Radio for the Future
of Iraq
by Mika
Mäkeläinen
As US troops tore
down a statue of Saddam Hussein in Central Baghdad
yesterday, clandestine radio station al-Mustaqbal,
"The Future", celebrated victory
in its hideout in Amman, Jordan. Today al-Mustaqbal
resumed its campaign to move into Iraq as soon as
possible to establish a radio station there. Al-Mustaqbal
is the mouthpiece of the Iraqi National Accord (INA),
one of the many opposition groups vying for power
in post-war Iraq.
According to a source in the
INA, several hundred core supporters of the organization
are already moving back to Iraq, where they once
escaped from. Now the plan for broadcasting, in
cooperation with other opposition movements, is
to restore electricity and to get transmissions
on the air as soon as possible, first from southern
Iraq.
There
is not only a power vacuum in Iraq, but a vacuum
for information, as Coalition troops have destroyed
nearly all Iraqi radio transmitters, and programs
by US Information
Radio still leave room for programming produced
by the Iraqis for the Iraqi people. Opposition
groups, until now confined to operating clandestine
stations in Kurdistan or beyond the borders of Iraq,
are racing to get their voices heard in post-war
Iraq.
Sandstorm blocks
INA broadcasts
Though the outcome was expected,
the war didn't go exactly as planned for Al-Mustaqbal,
the radio voice of the opposition Iraqi National
Accord. Originally, al-Mustaqbal had a bold plan
to hijack the airwaves over Iraq by 24-hour blanket
broadcasting as soon as the war would begin. The
broadcasts would have been aimed at persuading the
military to defect to the opposition while they
still can. The target group has been clear from
the start. Military and intelligence officers have
always been the most important support base for
the INA.
However, instead of increasing
airtime, new programming actually decreased when
the war began. A strong sandstorm, which brought
US ground forces to a standstill in Iraq, also severely
damaged a satellite receiving antenna at the clandestine
office of al-Mustaqbal in the Jordanian capital
Amman. The station survived only with outside help.
Broadcasting from
the shadows
Al-Mustaqbal is run from a secret
location in Amman. Tight security has been a must.
For many years, this has been a highly sensitive
operation; trying to overthrow the regime of Iraqi
president Saddam Hussein, while based in the only
country which until the end still more or less got
along with the government of Saddam Hussein.
To the relief of
the Jordanian government, the burden has been shared
with other neighbors of Iraq. From Amman the signal
is transmitted to a satellite and downloaded in
Kuwait, from where it is beamed to Iraq. Mohammad
Ribar, chief technician for al-Mustaqbal, confirms
to DXing.info that a 50-kilowatt transmitter in
Kuwait is used for the broadcasts. The transmitter
is located at the US International Broadcasting
Bureau (IBB) relay station in Kuwait - used for
Radio Sawa programming to Iraq - but the particular
transmitter airing al-Mustaqbal is said to be administered
by the CIA.
When al-Mustaqbal
first began broadcasting on April 21, 1996, a transmitter
in Saudi Arabia was used, Ribar says. Nowadays the
Saudi intelligence service supports another faction
of the Iraqi opposition running a station called
Republic
of Iraq Radio, Voice of the Iraqi People. The
station has studios and offices in Jeddah, using
the powerful shortwave transmitters of the Broadcasting
Service of Saudi Arabia (BSKSA) to reach its audience
in Iraq.
A fake Saddam on
the air
Back in Amman, programs
have been produced by some 40 full-time and 20 part-time
employees. Before the war, they used to prepare
a wide range of programs from commentaries outlining
the future political system of Iraq to satirical
radio plays.
"We don't have
dry articles. We present our ideas in dramatic plays,
radio plays, with the accent of the common people,"
Ribar explains. "We even have a person who
imitates Saddam. The show is called A picture
of the leader of the necessity," referring
to one of the titles given to Saddam, Ribar says.
