Media confront ethics of showing POWs and war pictures

Despite a Red Cross plea for prisoners' rights, New Zealand media say showing pictures of troops captured in Iraq does not breach the Geneva Convention, reports SIMON RANDALL.

New Zealand media have been scrambling for a local angle on the Iraq war since the first smart bombs slammed into Saddam Hussein's palaces last week.

But the country's isolation from the war -- geographic as much as political -- limited New Zealand media to poignant, if minor, stories about expatriate Iraqis and New Zealand families desperate for news of loved ones on both sides of the conflict.

Then on Monday, a convoy of United States army engineers took a wrong turn in the Iraqi desert and five troops were captured.

Images of Iraqis interviewing the prisoners broadcast on Arab satellite station al-Jazeera were shown around the world, including New Zealand.

The broadcasts, and earlier ones of captured Iraqi prisoners, prompted the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to urge both sides in the war to respect the Geneva Convention, including rules that say Prisoners Of War (POWs) should not be shown on television.

The next day news broke that one of the prisoners, Sergeant James Riley, had lived in Auckland until he was 10 and was still a New Zealand citizen. By that time, he had been already been clearly identified.

Many organisations would have been driven to show the images by New Zealand's competitive media climate, Canterbury University's head of journalism Jim Tully said.

"It's indicative of the media's desperation to find a local angle," he told NZPA.

But media organisations had judged that showing the images did not breach the convention in any serious way, said New Zealand Broadcasting School head Paul Norris.

"Once you agree to show photographs, there may be a technical breach of the convention there," he said.

"But it's a broader issue -- whether it's right that media organisations should be constrained by the convention in this way.

"Clearly, it isn't the media organisation that puts these people on show, it is the ... military that has captured these people who puts them on show.

"The key offence, if there is one, is not the media's."

Gavin Ellis, Commonwealth Press Union New Zealand chairman and the New Zealand Herald editor-in-chief, said it was questionable whether, under the convention, captive powers should parade prisoners before cameras.

"But having parading them, I don't think there are any issues related to the convention that bind a news organisation."

It was in the public interest for the British public to see graphic images of two severely beaten RAF servicemen captured during the 1990 Gulf War, he said.

"I would defend that, although it caused ... outrage in the UK -- not that the pictures had been published but that the men had been mistreated."

Publishing pictures of Sgt Riley would not have the same impact in New Zealand as in the United States.

"New Zealand is somewhat remote from that conflict, and although one of the captured (US) soldiers was a New Zealand citizen, his parents are in the United States, his grandparents (in Auckland) had been made aware of the fact that he'd been pictured," Ellis said.

Publishing a "head shot" of a soldier was not degrading and carried no ethical issues.

"If the person was being publicly humiliated then I think most editors would think twice about that," he said.

"There is no shame in having been captured."

However, editors would have to weigh up public against private interest if publication risked identifying prisoners before their families had been informed.

The Pentagon, having asked US media not to show the prisoners' pictures until families of prisoners had been informed, later clarified its request to include respect for the convention. But CNN showed the images regardless.

"The Geneva Convention binds sovereign states who are signatories to it ... and their treatment of prisoners. It doesn't relate to corporate entities, ie news organisations within those states," Ellis said.

Prisoners had a right to be treated humanely and not be subjected to ridicule.

"As long as we stay within those tenants then publication of images and stories about them is in the public interest."

However, ICRC officials have said showing any prisoners on television violated Article 13 of the convention.

The article says captives should be treated humanely and "at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity".

"At the end of the day, different people may have different interpretations of that," ICRC spokesman Florian Westphal said.

POWs could be shown, he said, but not so that they were recognised.

France's television watchdog summoned al-Jazeera's Paris representative for broadcasting the images, and asked French broadcasters to meet international guidelines for showing such footage.

For many New Zealand news organisations, the real debate was whether war images would offend their audience, and by how much, Tully said.

"And boundaries get nudged a heck of a lot more than they do in a non-competitive environment."

New Zealand health authorities have warned parents that graphic war footage could make children anxious, particularly younger ones unable to separate fact from fantasy.

"At the moment our media have been much more likely to show images that once upon a time would have been considered inappropriate or offensive or just not acceptable," Tully said.

Free-to-air television did not normally show graphic images of dead or injured people, Norris said.

The footage was often available to organisations, who decline to show it on the grounds of taste.

"You can't afford to alienate the audience by showing unacceptably gruesome or graphic shots," he said.

"It's (a matter of) balancing the importance of a story and the need not to sanitise the truth."

- NZPA

Herald Feature: Iraq