They say “the truth is the first casualty of war”. But how do we communicate the truth? Whose truth? That of the victor or that of the vanquished? Who wins and who loses? In this era of multi-media revolution there are as many truths as there are terrestrial TV and satellite stations, radio stations, whether analogue, digital or internet based. The print media no longer has a monopoly of the printed word due to saturation coverage of all issues from all kinds of angles on the Internet!

Whichever angle you look at it war is an unpleasant business but the global reach of the media now brings it home to us more graphically. Our choice of sources now depends on how much we can take without vomiting. Consequently, other rivals have broken the sanitised rendition of the breakdown in humanity that war represents brought to us by the previously hegemonic Western media. What the CNN or BBC will not broadcast or air can be brought to you by other means.

Al Jazeera has now become a major source of news for the majority of the world who do not speak Arabic. It goes beyond hypocritical western sensibilities in covering Afghanistan, Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other matters concerning its core constituency in the Middle East and, by extension, the Muslim world.

Without Al Jazeera both the US and British governments and their largely loyal media would have continued to cover up the atrocities being committed against Iraqis in the name of freedom, democracy and liberation by the Anglo-American occupying forces.

The same Western governments who considered the arrival of Al Jazeera, a few years ago, as a dawn of a new oasis for freedom of expression, pluralism and democratisation in the despotic Middle East now wish the station would just shut down. That’s why the US forces have bombed its offices in Iraq, and in Afghanistan before that, in calculated 'mistakes'. A number of its journalists have been harassed and some are being held in illegal detentions as Al Qaeda suspects.

The tragedy in Iraq was foretold but the militaristic ‘shock and awe’ lunatic right that have seized power by an electoral coup in Bush's Washington were too convinced of their invincibility to listen to anybody or consider the legality and morality of their mass murdering enterprise. Now that the predicted tragedy is staring them in the face in the most gruesome way, instead of doing the decent thing by saying: ‘We are sorry, we miscalculated and misjudged everything’ and showing some remorse, they are seeking cover up under all kinds of excuses without giving convincing explanations.

Bush managed to talk about the gross abuse of Iraqi prisoners of war without saying sorry, not that it would have amounted to much, but he still could not bring himself to say it. The Emperor cannot be wrong. The British are still investigating and trying to prove that the pictures of its soldiers humiliating Iraqis are fake.

The saga is thanks to the doggedness of The Mirror of London that broke the silence and has valiantly refused to be silenced on the atrocities. The more Blair dodged the issues, the deeper it delved and found that whatever has been revealed so far is the tip of the iceberg of shameful conduct by the two occupying powers, both of whom claim to be lecturers in democracy, human rights and freedom to the rest of the world.

They even tried to brand the publication of the pictures as unpatriotic and endangering the lives of British soldiers! So much for the obligation of journalists to inform, educate and entertain in a democracy.

The British are deluded by their own self-image of being ‘good guys’ who may fight with their American cousins but not like them. Iraq is showing us that this is a distinction without a difference. Despite their history of fighting the Irish, violations of the rights of peoples in the colonies from Africa through Asia to the Middle East, massacre of anti-colonial resistance fighters like the Mau Mau of Kenya and many other atrocities, they still believe that their soldiers do not do bad things!

War dehumanises both victor and vanquished. The violation of the humanity of any person diminishes the humanity in us all. However, Western leaders try to shield their peoples from their cruel acts abroad through sanitised media and doctored vocabulary. So occupation is dressed up as “liberation”, torture is called “abuse” and resistance fighters demonised as “terrorists”, “insurgents” or “foreign fighters” without thinking twice that the Anglo-American occupiers are not Iraqis! They think they own the world and the rest of humanity are interlopers! That is why you hear more about American or British deaths but little about that of the Iraqis.

But more importantly they are careful not to show their people that war is about death, gruesome death. Also, the Western media refrains from showing the irrational violence of war when Western lives are involved. It is all right to show pictures of humiliated Iraqis or the routinely demeaning humanitarian NGO appeals for one African conflict or the other but somehow their audience cannot stomach seeing their kind being brutalised, dying or humiliated.

What kind of peace and security can the world hope to achieve if the destiny of the overwhelming majority of the world who are not Westerners is to be humiliated?

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General Secretary of the Global Pan African Movement, based in Kampala, Uganda and also Director of Justice Africa, based in London.

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