television channel won so much attention and caused such wide-scale controversy in the Arab World. While the inhabitants of Qatar do not exceed 600,000, it is estimated that Al-Jazeera has around 35 million viewers.
Al-Jazeera, which is sometimes dubbed the CNN of the Arab world, has been openly discussing previously taboo and sensitive subjects, such as police torture in Arab countries, polygamy, the compatibility of Islam and democracy. This, of course, has caused them problems in several countries. Their Kuwait office was closed last year and they also encountered difficulties in Algeria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
The channel is financed by 500 million riyals from the Qatari government, on condition that it becomes financially independent by April 2001, which, however, does not seem to be an attainable goal. As a result of this government financing, the Qatari foreign ministry has received as many as 400 complaints, mostly from other Arab governments. And yet, the channel, which already has bureaus in London, Moscow, Washington, Baghdad, Tehran, Gaza City and Amman, will soon open bureaus in Kabul, Rabat, Paris, Beirut and, possibly, also New York. The channel can be seen throughout the world, with the exception of Latin America.
There was anger in Egypt one-and-a-half years ago, when Al-Jazeera screened an interview with Adel Abdel-Meguid, an Egyptian Islamist militant living in London, who had been sentenced to death in absentia by an Egyptian military court in 1997 for his involvement in a conspiracy to bomb Cairo's Khan El-Khalili bazaar. Despite the admiration of many of its Egyptian viewers, others believe that Egypt is systematically targeted by the Qatari channel. "A broadcaster from Egypt... is against Egypt," read the headline of the national weekly Rose El-Youssef last week.
"Those who work for Al-Jazeera are human beings, and not angels. They may make mistakes, and we learn from these mistakes. There is no premeditated intention to defame Egypt or any other Arab country; defamation is not our policy," Sheik Hammad bin Thamer Al-Thani, chairman of the board of the controversial channel, told Al-Ahram Weekly.
At the reception on Monday evening with the strains of classical music in the background, Sheikh Al-Thani and Egyptian Information Minister Safwat El-Sherif jointly signed the agreement of Al-Jazeera's inauguration in Egypt.
In a speech to the gathering, El-Sherif expressed faith in Egypt's credibility and in the freedom of the media. "Freedom of the media is based on credibility and transparency. It means that we agree on many occasions and disagree sometimes."
But what will happen if, and when, they disagree, now that Al-Jazeera is operating in Egypt?
"We have willingly chosen a difficult path, a challenge," El-Sherif told the Weekly. "The Free Zone means that there is no censorship. What they will say from Egypt, they have been saying from Qatar, and can say from anywhere else. The communications revolution has eliminated barriers. We decided to enter this age with open hearts and minds."
Channel and Egyptian officials denied that a deal had been struck so that Al-Jazeera would tone down the programmes perceived as being anti-Egyptian in order to be able to operate from here.
Abdel-Rahman Hafez, head of the Egyptian Radio and Television Union, said that the Qatari channel would show respect for an "Arab code of ethics," but he declined to explain what he precisely meant by this.
"We were promised that there would be no change of the content or tone of our programmes," broadcaster Ahmed Mansour, host of the two controversial on-air programmes 'Without Limits' and 'Witness of the Age,' told the Weekly. "Anyway, we don't work in the dark and the audience will be able to tell the difference if any change takes place," Mansour added.
Novelist Youssef Al-Qai'd and many other Egyptian intellectuals object to Al-Jazeera hosting Israeli analysts. "We are not the first Arab channel to do so. Our channel believes in airing opinions and counter-opinions. We believe that Arabs, the advocates of right, are not going to change their minds or give up their rights when they hear Israeli counter-arguments," Sheikh Al-Thani told the news conference.
