IT IS THE second anniversary of the death of Farzad Bazoft, the Observer journalist hanged by Saddam Hussein for doing his job. I believe this is an important anniversary, not least as an opportunity to pay tribute to a reporter who died pursuing his craft with the kind of independence and courage that is rare. But there is much more to remember than his murder. There is the behaviour of the British Government and of much of the British press in relation to his murder, which has wider implications for free journalism.
Just before he was hanged, Bazoft told a British diplomat: ‘I was just a journalist going after a scoop.’31 And quite a scoop it might have been, too. On the day Bazoft left London for Iraq, to report elections in Kurdistan, there was a huge explosion in a factory near Baghdad, where Iraq was thought to be developing missile technology. Some 700 people were reported killed.32 Bazoft, on the spot, did what a good reporter should have done: he headed for the site to find out what exactly had happened, and why. When he got there, he took soil samples as evidence. He was arrested, tortured and sentenced to death in a kangaroo court.
Few believed Saddam Hussein would hang him; and at first the press reflected our shock and anger. Britain had to break off diplomatic relations with this ‘stupid and brutal regime’, said the Evening Standard. ‘To do less would be to suggest that there might have been some justice in taking the life of Mr Bazoft.’33 But this tone was to change.
Within 24 hours of the hanging, the Sun led the way with its ‘exclusive’, headlined ‘Hanged Man Was a Robber’.34 The facts were not in dispute; Bazoft had stolen £500 from a building society when he was a student ten years earlier. What was significant was that the story had been provided by a ‘security source’: in this case, MI5 acting on behalf of the Thatcher Government, apparently seeking any excuse not to suspend its lucrative business and arms deals with Saddam Hussein.
During the 1980s Baghdad had been a favourite jaunt for Thatcher’s boys. Among the unframed travel souvenirs of David Mellor, then chief secretary to the Treasury, is a photograph of himself with Saddam Hussein, their paunches extended from the comfort of the Old Torturer’s sofa, with Mellor beaming at the Old Torturer himself.35 Five of his ministerial pals had sat on the same sofa.
Indeed, such was the extent of Britain’s support for and complicity with Saddam Hussein that Bazoft’s hanging was the gravest inconvenience. Something had to be done. He would be smeared. The Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Express relegated the hanging and featured the ten-year-old robbery.
This had the desired trigger effect. The Mail the next day carried the headline, ‘Bazoft “A Perfect Spy for Israel” says MP’.36 Today refined this to ‘Bazoft “Was an Israeli Agent”’.37 The quotes were from the Tory MP Rupert Allason, who writes spy books under the name Nigel West.
That was enough to silence earlier demands for sanctions against Iraq. Those newspapers that had published allegations about Bazoft’s ‘spying’ now called for ‘caution’ and ‘a cool head’ in dealing with Iraq. A leading article in Today spoke for them all. ‘Withdrawing our ambassador and sending home a few students will hardly rock the Hussein regime . . .’ said the paper.38 Woodrow Wyatt, who usually spoke for Thatcher, told readers of the News of the World: ‘It’s ridiculous to reduce or cut off our trade’. His solution to the ‘whole incident’ was ‘maximising trade and saying nothing more about Bazoft’.39
The smear came to a head with an infamous editorial in the Sunday Telegraph, which demands inclusion in journalism studies courses. For no finer example exists, not even in the Sun, of journalism’s sewer. Under the headline ‘How Innocence Can Equal Guilt’, there were these words:
A group of journalists were to have visited the [explosion] site with the permission of the Iraqi government. Permission was then withdrawn. Mr Bazoft decided to go anyway. He took photographs and soil samples. How was this different from spying? True, Farzad Bazoft would have passed on his information to a British newspaper rather than to the British government. But that would have still been spying. In these circumstances the investigative journalist takes on the role of spy.40
Hugo Young of the Guardian was one of the few to reply. He described the Sunday Telegraph’s ‘scorn for investigative journalism’ as ‘matched by the extreme infrequency with which any of them has been known to insert a new fact into the public realm. Investigating nothing, save that which will confirm their unbreakable political prejudices . . . the pride of Tory journalism produced the most weaselling and morally insensate explanation that the Iraqi Government can ever hope to read . . . with a subtext for Western eyes which says that investigative journalism is a punishable offence against the state.’41
That a principal function of the press (and the rest of the media) is to limit news and public debate within an established ‘consensus’ seems, to me, beyond doubt. For many journalists, Macaulay’s notion of a ‘fourth estate of the realm’ simply does not apply. But these days there is an added element. It is smear of an especially malicious, spiteful and ruthless strain that varies from tabloid to ‘quality’ broadsheet only in presentation. Perhaps Jack Jones was right when in 1984 he warned of a ‘new wave of Goebbels-type methods beginning to spread in our country’.42 The campaigns against Death on the Rock, Arthur Scargill, Salman Rushdie and Farzad Bazoft, to name just a few, were to follow.
Of course, for those newspapers that have no qualms about their role as state protector and propagandist, smear is a form of censorship; and the aim, if not the method, is the same as it was in Soviet Russia. In this way Thatcher’s censorship laws, like the Kremlin’s, are promoted and guarded by journalists. In its smear against Farzad Bazoft, the Sunday Telegraph likened investigative journalism to an offence against the state. Sadly, it has become just that.
Among belongings of Farzad Bazoft released by Iraq some months after his hanging were several books he had read in prison in Baghdad. One of them was my book, Heroes. At the bottom of a page on which I had listed journalists noted for their bravery and sacrifice he had added his own name, and this: ‘Farzad Bazoft of the Observer, who tried to tell the truth about a “big explosion” that killed so many people in Iraq, was arrested. Under pressure and fear, he gave a “false confession” and was accused of spying. He’s a journalist, too.’43
March 20, 1992