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Quiet and subtle - the way to win

Thursday, August 6, 2009

HOW STUPID NOW, AND UNHELPFUL, has that media-pitched label “The Axis of Evil” been shown to be. Relations with all three countries thus tarred by the previous US Adminstration have proved in real need of a deft touch (- never a hallmark, we’ll recall, of that Administration, with its swaggering trade in insults).

This week’s success took a while, with all that delicate maneuvering involving the Barack Obama White House, the Hillary Clinton State Department, North Korea’s delegation to the United Nations here in New York (and - though greatly under-acknowledged - the Korea Society, whose offices are also here) and finally Bill Clinton, the Secretary of State-in-Law who went to “close” the deal.

 

But finally the bellicose but needy Communist regime allowed the two detained Current TV journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee (pictured above) to come home.

 

By all media accounts (or at least by many, including eminently sober ones like The New York Times) the release marked the end of a “harrowing ordeal” - though we will have to await the media operatives’ own full accounts to be sure of that. During their short remarks on landing in California Ling referred to the experience as “the nightmare of our lives”. The prospect of 12 years in an East Asian prison labor camp was clearly terrifying, but their most recent place of detention was of the “guest house” variety, which sent signals that the two were essentially intended to be seen as a bargaining counter.

 

We've yet to learn for sure what behind-the-scenes bargaining actually went on.

 

Iran, though, that other so-called “evil” regime (with about as tenuous an "axis"-style link to the Korean peninsula as can be imagined) remains isolated but in the forefront of world attention, flouting global concern about human rights abuses in the wake of its desperately disputed election.

 

While Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was inaugurated yesterday for his second presidential term, a hundred accused people - out of his many hundreds of post-election detainees - were facing a highly dubious legal process. And many appear to have been physically abused already. Among them is a well-respected and prominent journalist – the Canadian-Iranian Maziar Bahari who works for (among others) Newsweek, a media outlet with greater international recognition than Current TV – though it cannot boast of a recent US Vice-President like Al Gore among its senior executives.

 

The weekly newsmagazine, part of the Washington Post Company, has now pulled out all the stops, working very publicly - in a way that Current TV, in its very different position, firmly chose not to, preferring instead to employ private back-channels. It has placed ads in upscale, influential papers beyond its sister publication, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, in which communicators from all over the world have voiced their protest. It has also begun a global online petition (you can click here) aimed at Iran’s Justice Minister.

 

The subtlety and flexibility of approach required in such cases of imprisoned journalists cannot be overstated. It was evident early on in Bahari’s captivity that Newsweek, for its part, also wanted to use only back-channels to attempt persuasion and/or pressure on the captors concerned.

 

But once the correspondent showed up in court – and more troublingly after it became clear that he had made what is clearly a false confession while jailed – the magazine’s tactics had to change. To express it mildly, as Sam Tradeau of Reporters without Borders has expressed it… the new situation “has put Newsweek in a much more urgent situation”.

 

But both Editor Jon Meacham and the magazine’s press spokesman Frank De Maria are publicly expressing themselves in a still minimalist manner – and all of the company’s employees have been enjoined to make no unattributable comments, either. The life of one contributor alone is important enough, and we all have to remember that Bahari is just one of an estimated forty journalists in Iranian custody.

    

  

 

CALLING YOUR INTERLOCUTOR “evil” could never have been any help in this, or in almost any other such circumstance of contention. That’s one of the fundamentals of diplomacy, you would think – at least until George W Bush came along.

 

And what of the great Decider’s third country making up his shadowy axis – the one country against which he did take action beyond hurling headline-seeking insults. Regime change was supposedly the answer in Iraq, and regime change was achieved. Surely journalists will now be safe there – unlike in Iran and North Korea?

 

Well, no – unsurprisingly. “Sovereignty” reverts into Iraqi hands (after a mere six years of American and allied forces’ occupation – but that’s a different issue) and yet the concept of press freedom is still not held in any great respect. The Journalist Freedoms Observatory, an Iraqi press rights monitoring and advocacy organization that Western journalists rely upon considerably, has documented more than 70 cases of assaults and harassment against reporters across the country, where security forces have used force and threats, and destroyed recording equipment.

 

And we mustn’t forget Reuters’ photo- and video-journalist Ibrahim Jassam, who’s been jailed without a court order for nearly a year now. The even greater, distressingly ironic twist here is that Iraq’s Central Criminal Court has ordered Jassam’s release because there is no evidence against him. It’s the US Military who refuse to let him go, on the grounds that he’s “a serious threat to the security and stability of Iraq”.

  

  

 

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NO SURPRISE THAT approval, like mine, of the Clinton-Obama-Gore success in springing Ling and Lee from imprisonment should prompt John Bolton, Bush’s loud-mouthed and disastrous choice as United Nations ambassador, to condemn the operation as a "knee-jerk impulse for negotiations" and "poorly thought-out gesture politics".

 

He’s been arguing that it only puts other Americans at greater risk from “rogue states”.

 

He said his own approach would perhaps have taken longer, but it wouldn't have "faltered badly" like this week's effort, and amounted to "in effect giving North Korea its own lifeline".

 

I suggest a simple journalistic exercise, of the sort that one of my favorite Assignment Editors liked to set for us reporters. Can anyone carefully research Ambassador Bolton’s time at the UN (August 2005 to December 2006) and prepare a list of his diplomatic successes, highlighting how they benefitted any single American citizen?

 

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