The last time I flew into Baghdad airport was in January 1991. It was just before the cruise missile attacks on the city at the start of the operation to retake Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s occupying forces. I came by commercial flight again this week, but to a different Iraq. It’s an Iraq where Saddam-era tyranny has been decentralised, messianic U.S. policy experimentation has fallen flat on its face and violence, crime and hardship are the bedrock of ordinary existence.

How you arrive affects your opinion of a city. In 1991 I was picked up by my driver, Haji Qata, whose job was to steer me away from stories and inform on me to Saddam’s secret police when necessary. He drove me to the relative comfort of the Al Rasheed hotel, a prime vantage point when the bombing began. When I arrived in April 2003 it was in the back of a U.S. Marine armoured personnel carrier that had been both home and transport during three weeks of mobile warfare along the road from Kuwait to Baghdad.

This time I needed an armed escort that travelled at speed into the city, along a highway lined with concrete blast walls and sniper screens, bouncing over the ruts left by roadside attacks launched from rival sectarian suburbs. Baghdad is not less militarised than in 2003 when the invasion force swept through the city, blowing up armaments dumped in city parks. Iraqi police, local security guards, militia forces and U.S. military swarm the streets. Helicopters thud across the skies. The effect is unnerving rather than reassuring. The security blanket has stifled street warfare in recent months, I’m told, but the threat of kidnap, criminal or sectarian, remains vivid.

In 1991 large sections of Baghdad, a city of seven million people, were off-limits to foreigners; secret districts were reserved for Saddam and his Baathist elite working in ministries and palaces behind high walls and screens of palm trees. Now the foreigners have the privileges. We drove through elaborate systems of roadblocks into the Green Zone, the vast section of the city walled off to ordinary Iraqis and reserved for politicians, civil servants and the legions of expatriates who sustain the foreign military endeavour here. The U.S. embassy is housed in a former Republican Guard palace built in chintzy opulence, all mirrored tiles, gilt door panels and marble. Military hospitals, private security armies, helicopter airports and large Saddamite monuments are enclosed within the walls of this Forbidden City. Five years of bruising reversals have sucked some of the fantastical arrogance out of the occupiers of this Oz, so memorably described by Rajiv Chandrasekaran in his book “Imperial Life in the Emerald City.” But on a first view the scale of the enclosure shocked me.

I came to Baghdad to visit the Reuters bureau, across the Tigris River from the Green Zone. Our reporting operation is big and complex. To deliver the story we feed, house and keep safe a half-dozen international staff and dozens of Iraqi reporters, cameramen and photographers. We occupy half a street of housing. To function efficiently we live “off the grid,” generating our own power, cooking our own food and pumping water from our own well. We have protection that would be the envy of most military bases. Walls of concrete slabs line the streets to protect the houses from mortar blasts or predatory human attack. Windows are sandbagged. Guards sit in watchtowers. Vast steel gates and bomb search bays block each end of our street.

Why are we still making such an effort to be here, now that it is quieter than in the bloody years of 2006 and 2007? Firstly because the quiet is fragile, with combatants still to be fully convinced politics will achieve more than violence. But more importantly we are here because this is the 21st century’s inaugural war. It’s a conflict that will redefine the Middle East’s sectarian and religious context, sharpening divisions, distracting Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and laying treacle in the path of social and political progress. This war will shape American policy for years by tempering the appetite for ambitious, ideologically-driven foreign adventures. It has imposed a huge cost on America’s image of itself and been a ruinous expense for Washington. In our globalised world the fiscal extravagance has had a ripple effect, touching distant economies and imposing a price on those who had no say in the war’s waging. The law of unintended consequences has applied in spades to a conflict that President Bush said would bring democracy and peace. Governments fell, militants were inflamed, terrorism raged and thousands of avoidable deaths have been suffered.

Reuters has also paid a heavy price in terms of lives. Seven of our colleagues have died in Iraq, six of them as the result of U.S. fire. Our staff have been beaten, abused and detained without trial for months. Working as a journalist in Iraq is still obscenely dangerous. The burden falls mostly on our Iraqi staff, who venture out to report and film. During my time here, in what was described as an “ordinary” week, one of our Iraqi cameramen was detained by police at a checkpoint and another left his house in a provincial town because a death threat was pinned to his front gate. Many of our Iraqi colleagues have sent their families abroad to safety and have abandoned their homes because they were in religiously fraught areas or the commute took them through hostile terrain. I have written elsewhere about the gloom I have felt over our losses. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists has rightly called the Iraq war the deadliest conflict for journalists in recent history. They believe 126 journalists and 50 media support workers have been killed since the conflict began on March 20, 2003. There are many reasons for this. Looming large among them is that the journalistic neutrality assumed in other wars is no longer accorded to reporters by combatants in this conflict. We are seen as partisan, as propagandists and as participants.

There is a good team spirit in the Reuters office, despite these difficulties. The city, while tense, is not as grim as before. Outside in the spring sunshine, children are playing in a riverside park and restaurants are preparing meals of barbecued mazgouf, a carp-like fish that is a Baghdad speciality. The government has constructed a zone for carefree relaxation by blocking off roads leading to the riverfront and filtering traffic through strict searches. It has a Potemkin quality but is welcomed, nonetheless, by Baghdadis. In the restaurants foreigners would be dining out at their peril. Abu Ali, our office cook, is preparing mazgouf for us tonight, but we’ll be eating it behind our blast walls.

Sean Maguire is Editor, Political and General News at Reuters

The disturbances in Kenya have prompted a thoughtful email from a member of the Media Council in the East African country. It pleads for restraint in reporting the details of tribal violence.

