New Laws Needed to Boost Media Freedom in Kurdistan Region

[Aslan]

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Press freedom in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region has made significant progress, but new laws are needed to guarantee these liberties and help break cozy ties between political parties and the media, local experts and a recent international report said.

"The government has no right to tell journalists what to do," Kurdistan Region Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani, the keynote speaker at a conference in Erbil titled “Media, Politics and Democracy in Kurdistan: Towards a Better Understanding", told the audience.

Barzani, whose ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party is the main partner in the Kurdistan Regional Government, acknowledged that internationally recognized media laws had helped progress freedom of speech in the autonomous enclave.

But like panelists at the conference, he echoed the need for further legislation to cement those rights, saying that the purpose of the conference was to use the knowledge of international media experts to build the foundations of free press and speech.

Asos Hardi, the CEO of Awene Media Company, told the conference that the mentality of using the media as instruments of political propaganda had developed during the struggle for greater Kurdish rights under ousted dictator Saddam Hussein.

"The media helped in the Kurdish revolution and the mentality hasn't changed," Hardi noted.

The struggle for power among Kurdish groups intensified after Saddam began to lose his grip on Iraq’s northern Kurdish regions in the wake of his disastrous 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The Kurds launched an uprising in 1991, using Western sanctions imposed against the dictator -- limiting his access to Iraq’s northern regions -- to plant the seeds of the autonomy gained in the wake of the 2003 US-led invasion that ousted Saddam.

"Until the 1991 uprising ‘media outlets’ in Iraqi Kurdistan were instruments of political propaganda used by resistance movements and the armed struggle," according to a recent report by international media watchdog Reporters Without Borders.

Following the uprising, the Kurdish region was riddled with eight political parties, each vying for the throne in Kurdistan. Media outlets, each affiliated to a particular party or group, became instruments in the power struggle.

Hiwa Osman, the creator of a new media consultancy group in Iraq, said Kurdish journalists do not have the tools to be fair and balanced because of these political affiliations. He said the local media have to rebrand through a modern legal framework to guarantee rights.

He also claimed that some media outlets remain state-run and funded by political parties, making it difficult for an individual in Kurdistan to rely on one source for reliable information and news.

Hardi said that now, with the enclave developing rapidly and the political landscape in transition, new laws are needed to guarantee media freedoms, and help sever the ties between political parties and media outlets.

Still, Iraqi Kurdistan has grown significantly in the last 10 years and press freedom is significantly ahead of surrounding countries, according to the report by Reporters Without Borders. It said that was mainly due to the adoption of a "protective Law of Journalism," in 2007.

The report also quoted other local media professionals, who expressed concern about how the 2007 law is applied, and how it is open to misinterpretation by judges and courts.