December 17, 2003

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World Media Watch

by Gloria R. Lalumia

BUZZFLASH NOTE: Once again, these are the views and perspectives of the individual papers, not of BuzzFlash or Gloria. They offer BuzzFlash readers a way of reading what other nations are saying about the crisis, whether we like it or not. We repeat: This is not an endorsement of their viewpoints.

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WORLD MEDIA WATCH FOR DECEMBER 17, 2003

1//World Press Review, USA--THE ARAB PRESS ON SADDAM HUSSEIN'S CAPTURE (World Press Review correspondent George Ziyad reviews Arab press reaction to Saddam Hussein's capture.)

2//Asia Times Online, Hong Kong--RUMSFELD AND HIS 'OLD FRIEND' SADDAM by Jim Lobe (At last in United States military captivity, ousted former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein will soon mark an important 20th anniversary, the kind of anniversary that brings with it an appreciation of the ironies of life, and politics. His captor, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, might also recall long-forgotten memories - or memories best forgotten - of what he was doing exactly 20 years ago.)

3//The Independent, UK--ANTI-WAR MPs GIVE BLAIR NO RESPITE OVER WMD HUNT (While Saddam's arrest appeared to swing US public opinion behind the war, Mr Blair found that MPs who opposed the war were in no mood to tone down criticisms of his actions. Peter Kilfoyle, a former defence minister, said: "I don't think this makes a difference for us because the war was about WMD and the threat from them. It might make a difference in America where the war was personalised. "They said they would find weapons immediately after the war. I doubt he has in his memory banks the location of all his weapons. But if they have him under lock and key and they can still not find his weapons it will show that the whole thing was a sham.")

4//The Moscow Times, Russia--THE RACE IS ON FOR THE KREMLIN (While President Vladimir Putin's re-election to a second term is treated as a foregone conclusion, other dilemmas facing Putin are not: Should he run as the candidate from United Russia, the party to which he conspicuously lent his name during the Duma campaign? Or should he run as an independent, to cultivate the sense that he represents the whole country, not just one party, and can transcend ordinary politics?... Putin's approval ratings remain stratospheric, with 78 percent saying they trust him fully and 13 percent saying they mostly do, according to the most recent survey by the independent polling agency VTsIOM-A, in November. However, if Putin's challengers can split more than half of the vote, depriving him of a majority, Putin would be forced into a run-off in April and, Shevtsova said, "his legitimacy would suffer.")

5//Inter Press Service, Italy--'FREE' SOCIETIES BATTLE TRICKIER MEDIA WOES (India is often called the world's biggest democracy, but journalists there are increasingly becoming targets for reprisals and police coercion, as well as legal action from state governments. Thailand too is perceived as having a relatively open media, but the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has come under fire for undermining critical media and shrinking the space for independent reportage. The Philippines has a reputation for being among the freest and noisest media in Asia, but it is also there where 14 journalists have been killed since January 2001, many from small publications in the countryside...These trends show that societies that have more room for free media rather than, say, nations like Burma or China are facing more sophisticated, subtler and trickier problems. Threats to media come in many other forms apart from open government control, use of advertising, or physical threats -- or a combination of all of these.)

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1//World Press Review December 16, 2003
http://www.worldpress.org/Mideast/1724.cfm

THE ARAB PRESS ON SADDAM HUSSEIN'S CAPTURE
George Ziyad
World Press Review correspondent
Cairo, Egypt
Dec. 15, 2003

"What we saw yesterday was the televised unveiling of a 30-year-old lie. A leader surrendered without fighting, the Arab street is stunned, and the Arab media appears to be in a state of shock," wrote Tareq al-Hamed in London's Saudi-owned, Pan-Arab daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat on Dec. 15. He was reacting, of course, to the capture of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

"With his silence, those Arabs who favor terrorizing people and falsifying [the images of leaders] will also fall silent-temporarily," another columnist, Abdel-Rahman al-Rashid wrote in the same paper.