Ribar is confident
that their programs (a sample station identification:
) do indeed reach Iraq, up to the point of having
irritated the government and Saddam's son Uday,
who has been in charge of much of the country's
government-controlled media, and has complained
about the programming of Radio al-Mustaqbal. The
fact that the station has been vilified by the government
media makes Ribar very happy, because al-Mustaqbal
couldn't have hoped for a better promotional campaign
among the Iraqi audience.
Up to the war, the
staff produced two 3-hour feeds per day, and were
said to be prepared to be on the air 24 hours a
day as soon as military action would begin. The
3-hour feed is broadcast at 2130-0030 UTC on the
frequency of 1575 kHz mediumwave, and another 3-hour
feed, containing partly same material, is broadcast
at another time in the early morning hours. "We
have been guaranteed a minimum of six hours per
day," Ribar says.
Keeping in touch
with its audience has been difficult for a clandestine
station, but all along al-Mustaqbal has had contacts
with Iraqis who have visited Jordan.
Unknown bedfellows
sponsored by the CIA?
Politically al-Mustaqbal
is affiliated with the Iraqi
National Accord (INA), an opposition group of
military and security officers who have defected
from Iraq. INA was created by the British intelligence
MI6, but has received extensive support from the
CIA since the mid-1990's, after the United States
shifted its support away from the Iraqi National
Congress (INC) and placed its bets with the INA.
The United States had hoped that the INA would have
been able to instigate a military uprising against
Saddam - despite an unsuccessful coup attempt in
1996.
There has been intense
speculation about the ties between al-Mustaqbal
and two other stations seemingly originating from
the same transmitter, Twin
Rivers Radio (Wadi al-Rafidayn), just one step
down the dial at 1566 kHz, and Radio
Tikrit, one step up at 1584 kHz. Prime broadcasting
time between the three is shared so that Twin Rivers
Radio is on the air at 1600-1830/1900 UTC, Radio
Tikrit at 1900-2100 UTC and al-Mustaqbal after that.
Ribar says that
transmission times are "politically coordinated"
between different stations, but he says that he
doesn't know who produces the programming heard
on the other two stations, and he says he hasn't
heard of Radio Tikrit before discussing the issue
with DXing.info in mid-March.
Until early March,
INA, headed by Ayad Allawi, had its headquarters
in London, with other offices in Germany, Jordan,
in the autonomous Kurdistan inside Iraq, Syria and
Turkey, but the main office was moved to Amman when
war against Iraq looked imminent. Now everyone has
already set their eyes on post-war Iraq, where the
station hopes to establish a permanent presence
next week. As contact information keeps changing,
the best way to contact the station is by email.
"It is unbelievable
how many people are approaching us and offering
their help," says Mohammad Ribar at Radio al-Mustaqbal.
INA
turns down a mobile transmitter offered by the US
Two weeks ago the
US military offered Radio al-Mustaqbal a mobile
transmitter, but INA turned down the offer, because
"the situation is changing so fast". The
transmitter would have been a system called SOMS-B
(Special Operations Media System-B), which is a
combined radio and television broadcasting station
packed in two Humvee military vehicles and a trailer.
At least two SOMS-B
units have been broadcasting Information
Radio programming from Kuwait since mid-December,
and moved inside Iraq soon after the first Coalition
ground troops entered Iraq. The transmitter power
of SOMS-B is only 1 kW, which is very little in
a country the size of Iraq, and may have been one
reason why the INA rejected the offer - after all,
currently they still have 50 kW just across the
border.
However, INA says
that it is seeking cooperation with other political
movements, and doesn't insist on having a station
of its own in Iraq. "We don't need to leave
our fingerprints," Ribar says, "We just
hope things will be peaceful now, that is the most
important issue."
While the future
of Radio The Future is more uncertain than
ever, some clarity may emerge after a planned meeting
of the opposition, which is to be held on Tuesday,
April 15, in Nasiriyah. INA is one of the opposition
movements sending its representatives to the talks.
In the meanwhile,
ambitious news reporting on Radio al-Mustaqbal has
been replaced by reruns of Oriental evergreen music.
Rulers in Iraq may come and go, but the appeal of
the music remains forever.
(published
on April 10, 2003)
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