Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore Iraqi journalists' perceptions of state corruption and democracy in order to deepen the understanding of the journalist’s role in democratic participation. Survey interviews were conducted ona sample of Iraqi journalists, using the theory of participatory democracy to design the instrument. The results show, based on demographic variables, a variety of perceptions towards democratization among the examined journalists, who are members of the Iraqi Journalists Syndicate. We argue that journalists can be active contributors to empowering public participation in the democratization process, a concept which closely corresponds with participatory democracy theory.

Introduction

Iraq ranked 162 out of 180 nations listed on the 2019 corruption perception index (CPI) report issued by Transparency International (2019). Additionally, the country was placed at 160 out of 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) 2018 World Press Freedom Index (2019). On June 12, 2018, RSF condemned the arrests of reporters who had been investigating corruption in various parts of Iraq, and called for an end to their persecution. By observing the Reporters Without Borders and Transparency International reports, which show increased risk for journalists and increasing rates of corruption, two issues arise: the first is the role of Iraqi journalists in coverage of corruption; the second is journalists’ perceptions of the Iraqi political system.

​In this respect, the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory (JFO) has frequently reported that local officials act with impunity, employing judicial interference and even death threats to terrorize journalists who investigate corruption (Reporters Without Borders 2018). The increasing rate of state corruption in Iraq and its relationship to the role of journalists arose as a result of the changing Iraqi political system since the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq, which set up a new political system and began a democratization process allowing Iraqi political parties to participate in the 2005 election (Altheide and Grimes 2005: 118). The attempt to expand the political system, or the democratization process (Kadhim 2013), continued with elections every four years until May 2018, which had the lowest participation rate since the Iraqi political system changed in 2003.

Iraqi doctor Tariq Al-Sheibani remembers little else beyond cowering on the ground as a dozen relatives of a patient, who had just died of COVID-19, beat him unconscious.

​About two hours later the 47-year-old director of Al-Amal Hospital in the southern city of Najaf woke up in a different clinic with bruises all over his body.

“All the doctors are scared,” said Sheibani, speaking at his home in Kufa a few weeks after the Aug. 28 attack. “Every time a patient dies, we all hold our breath.”

He is one of many doctors struggling to do their job as COVID-19 cases rise sharply in Iraq.

In Iraq, birth defects are a visible embodiment of the enduring toxic legacy of war for future generations and the environment. The Falluja Hospital’s birth defects Facebook page, where medical staff catalogue cases, reveals the striking diversity and quantity of congenital anomalies.[1] Babies in Falluja are born with hydrocephaly, cleft palates, tumors, elongated heads, overgrown limbs, short limbs and malformed ears, noses and spines.

The accompanying case reports are brief and often incorporate prognoses like “incompatible with life” or “stillborn.” The reproductive history of the mother is sometimes included as well. While most of these children do not survive, some live for weeks, months or years, often in pain and with grave disabilities.
​
Samira Alaani, a pediatrician at the Falluja General Hospital, is among several doctors who started noticing a wide range of uncommon birth defects among the infants delivered after the start of the US occupation in 2003.

Not only were birth defects high in number, they were also new and unusual in kind. Alaani and her colleagues were among the first to sound international alarm by publishing reports documenting the high rate of birth defects observed in hospitals in Falluja and Basra. In 2013, Alaani stated in an interview with the BBC:

Beijing and Moscow hope to use inroads into Iraq opened by the pandemic to build greater influence in the Middle East

​The Covid-19 pandemic starkly illustrates the state of health care in the Middle East, from the good to the truly wretched. The condition of local health systems has, in turn, offered opportunities to outside powers to boost their influence in the region. And no country in the Middle East offers better opportunity – in terms of size and geo-strategic importance – than Iraq. It is being seized upon.

The pandemic hit Iraq’s already fragile health system like a freight train. After decades of conflict, corruption and mismanagement, the Iraqi health system was on the brink of collapse even before the pandemic. Now, it is in utter turmoil.

Misinformation has spread like a plague, from claims about a locally manufactured therapeutic (not really) to conspiracy theories about the weaponization of the Covid-19 coronavirus (not really, either). They have contrived to create conditions that have allowed Covid-19 to spread through the population beyond the ability of the government to exert any control.

As of mid-September, Iraq had nearly 300,000 cases of Covid-19 and more than 8,000 resulting deaths in a population of 39 million. By comparison, Egypt, with a population of 99 million, recorded 101,000 cases and about 5,500 deaths. Crucially, Egypt has managed to suppress the curve and currently is recording about 150 new cases a day. The trajectory of infections in Iraq, however, continues to climb, and new cases number around 4,000 each day.