The Arab satellite channels Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera gave the event extensive and factual coverage. The pundits that appeared on Arab TV, far from sounding embarrassed, seemed to revel in the prospect of the U.S. presence in Iraq being exposed as a neocolonialist enterprise now that Hussein is captured. Iraqi leaders such as Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari appeared to squirm at their own lack of knowledge of how and when the operation in their name was carried out.

(MORE)

2//Asia Times Online December 17, 2003
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EL17Ak01.html

RUMSFELD AND HIS 'OLD FRIEND' SADDAM
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - At last in United States military captivity, ousted former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein will soon mark an important 20th anniversary, the kind of anniversary that brings with it an appreciation of the ironies of life, and politics.

His captor, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, might also recall long-forgotten memories - or memories best forgotten - of what he was doing exactly 20 years ago.

If so, he will remember that he was in Baghdad, as a special envoy from then-president Ronald Reagan, assuring his host that, to quote the secret National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) that served as his talking points: the US would regard "any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West".

So began the effective resumption of close relations between Baghdad and Washington that had been cut off by Iraq during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Within a year, Washington would fully normalize ties with Saddam, and even suggest that the dictator had become a full-fledged "Arab moderate", ready to make peace with Israel.

Of course, the reason for this rapprochement - nay, avid courtship - was the bad turn that the war between Iraq and Iran had taken for Baghdad. A victory by Tehran, which seemed imminent, would pose a major threat to US interests in the Gulf, such as access to the region's oil.

(MORE)

3//The Independent 16 December 2003
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=473757

ANTI-WAR MPs GIVE BLAIR NO RESPITE OVER WMD HUNT
By Ben Russell and Andrew Grice

Tony Blair's delight at the capture of Saddam Hussein was tempered yesterday when Labour MPs warned that it had not changed the fundamental flaws in the legal and moral case for the Iraq war.

Several MPs warned that the Government would come under increasing pressure to find hard evidence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq now that its former dictator was behind bars.

While Saddam's arrest appeared to swing US public opinion behind the war, Mr Blair found that MPs who opposed the war were in no mood to tone down criticisms of his actions. Peter Kilfoyle, a former defence minister, said: "I don't think this makes a difference for us because the war was about WMD and the threat from them. It might make a difference in America where the war was personalised.

"They said they would find weapons immediately after the war. I doubt he has in his memory banks the location of all his weapons. But if they have him under lock and key and they can still not find his weapons it will show that the whole thing was a sham."

In a letter to Mr Blair, Graham Allen, a former government whip, warned: "With Saddam a captive, the world will now expect these weapons to be found. They represent his only bargaining counter with the Allies and he can expect only a short time to use it. If Saddam does not within the next month or two offer some evidence which leads to a discovery of WMD, the world will draw the reasonable inference that he never had any. If that happens, I hope that the Government will accept this conclusion too."

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4//The Moscow Times Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2003 Page 1
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2003/12/17/002.html

THE RACE IS ON FOR THE KREMLIN
By Caroline McGregor
Staff Writer

Last week's kickoff of the presidential race was a nonevent, perhaps because the March 14 vote itself is expected to be a nonevent.

While President Vladimir Putin's re-election to a second term is treated as a foregone conclusion, other dilemmas facing Putin are not: Should he run as the candidate from United Russia, the party to which he conspicuously lent his name during the Duma campaign? Or should he run as an independent, to cultivate the sense that he represents the whole country, not just one party, and can transcend ordinary politics?

Lilia Shevtsova, an expert on presidential politics at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said she expected Putin to choose the latter. "He wants to be the president of all Russia, to sit on all chairs, to be everyone's man," she said.

(SNIP)

Putin's approval ratings remain stratospheric, with 78 percent saying they trust him fully and 13 percent saying they mostly do, according to the most recent survey by the independent polling agency VTsIOM-A, in November.

However, if Putin's challengers can split more than half of the vote, depriving him of a majority, Putin would be forced into a run-off in April and, Shevtsova said, "his legitimacy would suffer."

Putin's campaign chairman, Dmitry Kozak, the first deputy head of Putin's Kremlin administration, is in charge of making sure that doesn't happen. His task is to make the campaign interesting enough that turnout surpasses the 50 percent needed for the election to stand, without allowing an alternative candidate to run a strong campaign that would establish himself as a serious contender in 2008.

