The role of the media in armed conflicts

by Karin Leukefeld,* Germany/Syria

(17 November 2022) (cm) Not least the latest geopolitical situation shows in all clarity that the media have abandoned their original mandate of informing the interested population as independently and accurately as possible in favour of “information” that is one-sided in terms of power politics. Research on the ground of the events is often saved and replaced by reports of the dominant western news agencies AFP, AP, Reuters and DPA – or else they are abused additionally by means of so-called “parachute journalism” for one-sided information. The German journalist Karin Leukefeld, who has been working in the Near and Middle East for many years – and also lives there! –, describes here how new information technology and the pressure of topicality have changed the media landscape – mainly for the worse.

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Not so long ago – say at the time of the First and Second World Wars in the 20th century – there used to be radio, newspapers and letters. Sometimes there were telephones and filming and photography. In the warring nations, such as Germany and France, films were produced with frontline coverage. Correspondent networks embedded in the armies were created on the various fronts. Today we call this “embedded journalism”. These films were shown in local cinemas under the title “newsreel”. People gathered there to see them and – we can assume – also to talk about them. So there was an exchange about what they had seen.

The transmission of information beyond this official war coverage took a long time. Letters or postcards, for example, sent by soldiers to their families and also reporting on the war, sometimes did not arrive at all. The film and photo material had to be transported to the editorial offices.

During my research on the expulsion of Armenians from the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1917, I came across the reports of the German writer Armin T. Wegner, who was stationed as a non-commissioned officer in a German-Ottoman medical mission in Eastern Anatolia on the Euphrates. Wegner became an eyewitness to the great dying. He secretly took photographs and spoke about the events in lectures displaying the pictures after his return. From Turkey he had smuggled the films with the photos hidden in his clothes. Most of his photographs were taken in 1916, and he gave his lectures in 1919, three years later. By then, the Armenian genocide was already history.

Or take the German theologian Johannes Lepsius, who wrote a “Report on the Situation of the Armenian People in Turkey” in 1916 and sent it from Turkey to the German government and parliament, the Reichstag. The MPs never got to see this report because the German military administration banned and confiscated it.

Much changed in the wars after 1945

The technical transmission of information became faster. Reporting, especially from wars, turned into a business.

According to a study, during the Vietnam War between 1962 and 1975, a total of about 5,100 journalists from 64 countries were in Vietnam. During the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive, there were about 600 journalists. During the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975, there were still 100. The images from the Vietnam War were broadcast on television sets; it was also termed “living room war”.

However, the pictures and reports about the actions of the US troops – as an example I mention the massacre of My Lai in 1968 – led to such massive protests and not only, but especially in the USA, that the US government finally had to withdraw the troops – who were no match for the Viet Cong anyway.

But much of what happened in the wars of national liberation in Africa, Latin America and Asia remained underreported in the mostly Western-controlled and oriented media. Information about these events came mostly through civil society groups, support committees or churches. And these in turn had their own interests that shaped the information.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991) technical development took another leap

In the 2^nd Gulf War in 1990/91, there was a direct broadcast of the bombing of Baghdad via CNN, otherwise most of the images of this war were produced and controlled by the US military and PR agencies.

In the Kosovo and Yugoslav wars of the late 1990s, digital cameras were used whose images could be transmitted almost instantaneously. However, as the internet connection was still poor in the area of operations, many photographers continued to work with slides or negative films, which they could have developed and scanned on site, and then transferred the pictures as a file with a poor internet connection. It sometimes took a whole night to transfer three photos.

Soon there were faster internet connections. If not via a local network, then via satellites. Before the Iraq war in 2003, journalists from print media in Baghdad still worked with slow – and incidentally Iraqi controlled – internet to transmit their reports. Or they could use a fax machine to send the report to the editorial office or otherwise phone in the text. By then, television and radio stations could use satellite dishes. Then, when the war started, almost all journalists pulled out their digital satellite transmission devices, which were banned in Iraq. Now they could transmit their data – photos and reports – from anywhere in the world.

Today, especially since the beginning of the “war on terror” in 2001, the digital transmission of information has accelerated further. Thousands of satellites circle the world, armed groups in war zones are equipped with digital technology, starting with smartphones. With the so-called “Arab Spring” in 2009/10, digital messages from mobile phones raced across Facebook and Twitter at great speed. Today there is TikTok and Telegram and many more.

