Fit to print?
With Al-Jazeera's critique of American foreign policy and the internal politics of many Arab states making powerful enemies, pressure is building to silence its voice. John R Bradley reports from Riyadh
Al-Jazeera's English-language Web site, re-launched just three months ago after being brought down by an American hacker at the height of the invasion of Iraq, is reportedly in turmoil once again after dumping its star Western reporter, Yvonne Ridley.
The editors of english.aljazeera.com have been inundated by almost one million e-mails protesting the decision, especially from Muslim groups, according to insiders who spoke to Al- Ahram Weekly.
They are reported to include messages from British MPs George Galloway and Jeremy Corbyn, and members of the House of Lords.
"I was told I'd been dismissed a week last Wednesday and security were told they should not let me into the building," Ridley told the Weekly this week, adding that she was unable to comment further for legal reasons.
Ridley is reportedly the ninth Western journalist to have left, or been forced out, since the English-version Web site was launched last September.
Three Asian journalists have been recruited from a local Qatari paper, The Peninsula, on two-month contracts to cover their work, and the Web site is presently producing only summaries of wire stories.
As a reporter for The Daily Express, Ridley shot to fame in 2001, shortly before the US bombing campaign against Afghanistan, after sneaking into the country on a donkey disguised as an Afghan woman.
She was imprisoned for 10 days by Taliban officials after being caught, and her incarceration became front-page news around the world.
In a book about the adventure, Ridley claimed that the CIA leaked false documents to the Taliban "proving" she was a Mossad spy. The CIA had hoped, Ridley argued, that the contents would persuade her captors to execute her, so the pro-war lobby in the West would have a powerful symbol of Taliban barbarity on the eve of its bombing campaign.
However, Ridley claims the Taliban saw through the plot and promptly released her. Although Ridley had little sympathy for her captors, she decided to study Islam, and converted nearly a year after her release.
After joining Al-Jazeera, Ridley began attacking the alleged justification for a war in Iraq, and seemed just the kind of journalist Al-Jazeera needed -- obviously sympathetic with the Muslim world, but a life-long peace campaigner in the West too.
Ridley's independent streak, however, quickly became a thorn in Al-Jazeera's side. After arriving in Qatar, she promptly set up the first branch of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) in the Middle East, while openly challenging what she saw as exploitative working conditions and nepotism.
There were also, according to journalists at Al-Jazeera, a number of public arguments between Ridley and senior management over the English-language Web site's politics.
"She was particularly furious that we are constantly having to tame our Web site's content to pacify US critics," one said.
Ridley's sacking is the latest in a series of headline-making events at Al-Jazeera, the Arabic-language satellite news organisation known as the CNN of the Middle East and most famous for airing exclusive video and audio messages from Al-Qa'eda leader Osama Bin Laden. In September its best-known Arab reporter, Tayssir Alounni, was arrested in Spain for alleged membership of a Syrian-dominated cell of Al-Qa'eda, suspected of having close links to those responsible for the 11 September attacks in New York and Washington. In the same month, the US- backed Iraqi National Congress also slapped a two-week ban on Al-Jazeera's Baghdad reporters, after they aired calls for suicide attacks within Iraq by what the station invariably calls "resistance groups".
Further, in October, US forces detained two Al-Jazeera employees covering a suicide bombing at a police station in Baghdad suspected of having had prior knowledge of the attack, because they arrived at the scene and started filming before the bomb actually went off.
It was in the midst of all this that Ridley's hackles were first raised, according to insiders, when Al-Jazeera's Web site editors quietly bowed to pressure from the Bush administration -- also in September -- by pulling two cartoons deemed "inflammatory" by Washington. In Ridley's view, this made a mockery of Al-Jazeera's public image of fierce independence.
Another Al-Jazeera journalist reported the cartoons were removed after a US government official called the station to register the complaint. One cartoon was of so-called "green card soldiers": young Latino men shown going through an immigration tunnel to emerge from the other side as US soldiers, ready to leave for military service in Iraq. The other was of the Twin Towers imploding, and two giant fuel pumps rising from the ashes to replace them.
Just before the decision to pull the cartoons was taken, an article appeared in a respected Kuwaiti newspaper which quoted an American diplomat as saying Congress had secretly recommended to US President George W Bush that he "put all possible pressure" on the Qatari government to shutdown the satellite station.
The article, published in the Arabic-language daily Al-Siyasa, sent shockwaves through the Al-Jazeera news organisation, despite the fact that its journalists were not able to verify its accuracy. It reported that a series of meetings were held in late August and early September at the headquarters of the Security Intelligence Committee of the House of Representatives. The subject of the meetings was "US-Qatari relations in light of the role Al-Jazeera has played in inciting anti-US sentiment".
The US diplomat said that the meetings of key members of the House of Representatives, Senate, Pentagon, State Department, CIA and FBI reached a unanimous proposal on the second anniversary of the 11 September attacks: To advise Bush to warn the Qatari government to close Al-Jazeera -- or, as a first step, to replace its current journalists with others who are "moderate and neutral".
If Al-Jazeera failed to reconsider its news content, the committee was said to have concluded, the US would in turn have to reconsider its relations with Qatar, despite the latter's aid in the war on Iraq.
Al-Siyasa said committee members had accused Al-Jazeera of being against both US foreign and domestic political interests and its armed forces, particularly those in Iraq and Afghanistan; of having become a platform for Al-Qa'eda and the ousted Iraqi regime; and of promoting other "fundamentalist and terrorist" Islamist groups.
Their proposals to Bush, according to the article, included transferring its largest military base in the region to another Gulf state; minimising its civilian presence; revoking the 50-year-old defence treaty between the US and Qatar; and withdrawing most other US support.
Observers say that, under this American pressure and also facing the wrath of other Arab regimes criticised on Al-Jazeera, the organisation had no choice but to tone down its rhetoric.
This was evident when, after the recent bombings in Saudi Arabia, Al-Jazeera televised phone interviews with mainstream Saudi journalists in Riyadh, who typically toe the government line, rather than -- as it had in the past -- with London-based Saudi opposition figures.
Qatar, indeed, would do well to study the Saudi experience generally.
It took the House of Saud seven decades to face up to the consequences of having aligned itself domestically with a Jihad- inspired Wahhabi religious establishment while also forming alliances with Western powers needed to guarantee its external security. One result of that inherent contradiction was 11 September, an attack against the Saudi-American alliance in which 15 of the 19 suicide hijackers were Saudi nationals.
Qatar, at least, seems to have taken only seven months to wake up to the absurdity of bankrolling an anti-war, and especially anti-US, pan-Arab satellite news station while also benefiting economically from allowing the US-led war on Iraq to be coordinated from a US airbase on its soil.
In the present period of wheeling, dealing and horse-trading involving Qatar and the US, there is evidently no room for the likes of Yvonne Ridley to promote their anti-US, and pro-Islam, agendas on Al-Jazeera. Ridley is finding other outlets, though. The BBC has just finished filming a documentary on her ordeal and she is finalising a book deal with a US publisher about her brief stint at the most controversial news organisation in the world.