My heart sank as my colleague told me recently about the latest torture victim from Iraq who had contacted us to share his story. I had heard the same kinds of accounts from other victims of torture in detention, including the same names of two lieutenants and a major who he said had supervised and participated in torturing him and others.

I had sent those same names to Faik Zaidan, the head of the Iraqi High Judicial Council in April 2019, after earlier victims shared them with me, asking the council to investigate their actions. In fact, at Human Rights Watch, we have reported on torture in Iraq for decades, but it continues.

It is clearly futile to keep calling on the Iraqi government to address the systemic use of torture and inhuman prison conditions on its own. Outside help is needed. Iraq’s Parliament should ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture. This would allow an independent United Nations team to visit prisons in Iraq and advise and assist Iraq in strengthening protections against torture. And short of parliamentary action, the new prime minister can act to uphold the dignity of his fellow citizens and reverse the country’s shameful record on torture in detention.

The young man who contacted us recently, now 22, told my colleague that as a boy of 17, he smuggled himself out of the city of Mosul in early 2015 after the Islamic State (ISIS) took control. He made his way to Iran for surgery he had needed for years. He returned to Mosul in May 2017, after Iraqi forces, with U.S. military support, retook the city.

A few weeks before I deployed to Iraq as a young US military officer, in the spring of 2003, my French-born father implored me to watch The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo’s dramatic reenactment of the 1950s Algerian insurgency against French colonial rule. There are many political and aesthetic reasons to see this masterpiece of cinéma vérité, not least of which is its portrayal of the Algerian capital’s evocative old city, or Casbah.

One winter morning in 2014, more than a decade after I first saw the film, I took a stroll down the Casbah’s rain-washed alleys and into the newer French-built city. Scenes from the black-and-white movie—like the landmark Milk Bar café where a female Algerian guerrilla sets off a bomb that kills French civilians—jumped to life. The ensuing French military response, memorably depicted in the film, included arbitrary arrests, torture, and “false flag” bombings that only inflamed the Algerian insurrection. 

It was these moral perils of counterinsurgency that my father hinted at. “Keep your eyes open,” he told me. This was a prescient warning, one that served as the backdrop for my deployment, even if the Algerian analogy was imperfect and would become overused. As American soldiers soon faced a guerrilla and civil war in Iraq for which they were woefully ill-equipped, intellectually and militarily, The Battle of Algiers would be screened and discussed at the Pentagon. To this day, it is taught to West Point cadets as a cautionary tale. 

Still, the full weight of the film’s lessons was not apparent to me in Iraq until one morning in the summer of 2003, when I received an urgent phone call about a captured Iraqi intelligence officer. My commander wanted me to go interview him at the Baghdad hospital where he was being treated for unspecified wounds. ​

The executive director of the Moscow-based CIS-Europe Monitoring Organization says “if one is not satisfied with the idea of non-state terrorist actors and wants to put the blame for the 9/11 (attacks) on one particular country, Saudia Arabia is much more proper choice than Afghanistan or Iraq.”

In an interview with the Tehran Times, Stanislav Byshok, says “I'm in no way defending the principle of collective responsibility, though. I'm just reminding that bin Laden's plot had more connections to that country, not others.”

Bin Laden, the mastermind of al-Qaeda who engineered the September 11 attacks on the U.S. World Trade Center and Pentagon, was raised in Saudi Arabia. Even 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers were Saudi nationals. 

Saudi Arabia and the United States supported religious fanatics, who were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. These fanatics who emerged under the name of al-Qaeda were inspired by the Salafist ideology propagated in Saudi Arabia.
​
The following is the text of the interview with Byshok:

Over 2,000 US troops are said to be pulled from Iraq, the US Central Command chief said. Germany also announced that it would reduce the number of troops it has in the Middle Eastern country.

​The United States said on Wednesday that it would reduce its troop presence in Iraq this month as President Donald Trump seeks to fulfill his campaign promise of "ridding the country of endless wars."

The move comes as Trump has been under fire after The Atlantic magazine published an expose where anonymous White House sources said he had denigrated dead American soldiers as ''losers'' and ''suckers." He has denied the statements made in the magazine.

Marine General Frank McKenzie, the US Central Command commander, announced the reduction from 5,200 military personnel to 3,000 during a visit to Iraq.

Iraq’s federal government has requested that the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) cut its oil production by 120,000 barrels per day (bpd), Iraq’s state news agency INA quoted a KRG minister as saying on Wednesday.

The semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq’s domestic oil consumption is at 30,000 bpd, INA quoted Khaled al-Shawani, the KRG minister responsible for dealing with Baghdad, as saying.
​
Baghdad and the Kurds are discussing several scenarios for an agreement over production cuts, al-Shawani said.