Introduction

When I worked for the official Iraqi TV back in 1997, a great deal of attention was given to the media during the Ba’ath rule. A military tank never left its position in front of the TV station’s main gate and the small road leading to it was always blocked. Every Iraqi driver knew it was forbidden to approach this road. The kind of security checks that everyone had to undergo to enter the main building were thorough. It looked like a place for the privileged, though its employees got very low salaries that could not sustain them for a whole month, mainly due to the economic sanctions. It was a rather surreal place where rumours spread about Uday Saddam’s torture chamber at his Al-Shabab TV station. It was believed that it contained different torture tools to be used against anyone who, intentionally or not, made a mistake. Other confirmed reports were about employees whose job it was to censor ‘suspicious’ TV material lest anything obscene or political, such as a half-naked woman or an anti-revolutionary message, was shown. For example, a colleague who translated George Orwell’s film 1984 was shocked when he knew that the authorities had refused to air the film because Iraq’s political system bore some similarities to Orwell’s imaginary authoritarian regime, especially in the way that the Iraqi security forces monitored the activities of the people.