TV Channels Suspended in Iraq over Sectarianism

Published: 30 April 2013

Country: Iraq

iraq media 2Iraq’s government has suspended the licences of 10 satellite television channels, including Al Jazeera, saying that they promote violence and sectarian conflict.

Communications and Media Commission in Iraq (CMC) stated that all ten TV channels were “provocative, misleading and exaggerated with the objective of disturbing the civil and democratic process”.

Responding to the accusation, Al Jazeera said in a statement: “We are astonished by this development. We cover all sides of the stories in Iraq, and have done for many years. The fact that so many channels have been hit all at once though suggests this is an indiscriminate decision. We urge the authorities to uphold freedom for the media to report the important stories taking place in Iraq.”

The channel has aggressively covered the Arab spring uprisings across the region, and has broadcast extensively on the civil war in neighbouring Syria. Qatar itself is a harsh critic of the Syrian regime and a leading backer of the rebels, and is accused by many supporters of Iraq’s government of backing protests in Iraq too, reports the Guardian.

The other nine channels whose licences were suspended by Iraq’s communications and media commission are al-Sharqiya and al-Sharqiya News, which frequently criticise the government, and seven smaller local channels – Salahuddin, Fallujah, Taghyeer, Baghdad, Babiliya, Anwar 2 and al-Gharbiya.

As the New York Times reports, all but one of the channels are aligned with Sunni financial backers, and the move was widely perceived as a crackdown on dissent by the Shiite-led government that is facing an increasingly violent Sunni uprising.

The decision will not banish the channels from the airwaves: as satellite channels based abroad, they are beyond the reach of the Iraqi government. But it prohibits the channels’ journalists from reporting inside Iraq.

The move, effective immediately, comes as Baghdad tries to quell rising unrest in the country after clashes at a Hawija protest camp last week, reports the Guardian. More than 180 people have been killed in gun battles with security forces and other attacks since the unrest began last week following more than four months of largely peaceful protests by Iraq’s Sunni Muslim minority against the Shia-dominated government.

Many of the channels had devoted large amounts of airtime to the Sunni protest movement that began in December and last week took a violent turn that has raised the spectre of a new civil war. A report last year by Sharqiya, in particular, that alleged mistreatment of Sunni women prisoners in Iraqi jails, became a rallying cry for the protesters, reports the New York Times.