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Prologue
- University of Michigan Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Basically, if you can carry it away or hold onto it, it’s as good as yours. —Mark Gordon-James, on the looting by Iraqis and the U.S. Army Prologue Agence France-Presse 6.9.03 “Baghdad freesheet hits the streets” By Steve Kirby BAGHDAD—A country devastated by war and occupied by U.S. and British troops may seem the least promising place to open an English -language paper, but as the first edition of the Baghdad Bulletin hit the streets Monday its owner-editors were confident of success. The bi-monthly news magazine is ground-breaking in every way. It is independent, colorful and produced to Western standards in a country used to the turgid propaganda sheets of the Saddam Hussein regime. The Bulletin is also distributed free to hotels, businesses, and households across the five wealthiest neighborhoods of Baghdad so that the advertisers who cover most of its costs know they are reaching their big-spending target markets. Getting the paper off the ground in a city which still has to contend with lawlessness, frequent power cuts and a night-time curfew has been a labour of love for the American and two Britons who conceived the project. The trio—two journalists and a financial consultant—have been taking no wages, banking on the eventual success of their innovative but high-risk brainchild to reward their efforts. In the month or so since they arrived to set up the paper, they say they have had to contend with Kalashnikov-toting Iraqi gunmen and jumpy U.S. troops nearly shooting them up at a checkpoint. “There was never a time when we thought we weren’t going to make it work,” says British journalist Ralph Hassall. “We have always worked ’round the problem or battled until we got it done.” The 10,000-copy launch edition boasts an article by Britain’s special envoy for human rights, Ann Clwyd, on how the coalition intends to preserve the evidence from the dozens of mass graves being found around Iraq, and also takes a critical look at U.S. efforts to restore power and security to the capital. Fellow Briton Mark Gordon-James stresses that the paper’s editorial line is entirely independent of the U.S.-led administration. Although all three of them opposed the war, the magazine is “apolitical .” The financial mastermind of the operation, Gordon-James acknowledges that the trio have benefited from an immense amount of goodwill from Iraqis and Westerners alike who want to see their project succeed. But on the strength of the advertising contracts he has already sealed he expects the paper to break even after just a few issues. He has even signed up a Jordanian distributor and hopes to find one for Kuwait as well. Among the advertisers in the first edition are Emirati airconditioning manufacturer SKM, an Iraqi water filter distributor called Action Group and Baghdad’s Cedar Hotel. The paper has been operating on a shoestring budget—a British venture capitalist stumped up start-up capital of $20,000 in return for a minority stake. “If other companies come in with more money and better resources I am not even sure that they would do better,” says Hassall. 2 BAGHDAD BULLETIN [18.117.91.153] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 20:45 GMT) “The fact that we were on such a tight budget means that we have run an extremely tight ship.” The trio have taken on an Iraqi partner to take care of the advertising and paid-for distribution—a pioneering Western-educated commercial printer who worked as an astrophysicist until Iranian bombers destroyed the huge observatory he was working on for Saddam in the late 1980s. “Of course in the past we never had a free press in any respect,” says Dr. Aziz Sadik. “I thought about such a business before but I couldn’t because I wasn’t allowed to.” The trio acknowledge that finding English-language journalists has proved a problem—years of politicisation of both newspapers and education under Saddam’s regime has made it extremely difficult to find people with both the writing skills and the independence of mind. But for the next edition, they have taken on three Iraqis—one of them an English professor and another a former employee of Saddam ’s propaganda sheet, the Baghdad Observer—and they plan progressively to employ more. “The endgame is to set up something sustainable—run, edited and managed by Iraqis but within...