LEBANON: A hellish experience for journalists

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By Raed Rafei in Beirut

Last week, I became a victim of the violence against the media that has been part and parcel of the recent fighting and unrest in Lebanon.

After taking a photograph of a dying man who was shot during a funeral, I was attacked by an angry mourner.

He was outraged because I was taking photos. I tried to explain that I was a reporter and that I was doing my job, but he grabbed a stick and got ready to hit me. I decided to stop resisting and hand him my camera.

Luckily, more cooler heads were around to calm him down and extricate me from the madness. One of them, Ali, took me by the hand and started running to a ‘safe place.’

It all happened too fast. I had been moving along with mourners at a funeral when shooting erupted. I ran away, ducking with all my energy while the gunfire kept piercing my ears.

Then, suddenly, calm prevailed for less than a second, before the wailing and screaming broke out.

I turned around and saw a lifeless body dragged into an ambulance.

Behind, a motor scooter was lying in the middle of the street drenched in blood. I watched incredulously while fumbling with my digital camera. My shaky hands finally pressed the button, freezing the image of the dead man being shoved into the ambulance. And then I was confronted by the angry mourner with the stick.

I never saw my camera again. And all the images I captured to encapsulate the intensity of that day are probably lost forever.

But my experience seems trivial compared to what media outlets have been subjected to in Lebanon. During the latest break out of violence, covering events got excessively difficult.

Before Friday’s incident, I was repeatedly stopped by militiamen, asking for my papers and warning me not to take photos. On Monday, the Arab TV channel, Al-Jazeera, reported that two of its cameramen were slightly injured by armed men while they were doing their job in a Beirut neighborhood Sunday evening.

On Friday morning, Future TV, a pro-government private channel owned by family of Sunni leader Saad Hariri family, was prevented from broadcasting by Hezbollah, the Shiite militia. After warning the employees to evacuate in a well-calculated operation, men entered the station and cut key cables to prevent the channel from broadcasting.

Other media outlets belonging to Hariri, the Future newspaper and the Orient radio station, were also forced into shutting down.

For days, journalists and civil rights activists demonstrated against this attack on the media.

‘You don’t have the right to stop us from speaking,’ Najat Charaferddine, a Shiite woman who is a star journalist on Future TV, said in an interview. ‘It’s not Syria or Iran.’

Even newspapers strongly supportive of Hezbollah condemned this move.

‘We must raise our voices to protest and condemn the unjustified and unacceptable attacks on some of the media and cultural institutions in Beirut and specifically our colleague the Future newspaper and Future television,’ the editor in chief of Assafir newspaper, Talal Salman, wrote in a fiery editorial.

Finally, Future television decided that despite continuing threats, it would resume broadcasting from its other studios at 4:30 p.m. today.

‘We are back,’ said a news anchor, ‘and our weapon is the word.’

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