Protests against the Indictment of Taisir Aluni in Spain

Al Jazeera has heavily criticized the indictment in Spain of one of its reporters, Taisir Aluni, who is accused of supporting Qaida militants. With its emphatic indictment, the court condemned contact with the terrorist network, while Al Jazeera maintains that this is an appropriate means for obtaining exclusive reporting. By Victor Kocher

​​The Qatar-based television station Al Jazeera has protested against the indictment of its Afghanistan correspondent Taisir Aluni in the Madrid Al Qaida trial. The news network says the decision was excessive and insists its journalist is innocent.

Al Jazeera spoke of a dangerous precedence being set in regard to freedom of the press and announced that it would appeal the decision. The station's website presented a series of criticisms of the court's decision written by various groups, from 'Reporters without Borders' to diverse Arabic and Muslim human rights groups.

The critiques center on several different aspects, ranging from weak evidence to prejudices in the court, arbitrary justice, and political pressure on the judges.

Solidarity via the internet

It is one thing when the mass media defends someone from its own ranks who is caught in the jaws of justice, but on the other hand Al Jazeera has thus entered into a conflict with the judicial system of a democratic European state that will also defend itself against the manifest threat of Al Qaida terrorism with the legal means available to it.

The first time Aluni was arrested two years ago, Al Jazeera organized a solidarity campaign on its website that in many ways resembled Western campaigns in support of political prisoners who are at the mercy of dictatorial regimes or fanatic kidnappers.

The effect of this campaign could be seen in an on-the-spot survey among website visitors: 87.1 percent of respondents supported the view that freedom of the press in the West had been compromised by the Aluni decision, and 81.9 percent considered the Aluni trial to be part of the general context of a Western campaign against Al Jazeera.

The message that this sends out, although not explicitly stated in so many words by Al Jazeera, is that the trial against an Arabic and Muslim star reporter who captured with a camera the bloody aspects of the American war against Afghanistan is part of a worldwide war of the West against Muslims.

One hand washes the other

A glance at the published trial documents may be enough to make Aluni's supporters question whether seven years is really an appropriate sentence given the accusations against him. The court was in particular critical of his close social and professional ties in both Spain and later Afghanistan to Arabs whom he knew to be radical members of Islamic terror networks.

In this context, he aided these groups in acquiring visa papers in Spain and as a money currier, having delivered 4000 dollars. This gave him the privilege of being the only foreign television correspondent in Kabul during the time of the Taliban, and it also gave him access to an exclusive interview with Osama Bin Laden after the September 11th attacks.

The stiff sentence he received shows that the court was apparently eager to show that it considers contact with Al Qaida, a terror group that has killed several thousand civilians, to be a serious crime.

The Spanish authorities found that Al Jazeera failed to maintain a necessary, clear-cut distance to terror groups; while the news organization felt that sending Aluni, who has unique qualifications, to Kabul was a very successful move on their part.

One may add, however, that some American news networks would themselves have invested considerable sums of money in an exclusive meeting with the Al Qaida leader and in doing so would not have shied away from aid offered by questionable middlemen. In 2001 Al Jazeera was able to sell three minute segments of Bin Laden videos for 250,000 dollars a piece to Western television networks.

Taking sides with victims

Al Jazeera originated as an upshot of an Arabic-language news project organized by the BBC. Its strength lay in the fact that it was able to take over an entire staff trained in London with Western standards for good journalism.

Its reporting on the Intifada in Palestine and the American military actions in Iraq, usually from the point of view of the Arabic population affected by these events, fueled the station's growing opposition to the US.

In spring of 2003 an American attack against the Al Jazeera offices in Bagdad killed correspondent Tarek Ayub. Following condemnation by independent Arabic journalists, the reaction to this incident became increasingly influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood, who insisted on taking sides with Muslim victims.

In this kind of a situation, an osmosis effect easily develops with those who take the Muslim victim ideology as grounds for a Jihadist war that justifies all available means, namely Al Qaida, and similarly the Islamic guerilla in Iraq. The lesson that was learned from the Madrid trial that this kind of militant tendency is not acceptable may well also have be learned by the Jazeera editors.

But the criteria are not as uncontroversial as they seem to be in Europe or America. As long as the Western justice system is involved in eminent political conflicts such as the West-East anti-terror war, it will be hard to accept this kind of court decision as the impartial realization of universal rights for all.

Victor Kocher

© Victor Kocher 2005

Translation from German: Christina M. White

This article was previously published by the Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

Qantara.de

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