Newsletter No. 348
News-Analysis
August 2, 2006

 

Kyodo News produced an interesting commentary today on GSDF control of news stories coming from Samawa.

GSDF CONTROLLED NEWS FROM SAMAWA
By Kyodo News

Although Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) troops are no longer in Iraq, their return home leaves challenges for Japan's mass media concerning their news coverage of the military.

From the start of the dispatch of the first contingent of GSDF personnel on a reconstruction support mission in the southern Iraq city of Samawa two and a half years ago to the homecoming of the last troops this week, the Defense Agency and the Self-Defense Forces remained determined to control news coverage.

Before GSDF troops left for Iraq, then Director General Shigeru Ishiba called executives of media companies to the agency in January 2004 and asked them to "exercise self-restraint" in reporting on the troops' schedule and matters concerning their safety, and to refrain from carrying out on-the-spot coverage as much as possible.

Defense Agency chief Fukushiro Nukaga instructed senior agency officials to cancel an agreement with the press allowing reporters to cover the departure of the first group of personnel from Samawa for Kuwait on the night of July 7. The agreement called for the media to cover the departures of the first and last contingents. Nukaga's instruction came just before the plane carrying the first batch of troops took off for Kuwait.

The media, for their part, were in a tough situation regarding how to ensure the safety of their reporters in Iraq. Some people have criticized them for bowing to the government's control of news reporting.

Yasuhiko Tajima, a Sophia University professor specialized in media law, said the sending of GSDF troops to Iraq was an epoch-making event in Japan's postwar history, marking the first time that armed members of the Self-Defense Force were engaged in activities in a war zone. However, he said, the government persistently showed no inclination to disclose information or to explain the GSDF activities to the people, and the authorities were explicit in trying to control reports to suit their convenience. Tajima said the government's action represented a control system that could be taken during wartime. "The biggest lesson for the media was that they swallowed this censorship," he said.

"Another defeat, was that, although they were obsessed with going to the local place, Japanese reporters of the major media pulled out of Samawa altogether in April (2004) after little more than a month and a half there." Since then, reports issued by the authorities went unchallenged, just like the news reports issued by the Imperial Military Headquarters during World War II, he said.

Freelance Japanese reporters, however, remained active in providing detailed reports from Iraq, but at the risk of their lives. They included Shinsuke Hashida, 61, who was shot dead along with his nephew, Kotaro Ogawa, 33, also a journalist, and their Iraqi interpreter, by unknown assailants in May 2004 near Baghdad.

Cameraman Shigeki Miyajima, 45, has gone to Iraq four times since 2003 and spent a total of four months in Baghdad and Samawa. "It's true the authorities at the scene controlled" information, he said.

Nahoko Takato, a 36-year-old Japanese voluntary aid worker who was briefly held hostage in Iraq, disclosed a story about Japanese journalists in a lecture meeting early this month. She said an Iraqi in the central city of Falluja told her seven Iraqis were killed in an assault by armored vehicles but Japanese reporters said they had not heard of such an incident. "That is not surprising," the Iraqi was quoted as saying. "No one came to cover it."

The Iraqi government restricted the issuance of visas to Japanese at the request of the Japanese authorities after Japanese hostage Shosei Koda was killed in the fall of 2004.

Still, a number of reporters underwent hardships and entered Iraq. But they were immensely obstructed in their coverage of GSDF activities. The Iraqi Foreign Ministry approved the issuance of a visa to a reporter for Kyodo News in May last year, but when he tried to get it at the Iraqi Embassy in Kuwait, he was told "The Japanese Embassy has asked us not to issue you a visa."

About 100 Japanese reporters were at Samawa when an advanced party of GSDF troops arrived there in January 2004. However, the bulk of them pulled out of Samawa after the hostage incident involving Japanese occurred in April and mortar shells landed near the GSDF camp.

Minoru Fukada, deputy managing editor of the Tokyo Shimbun, said, "Of course, direct coverage is indispensable but, in reality, there are constraints, such as law and order. There are restrictions on accompanying U.S. and European troops but the subject is worth studying."

"We would not have to swallow announcements of the Defense Agency and GSDF if we had our reporters in Iraq," said Isao Adachi, city news editor of Jiji Press.

Kyodo News tried to ask a security company to protect its reporters for the coverage of the GSDF withdrawal from Samawa but gave up the plan because it was unsure the reporters would be safe. The public relations department of Japan Broadcasting Corp (NHK), which still has reporters in Baghdad, said, "We pay full attention to the safety of our staff. We carry out our duty as a public broadcaster by conveying information from the spot as much as possible."