By Alastair Macdonald
Reuters, 27 November 2006
BAGHDAD - Iraq's parliament will bar the media from future sessions and began on Monday by refusing access to reporters and then cutting off television coverage as a debate on mounting sectarian violence became heated.
Spokesmen for the government and parliament said it was part of efforts, newly agreed by Iraq's National Security Council, to stop political leaders contradicting each other in public and prevent media coverage that was deemed to inflame conflicts.
"If there is any tension in the state, then the media should be kept out because it may increase tension," speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani told lawmakers in a televised session after dozens of journalists were barred from the building by security guards.
When one lawmaker rose to object, Mashhadani, from the Sunni minority, ordered the cameras turned off, effectively shutting off public access to a legislature whose election was held up by the United States as a beacon for democracy in the Middle East.
No transcript is published and journalists and members of the public have always been barred from the chamber itself.
After reporters were left standing outside the Saddam Hussein-era convention centre in Baghdad's Green Zone which houses parliament, Mohammed Abu Bakr, a parliament spokesman, told Reuters that he could not say when they could return.
An official in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's media office said: "This is one of the decisions of the National Security Council to make sure people speak with one voice to the media."
He declined to say whether further measures were planned to prevent the media reporting on political disagreements.
Security Council meetings in recent days have focused on how to stop Thursday's killing of over 200 people in the Baghdad Shi'ite stronghold of Sadr City triggering all-out civil war.
President Jalal Talabani, an ethnic Kurd, blamed the media on Friday for inciting violence -- apparently referring to conflicting accounts from Iraqi officials of apparent reprisal attacks by gunmen on a Sunni neighbourhood in Baghdad that day.
CONTRADICTORY ACCOUNTS
It was not the first time this month that officials flatly contradicted each other -- often, though not exclusively, along sectarian lines -- and have then accused the media of distorting accounts of kidnaps and killings when quoting official sources.
The Iraqi Journalists Union declined comment on the issue -- a senior union official indicated he was afraid to speak out. Dozens of journalists have been killed since the U.S. invasion of 2003, with the number of killings rising sharply of late.
The government has also not hesitated to censure media organisations. It ordered two Sunni-run television channels off the air for several days this month, apparently over their coverage of the death sentence passed on Saddam.
Al Jazeera has been banned from Iraq for the past two years. The Baghdad bureau of its rival pan-Arab channel Al Arabiya was shut down for a month in September because of its coverage.
Politicians from the Shi'ite majority have accused channels run from Sunni-ruled Arab states of being biased against them.
In a "four-point plan" produced by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki last month to improve security in Baghdad, point No. 3 was to increase "supervision" of the media. Little evidence of the implementation of the plan has yet been seen.
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Citation: Alastair Macdonald. "Iraq parliament bars media as tension mounts," Reuters, 27 November 2006.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/MAC738897.htm
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