Round-Robin: BBC's Coverage of Iraq's Women in and Beyond the Conflict
Tim Symonds, Partner Eyecatcher Associates/Shevolution

May 23 – For journalists who may have taken a kindly interest in my recent critique of a James Naughtie/Richard Armitage interview on BBC Radio 4 Today Programme (repeated on the BBC World Service) which seemed to me deeply uninterested in the aspirations of Iraq's women post-Saddam and in the face of Islamic fundamentalism, may a word go to a British journalist Christina Lamb who wrote as follows in the New Statesman May 19 2003, in a feature titled 'The Real War Heroes':

'I have a shameful confession to make. Crossing the border back into Kuwait after several weeks in southern Iraq, where I had been reporting the war, I realised that I had not interviewed a single Iraqi woman. Since I am a woman and a mother, this was particularly inexcusable. But it seems I was not alone. For all the hundreds of hours of television footage and acres of newsprint devoted to the war, one could have been forgiven for thinking Iraq was a country of men.

When women are reported in wars, it is usually as victims, weeping over the broken bodies of sons and daughters in hospitals, or raped by enemy soldiers. Yet in many ways women are the real heroes of war...

But the role of women in war is strangely undocumented. That is perhaps partly because most war correspondents are men, partly because most news editors are testosterone-fuelled males who stick coloured pins into war-maps on their walls and are far more fascinated by action than by how women keep their homes together in times of conflict.'

Christina Lamb is a foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times and author of 'The Sewing Circles Of Herat: my Afghan years'.

What responses did I get to my round robin on the Naughtie/Armitage interview? The BBC men who took time to reply seemed affronted and defended Naughtie - shortage of time/had to cover a wide spectrum/maybe Tim Symonds doesn't properly understand the pressures of journalism - and one male respondent from the LSE seemed frankly misogynist, ending by calling my criticism mere piffle. By contrast, the BBC women journalists were clearly delighted, and happy this subject had been mooted so directly.

Below is the original round-robin sent around by Eyecatcher Associates/Shevolution:

We are passing around the excerpt below as an example of why journalists and broadcasters, especially in the public broadcasting sector, should be required to take gender training. Otherwise it leads to the sort of journalism demonstrated in an interview on May 7 2003 by the BBC's James Naughtie, broadcast on both the BBC domestic service and repeated on the BBC World Service - then distributed even wider by the US State Department etc.

Note what happens after the powerful Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage gives Naughtie an incredibly good steer on the complex problem of women in the maelstrom of Iraq and the Moslem World:

DEPUTY SECRETARY RICHARD ARMITAGE
BBC RADIO 4, May 7, 2003

NAUGHTIE Intro: The White House has named the man whose task it is to supervise the transition to democracy in Iraq, a former State Department diplomat, Paul Bremer, he‚s going to be a civilian administrator outranking the retired General Jay Garner who was running the office of reconstruction in Baghdad at the moment. His appointment is seen as something of a victory in Washington for the Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Well Mr. Powell’s deputy Richard Armitage is now on his way to the Middle East and Pakistan and India and when he stopped off briefly in London I spoke to him about Iraq.

NAUGHTIE: How soon can we expect some kind of authority to be established in Iraq which promises a democratic outcome to this?

ARMITAGE: We are intent on trying to set up an IIA as a way-stop on the way to a democratically chosen government by the end of May. That in itself is not the answer to democracy in Iraq, but it will be the beginning of the answer. And from that IIA a process will be developed which will have a representative government selection process put into place which will lead, not unlike the Bonn (sic.) Conference in Afghanistan, to a legitimate government.

NAUGHTIE: What about the criticism that‚s coming from some quarters that various parties, I mean individuals and groups, have been excluded or aren’t participating in this stage of the process and that if it isn’t seen to be more embracing for those people, the outcome in the short-term will be dangerously unstable?

ARMITAGE: Well, we get a lot of criticism from a lot of quarters. Our British friends do as well. But the 300 or so participants at the Baghdad conference recently held seem to feel we‚re on a good path towards full representation for all ethnic and religious groups. If there‚s an area where I feel that‚s probably fallen short, but having realized we’re going to correct it, it is in the representation of women. We need to have even higher levels of participation of women in this process. We’ve realized that we haven‚t done as well thus far in this area and we are redoubling our efforts.

NAUGHTIE: And you recognize that the restoration of what we might call normality-- normal services, clean water, electricity-- is to return to a phrase you used earlier, is desperately urgent, if the people are to be brought along with this process at the pace you want?

Tim Symonds
Partner Eyecatcher Associates/Shevolution
United Kingdom
Tel. +44 (0) 1435 882 655
tim.symonds@shevolution.com
http://www.shevolution.com