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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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 Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 12:34 pm Post subject: Jon Snow's Hidden Iraq |
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this was on the other night and was a really interesting, insightful look at life in iraq now ... well worth watching - pretty gruesome in places 
| Quote: | Jon Snow's Hidden Iraq
Five years after the invasion, Channel 4 news anchor Jon Snow examines the brutal reality of life inside post-invasion Iraq, meeting a variety of its citizens from victims of bomb blasts and war widows to human rights activists and politicians. While the coalition forces herald its burgeoning democracy, Snow ties together reports and unseen footage of recent violence and human rights abuses from beyond the Green Zone which paint a picture of a fragmented state on the brink of anarchy and collapse.
Deploying regional video journalists and specialist cameramen into areas few Western journalists could ever contemplate, Jon Snow's Hidden Iraq ventures behind the rhetoric to uncover what life on the ground is really like for Iraqis. The film forms part of the Happy Birthday Iraq season marking the fifth anniversary of the invasion - a series of penetrating programmes made by award-winning filmmakers examining the devastating fall-out of the war for Iraq and the Middle East, America and Britain.
Journalist Nir Rosen travels around Baghdad and uncovers a patchwork of ethnically-segregated communities, divided by concrete blast walls. Where once different religions and sects mixed freely, he discovers a complete disconnection with homogenous neighbourhoods at war with one another.
Rosen's footage reveals how the splintering of Iraq has allowed warlords and militias to control individual areas. He meets Abu Abed, the commander of one such militia protecting the Sunni Ameriya district of Baghdad. The Americans have celebrated the exploits of his "Awakening Council" which united them in the fight against Al Qaeda, as emblematic of the success of the surge. But his views on the Shia offer a chilling prospect for the future of Iraq: "Because Iraq is a tribal country the killing is not forgotten even after years. You kill my brother and I know you killed him then I will follow you for a hundred years. You cannot forget. Revenge in the Arab tradition is a very old habit."
The view from an opposing Shia militia is no more encouraging. Abu Hassan, a committed Sadrist, the party protected by the powerful Shia Mahdi army labels the Awakening Council a "bunch of killers", arguing they kill for money and their loyalty is dependent on America's funding.
The film reveals how our obsession with the security situation in Iraq masks the true hardships of daily life. Saad Jawaad, victim of a recent bomb in the Karrada district of Baghdad, tells Snow that state healthcare has all but collapsed. He describes being turned away from his hospital which now only treats wealthy private patients.
Iraq was once home to the largest secular middle class in the Middle East. Human rights activist Basma Al Khatib describes its disintegration to Snow - the collapse of industry, the closure of universities and the control of business centres by militias. Basma reveals just how far the standard of living has regressed: "In the eighties we discarded oil fuel heaters, but now it's life-saving because you can survive with them... You dig your well in case there is no water. You have your own generators; you have your own stock of fuel. You have to have a stock of food for three months, especially if you have kids... We don't have hot water... You do worry about your wife giving birth after 11 O'clock in labour, because you cannot take her to hospital, so most of the pregnant women now schedule a caesarean."
The film examines the appalling, but forgotten plight of Iraq's millions of widows. Najah Abbas speaks for the thousands of women whose husbands have been killed, telling Snow how impossible her life has become following the death of her husband - how she feels abandoned by the Government and has no-one to turn to.
Iraqi journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad tells Jon that the newly-created central government in the Greenzone is in reality a paper fiction, bearing no relation to the lives of ordinary Iraqis: "The parliament in Baghdad, for the average Iraqi person is a distant planet, somewhere else. People talk in the Parliament about issues that don't really touch the life of the Iraqi people... When we talk about an Iraqi Government, again, it's a... it's a kind of a mistake, it's a kind of a wrong word."
Jon contends that our expectations for Iraq have sunk so low that "success" is measured purely by casualties. "In attempting to quantify what's happened here in the last five years there's been a grim obsession with body counts - how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died, but the abiding casualty is the quality of life of the average Iraqi... This is a society that has seen its middle classes flee, has witnessed the execution of Saddam, but itself has been beheaded." |
from http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/dispatches/jon+snows+hidden+iraq/1753147?intcmp=homepage_box3
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-3886376311962177051 |
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