Putin will require that the strategies used for achieving re-election be above board, and vote rigging is out of the question, Shevtsova said.

"He wants the elections to be civilized," she said. "His image in the West is very important, and he doesn't want any of the unpleasantness that happened with the parliamentary elections."

5//Inter Press Service December 12, 2003
http://www.ips.org/index.htm

'FREE' SOCIETIES BATTLE TRICKIER MEDIA WOES
Roxanne Toh and Johanna Son

KANCHANABURI, Thailand, Dec 12 (IPS) - India is often called the world's biggest democracy, but journalists there are increasingly becoming targets for reprisals and police coercion, as well as legal action from state governments.

Thailand too is perceived as having a relatively open media, but the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has come under fire for undermining critical media and shrinking the space for independent reportage.

The Philippines has a reputation for being among the freest and noisest media in Asia, but it is also there where 14 journalists have been killed since January 2001, many from small publications in the countryside. The seven killings in 2003 are said to be the highest number in a year ever.

These trends show that societies that have more room for free media rather than, say, nations like Burma or China are facing more sophisticated, subtler and trickier problems. Threats to media come in many other forms apart from open government control, use of advertising, or physical threats -- or a combination of all of these.

''The press in India have suffered unfairly from the use of privilege by governments that cannot accept criticism,'' stated Nirmala Lakshman, joint editor of Chennai-based 'The Hindu' newpaper.

The atmosphere of intolerance for dissenting views and exposes of corruption has led to 100 cases being filed against newspapers and magazines in Tamil Nadu state, she told a forum this week on media, human rights and democracy organised by Bangkok-based regional human rights lobby Forum-Asia and the South-east Asia Press Alliance (SEAPA).

'The Hindu' itself was a target of such action by the government of Tamil Nadu state, whose assembly in November sentenced the newspaper's editor and four other journalists to 15 days' imprisonment for 'breach of privilege' for articles critical of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayaram Jayalalithaa.

(SNIP)

Thailand's media environment has deteriorated since the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, sensitive to criticism, came into power in 2001, says Kavi Chongkittavorn, deputy managing editor of the Nation Group, which runs the English-language daily 'The Nation'.

The government's cultivation of a more pliant media, its popularity and the use of business to weaken media, has made Thailand a ''superficial democracy'', he adds.

While media had been very proactive during what he calls their ''golden period'' from 1990 to 2000, a time that saw the new Constitution being passed, newspapers today are divided into different factions, Kavi adds. ''Media and civil society have been disarmed and divided by Thaksin and his team since January 2001,'' he said.

(SNIP)

Ahead of the 2001 general election, which Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai Party won with a thumping majority, Shin Corp, owned by Thaksin's family, took over the television station iTV due to what it said at the time was purely business reasons.

At present, opposition politicians are watching whether the government will give in to a request by iTV to reduce its concession fees from 25 billion baht (633 million U.S. dollars) over 30 years to 150 million baht (3.8 million dollars) per year. ''I am watching whether Thaksin will choose the public interest over that of his family,'' said Democrat Party member of parliament Abhisit Vejjajijva. Thaksin refused to comment on the issue, local media reported.

More recently, critics expressed concern over data from the Stock Exchange of Thailand showing that a key amount of shares in The Nation Multimedia Group -- more than 11 percent as of end-November -- had been bought by relatives of Communication and Transportation Minister Suriya Jungrungreungkij.

(SNIP)

Over in the Philippines, the irony is that the attacks on its journalists have not even been getting enough coverage in the media, says Carlos Conde, a journalist and officer of the National Union of Journalists in the Philippines.

(SNIP)

''The predicament of Filipino journalists flies in the face of the myth being peddled that the Philippines has the freest press in South-east Asia,'' he said in a country paper for this week's seminar here.

''I would agree with the general description of our press as free-wheeling, rambunctious, even colourful and flamboyant to the point of being irresponsible. But free? That would be a lie,'' he wrote.