This has changed the role of the media and of the news

What was initially celebrated as an achievement for global communication is used and instrumentalised – for their own ends – not only by journalists, but also by actors in wars, including intelligence services. As an example, I would just like to point to the Pegasus spy software developed in Israel. In January 2022, it became known that this Israeli spy software was found on hundreds of phones of politicians, journalists and civil society actors in Lebanon.

For news, it means that recipients of reports from war and crisis zones via the so-called “social media” in editorial offices or in public can hardly comprehend what is actually happening in the country of origin. The context is missing. The famous “W-questions” of journalists are completely or partially ignored and are probably also no longer known by many who disseminate reports.

These “W-questions” must always be asked in different directions, to the different actors in a conflict:

1. Who (did something) – who refrained from doing something?

2. What (was done) – what was omitted? This also includes the question what happened before and what happened afterwards.

3. Where (did something take place) – where are the actors located?

4. When (did it happen)? – to explain the development of an escalation.

5. How (was it done) – militarily or otherwise?

6. Why (was something done)? – to explain the background.

7. Where (did the information come from)? – what are the sources?

In former times – and I still belong to this species of journalists –, in former times you drove to the place of an event, documented with photo or film recordings, you talked to eyewitnesses, wrote – and several sources existed just because of the time span everything took. This allowed for more impressions to be gathered, statements to be verified, a more accurate picture to emerge. Today, things have to move fast because the next reports are already waiting in the “pipeline”, as they say. Speed opens the door to propaganda. But “topicality” does not make a news item or a report more respectable, by which I mean honest and with integrity, as well as more accurate. Speed is a disadvantage for the respectability of news.

“Citizen journalists” instead of “journalists, photographers and camera people”

In the last ten years, for example, journalists, photographers and camera people have often been replaced by so-called “citizen journalists”. They record events with their mobile phones, take photos, perhaps record a short audio message and off it goes. Their identity and location usually remain unclear. This is then justified by the fact that “security must be guaranteed”. Since the Iraq war in 2003, for example, the BBC has specifically asked people to send reports if they are in a certain area where fighting has taken place or where missiles have hit. This set standards and with the “Arab Spring”, editorial offices of print media, radio and television moved to take over such reports and ensure their dissemination. In this way, events appear current and authentic, but verification is made more difficult and the transparency of information is no longer guaranteed.

This became clear for journalists in the Libyan war and even more so in the war in Syria. We can safely say that the information from the war in Ukraine that reaches editorial offices and the public does not meet the original journalistic standards.

I would like to give an example from Syria, from where I have been reporting for many years. It is about an alleged poison gas attack on Douma, a town east of Damascus. Numerous deaths in Douma due to a chemical weapons attack were reported via “social media” in April 2018 by the White Helmets – who are considered an aid organisation and civil activists. The Syrian army was blamed for this. The Syrian government rejected this and called for verification by a team of experts from the Organisation for the Protection against Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

The report by the White Helmets on social media went around the world. In Germany, it was national headline news. In Washington, Paris and London, the news was considered to be true, both the Syrian government and Russia, Syria’s ally in the war, were blamed.

To punish the Syrian side, the three Western UN veto states flew a “retaliatory attack” without a UN Security Council decision, firing more than 100 missiles in one night. Meanwhile, the OPCW team of experts sat in Beirut because they had been banned from travelling on to Syria “for security reasons” – because of the US-British-French air raids.

A report on social media by “citizen journalists” or “activists” led to an air attack not authorised by the UN. None of the three countries had been attacked by Syria – a violation of the UN Charter. They didn’t wait for the report of the OPCW team tasked by the UN Security Council to investigate what had happened in Douma.

Months later, testimonies of two scientists from the OPCW Douma team came to light. Both had worked for the organisation for years. It emerged that their investigations on the ground could not confirm a poison gas attack from the air. Their report was replaced by another report by the OPCW. The two scientists were accused of lying and bribery. Journalists who attended a meeting with one of the two OPCW scientists and reported on his findings were defamed – by other journalists – and accused of Russian propaganda. Until today.

The other perspective

As a journalist, I have been working in war and crisis zones in the so-called “Near” and Middle East for more than 20 years. That is a political term. During this time, new global television channels emerged, such as Al Jazeera, Al Arabia, Russia Today, TeleSur, CCTV from China or Al Mayadeen from Lebanon. They differed in their perspective on events from Western-style broadcasters such as BBC, CNN, ABC or smaller European broadcasters such as France 24 or Deutsche Welle. Whether on these TV channels or in Arab print media: the different perspective was and still is important for my work.

Life in the background of headlines

Life in the background of headlines is the motto of my reporting. How do people live and how do they want to live? How do war and sanctions, interventions and paternalism affect their lives and their day-to-day lives?

