Wednesday, April 09, 2003

Kuwaiti media, which knows firsthand what it is like to be freed of Saddamite dominion, has no problem showing the jubilation on the streets of Baghdad.

Kuwaiti television has trumpeted the joy of Iraqis after the fall of Baghdad to US troops, with a presenter saying it is a “slap in the face” to those Arabs who sided with Saddam Hussein.

Kuwait Television showed footage of an old Iraqi man using his shoe to hit a poster of Saddam Hussein and screaming ”This is freedom!”

The state channel’s presenter voiced over the clip: “This is a slap in the face to all those who believed Saddam Hussein could stay in power.”

“This is the day of great jubilation, the day of rebuilding Iraq,” a member of the London-based Iraqi opposition, Faek Sheik Ali, told Kuwaiti television.

Ali applauded Kuwait’s media for their coverage of the war, saying Iraqi dissidents were baffled as to why other Arab channels had supported a dictator against his people.

Few Arab television stations outside Kuwait have hosted Iraqis who opposed the rule of Saddam Hussein.

Kuwait television has been calling the three-week old war the “liberation of Iraq,” and one of its correspondents has been embedded with U.S. troops.

Most of the country’s dailies have sent reporters to southern Iraq. On Wednesday, the Al-Watan newspaper ran a report on prison torture in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, that British troops liberated early this week.

“Basra breathes freedom with a lung it hasn’t gotten used to yet,” said a headline in the Kuwaiti daily Al-Qabas.

And of course there are still the ignorant and blind.

The Lebanese channel, Al Hayat-LBC satellite TV, broadcast an interview from outside the Palestine Hotel with a British woman, apparently one of those foreigners who had come to Iraq to act as human shields against the invasion.

She expressed shock at the speed of the collapse of Saddam’s authority. She also said that Iraq was free until the American and British troops arrived.

An Italian woman in Baghdad, who said her name was Marlyn, told the channel that “American gangs” had come to occupy Iraq “for economic purposes.”

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