The morning the loss of life of Father Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani was introduced, I used to be requested to write down about Al Jazeera and the person whose imaginative and prescient introduced it into being. Might God have mercy on him.
I discovered myself not sure the place to start out: with Sheikh Hamad, the person behind the concept and the challenge, or with Al Jazeera itself? In fact, the 2 are troublesome to separate. Each challenge begins as an thought earlier than the willpower of these behind it turns it into actuality. Al Jazeera was Sheikh Hamad’s brainchild. Via his resolve, persistence and braveness in standing by his positions and choices, it turned what it’s as we speak: a drive within the media world and a presence unattainable to disregard.
Let me roll the digital camera again 30 years or extra.
By a exceptional coincidence, that very morning the BBC introduced the closure of its Arabic tv service, lower than two years after it had gone on air. The newsroom doorways had been closed to us, and instantly we had been in search of work once more. For somebody like me, accustomed to in search of work removed from dwelling, the scenario itself was hardly unfamiliar, even when the information had come out of nowhere.
Then a colleague arrived with phrase {that a} Qatari staff in London was recruiting journalists for a tv information channel it deliberate to launch in Qatar. The channel, he mentioned, can be free to report the information and broadcast speak programmes in line with their significance, simply as main broadcasters within the West did.
May such a factor actually be doable in an Arab nation? It was a tragic query to should ask.
I had lived in Kuwait for 15 years and left after the Iraqi invasion. The Gulf held many reminiscences for me. My youngsters had been born there. Listening to concerning the new Qatari challenge introduced these reminiscences flooding again, and I made a decision, as I had so usually earlier than, to comply with the place work would possibly take me.
The BBC had closed its doorways. Al Jazeera opened them.
On June 1, 1996, our aircraft landed at Doha’s previous airport. My colleague and buddy, the late Ahmed Al-Shouli, was sporting a swimsuit and tie. When the aircraft door opened and the new air poured in, he turned to me and mentioned: “If solely I had travelled gentle, such as you.”
The newsroom was small. Beside it was an equally small studio, and behind them 5 small modifying suites, a tape library, an workplace for the editor-in-chief and a bigger one for the director-general and his employees.
It was clear that the concept of launching the channel had been taking form within the thoughts of the person behind it for a while. The foundations had been already in place earlier than he started bringing within the journalists, technicians and directors who would enter that newsroom and put their abilities and expertise to work.
It was equally clear that those that had designed and geared up the constructing had not imagined how rapidly the channel would develop. Inside a couple of years, the constructing can be too small and its services unable to maintain tempo with the calls for of growth.
But it was a heat dwelling for us all. The intimacy of the place solely gave us better vitality and resolve as we set about constructing a channel that might rival people who had come earlier than it and alter the stability of media between the World North and South.
Through the 5 months of trial broadcasting, the staff grew in power and cohesion by the day. But all of us questioned whether or not the liberty we had been promised was actual. These doubts progressively light with each information bulletin we accomplished. We noticed no interference within the content material, the stories or the best way tales had been informed.
Earlier than lengthy, our frustration was of a special type. We had been producing bulletins that rivalled the BBC’s, and even surpassed them, however no viewers may but see them.
On November 1, 1996, Arab media lastly discovered its voice. In Al Jazeera’s first information bulletin, the late Jamal Rayyan introduced the channel’s launch to the world.
The person who had promised us freedom had saved his phrase. There was no image of him within the bulletin. There was no story about him.
Individuals throughout the Arab world may scarcely imagine that the information bulletins and speak programmes they had been watching had been being broadcast from a Gulf Arab nation. They had been accustomed to tv that sang the ruler’s praises and was by no means allowed into the sphere to bear witness to actuality, convey individuals’s issues freely or give them house to boost their voices in pleasure or sorrow and converse brazenly of their goals, visions and opinions.
The person behind the concept and the challenge saved a detailed eye on its progress. He would go to, supply broad steering and encouragement, and typically joke with us. However Sheikh Hamad by no means as soon as intervened in a information report or a chat programme. Nor did the aides he had entrusted with overseeing the challenge.
He gave his phrase and saved it. We knew then that success can be ours.
However let me transfer the digital camera ahead, so I don’t linger too lengthy.
Inside months, others had begun to note the arrival of a brand new channel from what they known as the World South. They started carrying its stories as a result of Al Jazeera and its correspondents had been current in locations they themselves hesitated to enter.
Photographs of the struggling of youngsters in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, and throughout the World South, had been seen completely on Al Jazeera. Recognition quickly turned an acknowledgement that Al Jazeera had taken the lead.
Success made it essential to achieve wider audiences in different languages. Al Jazeera English and the community’s on-line presence adopted, remodeling the channel right into a community that spoke to the entire world, North and South.
That was the breakthrough.
For many years, information had travelled in a single path. Western cameras captured it via Western eyes and a Western understanding of the world, usually formed by colonial and cultural biases that had been typically express and typically hidden between the traces.
The media equation had modified. Information may now journey from South to North, seen via the eyes of the individuals and locations it got here from.
The community’s increasing attain and rising presence internationally additionally reshaped the cultural and mental panorama of the South. It opened new cultural horizons within the area the place it started, throughout the broader Muslim world and the World South, and even within the distant West.
However the years have taught us that success can carry painful penalties. Some got here from the instant area. Many extra got here from farther afield.
The area round us couldn’t tolerate the free phrase or its results, and so it invented an enemy for itself. Workplaces had been closed. Correspondents had been hounded, arrested and killed. The nation that hosted the community got here beneath fierce assault.
This was Al Jazeera syndrome.
Past the area, places of work had been bombed. Reporters and digital camera operators had been killed, imprisoned and tortured. Strain on the nation internet hosting the community’s headquarters intensified.
Sheikh Hamad didn’t yield.
Along with his attribute boldness, he would ask these close by: “When will you cease treating the free phrase as an enemy?”
And to these farther afield, he would say: “Are you not those who’ve spent years preaching freedom of expression, democracy and the human proper to know?”
Sheikh Hamad was a defend for the community and people who labored for it. He and the individuals he entrusted with working Al Jazeera would inform us: “Your solely purple traces are the principles of the career. Nothing else.”
Might God have mercy on the person behind the concept and the challenge.
We proceed on the trail.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial coverage.
