Wrong side of history
Photojournalist STEVE CONNORS discusses why his film on Iraqis' resistance to the war has been shunned by the mainstream.
Academic studies have been published. The two most influential US newspapers have issued public apologies. It is now widely understood that the media on both sides of the Atlantic completely failed to hold governments to account in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
As Arianna Huffington of news website Huffington Post pointed out, the "watchdogs acted more like lapdogs."
Less talked about is the mainstream media's subsequent failure to accurately report on the continuing occupation of Iraq - in particular, the large, violent resistance that sprang up after the initial US-British assault in March 2003.
Sheffield-born photojournalist and film-maker Steve Connors maintains that most of the Western journalists working alongside him in Iraq after the fall of Baghdad "weren't all that interested in going out and doing this story."
They had "swallowed the party line - we are the good guys, they are the bad guys. The people who are resisting us are dead-enders, it was foreign fighters."
The right to resist is enshrined in the UN Charter, but, says Connors, "when we go and invade somebody's country all of a sudden their right to resist is not legitimate in our eyes."
Working closely with fellow journalist Molly Bingham, Connors soon realised that "ordinary Iraqi people" were resisting the occupation.
Sensing an important story, they started hanging out in the teashops of Adhamiya, a northern suburb of Baghdad, spending 10 months speaking to 45 Iraqis involved in the growing resistance movement.
Eleven of these interviews appear in Connors and Bingham's superb 2007 documentary Meeting Resistance, a much-needed antidote to the crude propaganda that has been disseminated about those resisting the occupation.
A Baghdad University political science professor who was conducting a statistical study of the resistance sums up the film's main findings - "the vast majority of resistance is a nationalist, popular resistance by Iraqis who have no relationship to the former regime."
Talking to me at a screening of the film at the British Museum in London, Connors suggests the inconvenient truths that they uncovered in Adhamiya are the main reason why they've been unable to get their work out to a wider audience.
Both the BBC and Channel 4 declined to show the documentary, with the latter refusing to "believe these people were who they said they were."
Despite this setback, Connors is upbeat - joiningthedocs.tv has just released Meeting Resistance on DVD and he hopes that it will get a limited theatrical release in the near future.
But, with the interviews conducted more than four years ago, does he believe that Meeting Resistance is still relevant to the situation in Iraq today?
"There were more attacks in 2008 than there were when we finished making the film," Connors replies. "It peaked and then it went down again."
The spike he is referring to is the much-heralded February 2007 US "surge," seen by many commentators and politicians including the new US president Barack Obama as a huge success.
But Connors argues that it did little to reduce the overall levels of violence.
"It was a set of political conditions that happened at the same time as the surge," he explains. "You had the Mahdi Army standing down, there was a sectarian cleansing of districts of Baghdad. There was nobody left to kill."
He also believes that the creation of the Awakening Movement, supposedly a successful US counterinsurgency operation that increased security in Anbar province, had an impact - at least in the short term.
"What they have done essentially is chosen elements from some tribes and promoted them over other elements, upsetting a system that is hundreds of years old," he says.
"I liken it to handing over Scotland Yard to the Kray twins. For a short-term tactical gain, there is going to be a huge price to pay. They are creating the conditions for another civil war, this time among the Sunni tribes."
And Connors attributes the reduction in violence to one more glaring factor - "the Americans started to withdraw in that period, so they were not presenting targets."
Although he has previously reported from Sri Lanka, the violent break-up of Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine, Connors was still shocked by the state of chaos in Iraq, where the dire security situation has made it very difficult to accurately estimate the number of Iraqi dead.
Connors believes that the Iraqi Body Count figure of around 100,000, calculated from cross-checked reports of violent deaths in English-language media, is a gross underestimate.
In Iraq, "especially in the summer, you can have someone killed and buried within two hours. There is no report of that death. Most people don't go to the morgue."
And although the 2006 Lancet study putting Iraqi deaths at 655,000 has been criticised by both the US and British governments, Connors highlights that the epidemiological studies upon which the figures are based "have been accepted in virtually every other conflict throughout the world.
"The reason we find it so difficult to accept is because we are the bad guys this time. We have caused all this pain and suffering."
Rather than arguing over the exact number of deaths, Connors is quick to point out that the central question "is the magnitude of the crime is the crime itself. Everything accrues from that.
"If you go back to the Nuremberg principles, to commit aggressive war is the supreme crime. And what we did in Iraq is we committed aggressive war.
"Britain is as guilty as the United States. We are on the wrong side of history."
Visit www.meetingresistance.com to find out more on Connors's film.
