When
the phone rang and Julia said, “Micah has been kidnapped,”
there was little surprise—just an instant Iraq mode reaction:
How does one reach the relevant people? Iraq is a village of
twenty five million, and with tenacity, there is always a route.
Iraq
has become a graveyard for journalists, with 39 killed since
last year’s invasion. If it is not killing, kidnapping is
rife.
And
in Najaf, Iraqi police rounded up journalists on Wednesday
“for their own protection,” finally releasing them just
after two rockets landed behind the police headquarters.
Media
victims of the US invasion include an Al Jazeera journalist,
killed when the network’s headquarters was bombed by US forces
(despite the US military’s having been given a grid reference
of the building), a Reuters cameraman and a Spanish Telecinco
cameraman, killed when a tank shot up the Palestine hotel
(journalists headquarters in Baghdad), and the award-winning
cameraman Mazen Dana, who was filming outside the Abu Ghraib
prison, with US permission and visible credentials, and was shot
by a US soldier.
Independent
journalists seem especially vulnerable—some through
inexperience, others for just being in the wrong place at the
wrong time in one of the most complex—and now
dangerous—places on earth.
Julia
Guest from Bristol, UK and Micah
Garen (36) from New York, US—both experienced, independent
filmmakers—have spent much of the last 17 months in Iraq,
recording chaos, tragedy, and humanity, and for Micah,
documenting the pillaging—and some recovery—of Iraq’s
unique archeological heritage. His meticulous work brought him
also into close contact with the US and Italian militaries, and
some of the New York Police Department officers—also working
in Iraq on missing antiquities.
In June 2003, in an impassioned
article
on the “fevered pitch” of looting in “the birthplace of
the written word, etched out in clay bullae and on cuneiform
tablets more than 5000 years ago,” Garen wrote that US Army
Colonel John Malay, Commander of southern Diwaniya, said that he
recognized the problem, but archaeological sites were not a
priority. Garen quoted a marine as saying, “We are not trained
for this. Marines are good for kicking in doors and killing
people.” In balance, he also quoted one awed Marine, shocked
at “how much deeper the history is.”
The
then Italian Ambassador Pietro Cordone—inexplicably newly
appointed Iraqi Cultural Minister—“did not wish to speak
about the looting.”
Iraq has become a graveyard for journalists, with 39 killed since last year’s invasion. |
|
Garen
filmed cultural horrors, a child standing in a damaged home, a
Quran damaged in a US raid; he filmed the trucks being loaded by
people from all denominations with sustenance for those in
besieged Fallujah, the shooting up of the external doors of the
Baghdad office of young cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr, severed limbs
...
He
traveled on Christmas Eve with the US military seeking a former
Iraqi Minister, Ibrahim Izzet Al Douri, with rock music
blaring—resonant of Vietnam. And he documented item after item
of Iraq’s looted treasures—Mesopotamia’s heritage,
unbearable beauty, figures from the mists of time, enchanting
statuettes, frescos, clay tablets, and vases that are “not a
priority” for the occupying forces.
Garen’s
communications to his company,
Four
Corners Media,
ceased on August 13, after he had e-mailed US-based Human Rights
groups—e-mails later copied to AFP—that he had been banned
from the Italian base; then he disappeared. His fiancée,
Marie-Helen Carlton, made an emotional appeal via Reporters
Without Borders for his release, after he had been shown with
kidnappers threatening to kill him unless the US assault on
Najaf ended.
However,
it transpired Garen had been staying in the southern Italian
Military base near Nasiriyah and left after accusing the
Italians of shooting up an ambulance, killing four people,
including a pregnant woman, during a clash with Shi’ite
militia. The film was sent to Italian state television RAI 2.
According to news sources, he left the Italian base, checked in
to a Nasiriyah hotel and, whilst filming in a local market, was
kidnapped. Italian military officials distanced themselves from
Garen’s film. Captain Ensore Sarli, spokesman for the Italian
contingency in Iraq, said he “did not deem the journalist’s
work credible,” according to The Age (August 17, 2004).
He also denied that Garen had been expelled from the base:
“The journalist was not kicked out of Camp Mittica ... The
journalist stayed with us until August 11 when he handed back
the badge that allowed him access to the base saying he was
headed to Baghdad.”
It
took remarkably little time to forge a route to Moqtada Al-Sadr,
who—whilst distancing himself from the newly named Martyrs
Brigade, which claimed responsibility for the
abduction—requested the release of Garen, and after some
hours, which seemed like weeks, announced the kidnappers’
readiness to free the journalist after Friday prayers.
Friday,
August 19th, came and went. Saturday was then the set date.
