One of the most obvious signs of a functional democracy is without doubt a free press and media. However in 2009 there was a rather strange TV station that appeared out of nowhere which seemed to challenge this thought. It was a huge mystery initially, a channel suddenly began broadcasting the first day of 2009′s Eid festival for Sunni Muslims. The stations official name has been alternating between two different names – Al-Arabi and Al-Lafeta which mean the Arab and the Banner respectively.
It’s not the most exciting channel and given that the majority of it’s content consists of still images of Saddam Hussein in various smart poses. There’s him on a horse, Saddam in a nice suit and then his military uniforms. Obviously there may be a few repeats given that Saddam was executed in 2006 nearly three years previously. The pictures are mostly rather old, and as yet we haven’t had a speaker or announcer or commentator. It does seem to be a rather pointless exercise at this point.
Finding who is paying for this strange TV station is not easy either although the chief suspects are that of the Baathist party. The party that Saddam led for so many years. However it was finally tracked down to a man in Damascus called Mohammed Jarboua who denied that it was the Baathist party funding the channel. He said that it is simply for Iraqis and other arabs. I have to say it was one of the most boring channels I’d every seen, and frankly it didn’t come close to an evening watching Iplayer abroad on my Ipad.
The media adviser to the current Iraqi Prime minister, has insisted that the station is an irrelevance. They refused to comment on whether the channel will be shut down or not. It seems unlikely a channel with such an obvious agenda would be allowed to continue in most countries never mind the new Iraq. The Baathist party has actually spread out since the demise of Saddam becoming strong in Syria and Jordan, but also to Yemen and a few other of the Gulf nations. Many of these people have gained great wealth during the time of Saddams rule and there would be many able to afford this sort of gesture, expensive though it is.