LEBANON: A hellish experience for journalists

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."

Photo: Men hold a banner that reads, "Future news," during a rally where journalists walked toward the Hariri's Future TV station that was forced to close by Hezbollah guerrillas in Beirut. Credit: Associated Press / Hussein Malla

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Comments

[cramsib]

you don't go to a gunfight with a knife !!!

fuad sanyurah is an inept p.m for lebanon. i wonder if he has any leadership qualities. he embarassed lebanon , the lebanese people and himself by crying on television, not once, but twice during the israel-terrorist hezballah war in 2006. now, in a double-punch embarrassement to lebanon and its people, he first approves the government threats to terrorist hezballah, and then one week later, revokes his decision. what in the world is this man doing ?? i realize that there are many bla, bla, bla reasons to oppose armed civil strife in lebanon, but how can you lead, manage and make decisions pertaining to a country and 4 million souls with so much lack of political savvy and inability to plan 2 steps ahead and anticipate your opponent's moves. if he were a mid to high level manager in any respectable, and even irrespectable corporation, he would have been axed a long time ago. he should step aside immediately because he has proven only one thing. terror works in lebanon. disgusting...

[evan1138]

This story can perhaps shed light on "news" from Gaza, where the Iranian surrogate is Sunni Hamas rather than Shia Hizbollah in Lebanon. (Terrorism makes strange bedfellows.)

Let's suppose you're a reporter who files a story from Gaza that is unflattering to Hamas.

And suppose you return to Gaza to do a follow-up.

Your fellow reporters, who at least did caution you against honesty, are less honest than you, but also less dead. Thus, they live to file another day.