[iwar] [fc:HizbAllah.Supports.Bin.Laden]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-17 18:15:54
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All for Afghanistan at Al-Manar
Hizbullah TV takes on issues according to its world viewCilina Nasser
October 17, 01
Daily Star staff After establishing itself as a platform for promoting
the Palestinian intifada, Al-Manar TV is aiming to play a similar
leading role in its coverage of the US-led war against Afghanistan.

“What we want is to rouse Muslims (everywhere) to denounce the
aggression against Afghanistan,” Hassan Fadlallah, the news director
of the Hizbullah-owned television station, told The Daily Star.
In covering this war, Fadlallah said, Al-Manar would take the side of
Afghanistan.

“We consider ourselves biased in favor of the Afghans because it is
they who are being killed,” he said.
Not surprisingly, while CNN has tagged its coverage with the logo War
on Terror, Al-Manar has opted for The American Aggression on
Afghanistan.

In reporting on the Afghan village of Qadam, where 160 civilians were
killed last Wednesday during a US bombing raid, the station
highlighted how the “quiet village was crushed by the American war
machine.”
Al-Manar has also given special emphasis to demonstrations against the
attacks in various countries around the world.

But sharp differences between the largely Shiite opposition and the
ruling Sunni Taleban in Afghanistan will not be brought to the surface
on Al-Manar TV, Fadlallah said.
“We do not have interviews with Shiite opposition figures,” he said,
explaining Hizbullah’s general policy was to emphasize the theme of
Islamic unity. “This station abides by this policy.”

“We must define our priorities, the first of which is to disregard
sectarian strife such as differences between the Sunnis and Shiites,
nationalists and Islamists, and Arab and non-Arab Muslims,” Fadlallah
added.
Asked whether the station was avoiding coverage of the Shiite
opposition in order to maintain Al-Manar’s predominantly Sunni Arab
viewership, Fadlallah said: “We report with absolute objectivity the
views of all warring factions inside Afghanistan and regard the
differences there as internal conflicts.”

Al-Manar television has dispatched three correspondents to Pakistan,
who have been granted permission from the Taleban embassy along with
15 other journalists to enter Afghanistan.

Fadlallah explained, however, that the Pakistani authorities
obstructed the move by preventing journalists from going to the border
on Saturday. Deutsche Presse Agentur reported that journalists were
not allowed to cross the border to Afghanistan due to security
reasons.

But the station was able to get footage from northern Afghanistan,
which is controlled by the Northern Alliance opposition.
Fadlallah denied that Al-Manar secured the footage from Iranian TV but
confirmed that cooperation with Tehran’s official media is taking
place.

He preferred not to disclose the identity of the individual working
for Al-Manar in Afghanistan “so that he will continue to send us
reports.”

Several foreign news agencies and television stations, including
Japanese and French ones, have used the Al-Manar footage of northern
Afghanistan.
“We gave the footage to them for free,” Fadlallah said, adding that
“we do not sell issues related to humanitarian causes. What we do is
cooperate with them.”

Fadlallah denied that Iran provided Al-Manar with funding and
maintained that such cooperation was restricted to technical exchange
and free swapping of series, films and footage.

He said the expenses required to cover the war prompted the station to
reshuffle its budget priorities.
“It increased the money allotted for the news department and reduced
it for other programs,” Fadlallah said. He explained that the
television station was paying $1,000 for each 10 minutes of satellite
transmission. “Sometimes we have 10 messages per day from our
correspondents.”

Fadlallah said that intermission snippets between programs shown on
Al-Manar TV will highlight the American campaign in Afghanistan.

He added that such clips will be comparable to those which portray the
plight of Palestinians on the station.
“These spots will have the title, Terrorism Without Borders, in which
we plan to draw attention to and parallels between the current US
campaign and American terrorism in Vietnam, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Iraq,
and Lebanon,” Fadlallah continued.

However, he said the week-long delay in broadcasting the clips was due
to technical, and not political, reasons.
Fadlallah pointed out that rare footage from Afghanistan contained the
Doha-based news television Al-Jazeera stamp or logo. “That is why they
cannot be used in our clips,” he said.

Al-Manar has shown less enthusiasm about highlighting the case of
Lebanese whose names appeared last week in a list of most wanted
terrorists released by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Fadlallah argued that the station dealt with the announcement of the
list as it would with any other piece of news.
“We do not deal with it as a cause of its own. Our main issue is to
launch a counter-campaign against the American aggression on
Afghanistan,” Fadlallah said.
Despite the shift of attention to Afghanistan, the Palestinian
intifada would remain on the top of Al-Manar’s agenda.

“On the professional level, our aim is to focus on current events,
which is the plight of Afghanistan at the moment. But politically, we
maintain our full support for the intifada,” Fadlallah said.

“Even if there is no news in Palestine, we try to show how the events
unfolding in Afghanistan are affecting the Palestinian struggle,” he
added said.
“One example is when (US President) Bush announced his intention to
create a Palestinian state as an offer to Arabs in return for their
support” (of the war on Afghanistan).

“We present the statements of American officials and then shed light
 on US foreign policy that contradicts these statements. That’s how we
 pass our message to viewers.”

DS 17/10/01

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