Nothing. But word is bond.
The
invasion has meant that everyone in Iraq is now a
potential “victim of terror.” |
|
Yet,
hope waxed and waned, and nerves frayed, until Sunday, when
Garen appeared in the office of Al-Sadr’s Nasiriyah
representative Sheikh Aws Al-Khafaji, looking remarkably
relaxed, his interpreter Amir Doushi also released and safe. He
thanked Al-Sadr for his efforts in his release, efforts Al-Sadr
exerted whilst in the thick of fighting.
Micah
said that his experience did not deter him from staying in
Iraq—something he wished to do. The calls for his release,
made through southern mosques at Al-Sadr’s behest, were heeded
by his captors, who had previously thought he was working for US
military intelligence.
Reports state that Garen was then handed to Italian troops, who
passed him to the US military. Appearing briefly at a US-held
press conference, US spokesman Bob Callahan said, “ [Garen]
remains in Iraq but I cannot tell you where.”
Ironically,
unconfirmed reports indicate that Marie-Helene Carlton,
Micah’s fiancée, was being advised on the kidnapping by New
York’s Police Department. In December 2002, Garen had made a
searing film on NYPD’s zero-tolerance practices at the World
Economic Forum, through the eyes of a 76-year-old naval veteran
and protestor. Brutality alleged and filmed was such that New
York-based civil rights lawyers Ronald Kuby and Daniel Perez
took up the case of the protestor, Dick Krause. NYPD’s best
are some of those investigating the looted antiquities in Iraq.
Anomalies abound.
Communication
from several thousand miles with a Shi’ite cleric under siege
by two Middle England women, who had no such dealings before,
was relatively a little problem. On August 19, the US State
Department spokesman Adam Ereli spoke of their “objective to
bring about the safe release of this innocent victim of
terror.” Many (though not the US military) were involved in
doing just that; then ironically, Micah was almost hijacked by
the US military. When he was eventually released, Julia
commented, “There will be a party in Baghdad tonight.”
If
there was, it quickly became a mourning.
Their
colleague Enzo Baldoni (56) of Italy’s Diario was
killed within hours of Micah’s reappearance, in the same area
of southern Iraq where Micah had been held. His kidnappers had
threatened to kill him if Italy did not withdraw its troops.
Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, safely thousands of
miles away in Rome, refused to “give in to terrorists.”
With
a love for Iraq and its people, Baldoni, Julia, and a small
group of journalists had braved April’s bloody US siege and
slaughter of Fallujah, determined to record the truth of the
horrors of a massacre comparable to another US atrocity,
Vietnam’s never-to-be forgotten My Lai. The small group, also
joined with activists, unhesitatingly traveled in ambulances and
cars containing the sick and injured, at further risk, in the
hope that their presence would deter soldiers from firing at
them. Baldoni risked his life for the Iraqi people—a further
poignancy to the tragedy is that he lost his life in Iraq, where
people will give their life for a friend. But his blood is not
on the hands of his killers alone; it will never be washed from
those of Prime Minister Berlusconi.
A
tribute
to Enzo called him “a witness of the world ... careful and
irreplaceable ... a witness of history and a seeker of the
truth.”
Still
missing in Iraq are Christian Chesnot of Radio France
Internationale and Georges Malbrunot of Le Figaro newspaper.
This
illegal invasion has meant that everyone in Iraq is now a
potential “victim of terror,” residents and invaders alike.
But the invaders have an option: they can leave (and take their
puppet government with their foreign passports with them.) Only
then will normality and stability gradually return, and
shattered lives, homes, shrines, cities be rebuilt. And maybe in
time, foreigners too will again be able to walk the streets of
what remains of Iraq’s wondrous heritage till late in the
night and hear, as before, only, “Welcome, welcome, welcome
...”
President
Bush has called this disaster a “miscalculation.” A Member
of Iraq’s Olympic football team put it better. Talking of the
carnage, the bloodshed, and the heartbreak, he said of the
President, “How will he meet his God having slaughtered so
many?” Indeed.
May
all the invasion’s victims forever rest in peace. May those
who brought it about never do the same.
Deepest
gratitude is expressed to Sheikh Aws Al-Khafaji and all those
involved in bringing about the release of Micah Garen and Amir
Doushi. They cannot be named for obvious reasons.
Felicity
Arbuthnot is a journalist
and activist who has visited Iraq on numerous occasions since
the 1991Gulf War. She has written and broadcast widely on Iraq,
her coverage of which was nominated for several awards. She was
also Senior Researcher for John
Pilger's award-winning documentary Paying
the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq.