First, I reported from Turkey, then about and from Iraq, where I worked from 2001 to 2005. When it became too dangerous in Iraq, I followed Iraqi refugees to Damascus in 2005, where I received accreditation in 2010.

Since then, I have been reporting from there about the countries in the region. I originally chose Damascus because Syria was quiet and well development and I could easily reach all the countries in the region from there. Since 2011 this has changed; the passage to Damascus and the countries in the region has become arduous.

The reason is the war, the closed borders. Another reason are the unilateral economic sanctions imposed by the EU, which prohibit flights to and from Damascus.

I wanted to build bridges with my reporting, to contribute to understanding between people in different cultures and political systems. But I became a correspondent about wars. Today, I see much more clearly than I did then how the “war on terror” and the struggle of the USA to assert itself as the “only”, the “indispensable world power” against other states has changed my work.

The “war on terror” infiltrates all areas of social life

The “war on terror” has spawned new wars and new military actors – including, for example, private security companies such as Black Water or the Wagner Group. The “war on terror” has turned wheat fields into battlefields, someone told me in Lebanon.

Fertile lands between the Euphrates and the Tigris have been devastated. The “war on terror” has destroyed the livelihoods of millions of people and turned them into refugees. The “war on terror” has manipulated and instrumentalised governments, businesses, media, aid agencies, culture, education and the judiciary – this war has simply infiltrated all areas of social life.

And this war has produced resistance, as we can see in the Middle East, but also on the African continent or in South and Latin American countries. There are people, groups, governments, military forces defending their country and their region. Great powers like China, Russia and emerging countries are opposing the USA and NATO. And everywhere there are also national and local and social conflicts that make the international “war on terror” and resistance to it even more complex.

It is difficult to depict this development in reports and articles, in lectures or even in photos. Especially since the media – as described before – are less and less oriented towards the original media work of information and clarification. This is particularly true of foreign reporting, especially reports from war and crisis zones.

Reports – also those of news agencies – are increasingly generated with “artificial intelligence”. Hardly any different points of view are presented anymore, which of course – and not only in conflicts – exist.

Articles rely on agency reports from AFP, AP, Reuters, DPA – all of which have their headquarters in Western capitals. Media from other parts of the world are hardly noticed and if – like from Russia or China – are portrayed as “controlled”. Or they are even banned.

Don’t let yourself be intimidated

We live in dangerous times. Voices for dialogue and peace are defamed. International law is disregarded and degenerated. Instead of pointing out injustice, hypocrisy and lies and letting all sides have their say so that the public can form a picture and understand, media prepare political crises and push for escalation, which they then accompany like war drummers and trumpeters of former armies. We have experienced this in Germany to an extreme extent since a new government took office in Berlin at the end of 2021.

Reporting has become – and here I am referring to an officer of the Austrian army – part of a hybrid threatening backdrop. “War without a fight” is what the military call it. A war designed to weaken and destabilise a political opponent.

The setting is primarily the internet. The target is the head. And at any time, the “hybrid threat” can also be extended by military means – as war.

Actors and at the same time targets of the “hybrid threat” are the media, journalists, diplomats and politicians. Actors are certain groups in the population of the respective other state – the Austrian officer speaks of “Volksgewalt” [popular violence, ed.] – which are promoted in various ways, up to and including arming, in order to stir up unrest in the opposing country.

At the same time, groups of society that do not allow themselves to be integrated become the target of criminalisation or exclusion in the warring country. This can be well observed in Germany. Protests against the Corona measures or current protests against government policies directed against Russia and arming Ukraine are stigmatised as “unconventional thinkers” or “right-wing extremists”.

I am a reporter and as a freelance journalist I have given myself rules to be able to continue my work in such an environment as a correspondent in the war and crisis areas in the Middle East. Read, communicate, ask questions, listen, inquire, look and always check everything as best as I can. And then report back.

The iron rule remains: don’t let yourself be intimidated.

* Karin Leukefeld studied ethnology as well as Islamic and political sciences and is a trained bookseller. She has done organisational and public relations work for, among others, the Federal Association of Citizens' Initiatives for Environmental Protection (BBU), the Green Party (federal party) and the El Salvador Information Centre. She was also a personal assistant to a PDS member of parliament in Germany (foreign policy and humanitarian aid). Since 2000, she has worked as a freelance correspondent in the Middle East for various German and Swiss media. She is also the author of several books on her experiences from the war zones in the Middle East.

(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)