“When a person from a particular tribe sees a number of his/her tribesmen dead they may incite their fellow men to retaliate,” is the argument made. “Don’t turn Kenya into Iraq” is the message. That such a comparison can be contemplated speaks volumes for the levels of apprehension in Kenya now after days of post-election clashes.

The warning reminds me of the challenge news organisations face in reporting accurately without being perceived as inflaming volatile situations. At Reuters we believe the best defence against dangerous misinformation and rumour-mongering is solid eye-witness reporting and the use of dispassionate, accurate language. Our Kenya staff are out on the streets and in the slums, braving the tear gas and the machetes, to see for themselves. Our stories are laced with the observations of Reuters journalists. And we have been talking continuously to aid workers, NGOs, the Red Cross, rights groups, priests and the residents of affected areas. Experienced staff piece together an accurate account of events from that multiplicity of sources.

For Kenyans it is discomfiting that the tribal element to politics should loom suddenly so large. But it can’t be ignored. To give the full picture to our global readership we have to give well-sourced figures for death tolls and make clear the violence has roots in tribal rivalries. That is not inflammatory, it is informatory. Explaining why Kikuyu, Luo and Kalenjin should clash so bitterly does not provoke violence, it helps the reader see the complex origins of what might otherwise be presented as simple brutality.

In our reporting from Iraq there have been times when we were accused of stoking violence by reporting on it. But ignoring rising death tolls in 2003 and 2004 or the sectarian split of Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims would not have stopped the killing. It might have prolonged it by diverting attention from the reality of the problem. The same argument applied in Northern Ireland, which was riven by religious conflict. So too in Kenya.

However, the focus is not just on violence. Calls for calm, for mediation and for an end to violence have come from many quarters and Reuters has reported them prominently. As the story unfolds we’ll report thoroughly and honestly whether the calls have been heard.

Venezuela is a passionate place and its politics are particularly feisty. The fervent supporters of President Hugo Chavez’s socialist revolution pit themselves against equally fervent opponents who believe he is driving the country to dictatorship and ruin. In such an atmosphere the local press becomes deeply politicised and many readers look outside to international news organisations to give them a balanced view in tumultuous times. That’s a role that Reuters takes very seriously.

For several hours before official results of Sunday’s referendum were released, Reuters reported senior government sources saying that Chavez was winning a vote that would allow him to contest elections for life and enshrine socialism as a state priority in the constitution. The sources were impeccable, including three cabinet ministers who had been correct in the past and who cited exit polls and early returns. The ministers told us Chavez was ahead by a hefty 6-8 points. An independent source also told us we were on the right track. But they were proved wrong. Chavez was defeated.

We’ve received many emails accusing us of a breach of trust, of favouritism and of incompetence. You’ll find a selection on the blog where we post reader comment.

Our mistake was not in using sources to get a beat on the story. We followed our own sourcing rules properly. We made clear that our sources were linked to the government and that we had talked to several senior figures. We specified where they said they had their information from.

We also made strenuous efforts to get the opposition’s point of view. But for a couple of hours we were unable to get them to comment. For some readers that left the impression that Reuters backed the government’s interpretation of events.

As the story developed and opposition conviction grew that the government’s numbers were wrong, we were slow to give the change the attention it merited. Some other news organizations emphasised that the vote was too close to call. In retrospect, it was an approach we should have taken.

We have provided comprehensive and distinguished coverage of the referendum, one of the most important stories in recent months in Latin America. We believe our reporting has been balanced and fair. Our stories strive to explain clearly why Chavez is loved and loathed in equal measure. We erred in this one instance, not from favouritism towards the Chavez government, but because we fell away from the high standards we set ourselves.

Thank you to all the readers who questioned our coverage.

The Marhaba restaurant in Peshawar gives an interesting vantage point on the challenges facing Pakistan. It is freshly-painted, one wall has been rebuilt and the floor has been scrubbed clean of the pints of blood that drenched it when a suicide bomber killed 25 people there in May. It is back in business, but barely. Staff are still in shock. Over cups of green tea they show visitors cuttings of press coverage of the attack, roll up trouser legs to display the scars from shrapnel wounds and stumble for explanations of why they were bombed. “We read in the newspaper that we were targeted because we were said to be anti-Taliban,” said one of the chefs, who gave his name only as Hassan. “But we just don’t know.”

One part of my job is visiting our network of bureaux to see the problems they face and to better understand the background to the stories they are reporting. I have come to Pakistan because it has been front page news for much of the year. On the political front the story has been President Pervez Musharraf’s desire to hold onto power by overriding legal obstacles to his transition from military leadership to civilian control. In March he sacked the country’s chief justice, tipping the country into political turmoil that culminated in him imposing a state of emergency. His popularity has slumped but in the face of protests, international pressure and the return from exile of bitter political rivals he has managed to get himself re-elected as president for five years and has given up leadership of Pakistan’s all-powerful military. He also looks to have given the January general election some credibility by enticing enough politicians to contest the vote. There are plenty of bear traps out there for him, though. If a hostile parliament is elected by a population heartily sick of the ex-general he faces at least a rocky cohabitation or at worst impeachment.

But that is not the worst of it. Pakistan has always had lawless frontier areas where tribal laws held sway. British colonial rule failed to quell them and Pakistan historically took a hands-off approach. But Pakistan is caught in the back-draught from the U.S.-led war on the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan. Jihadist militancy, which many argue sprung from the religious schools of Pakistan that provided cannon fodder for the fight against Soviet rule in Kabul, has put down deep roots in border areas. Musharraf, under U.S. pressure to stop Afghan Taliban retreating into his country, has set his own military on militant groups, turning a localised law and order problem into a blossoming insurgency.

Musharraf has been criticised inside and outside Pakistan for being either reluctant or unable to stem militant infiltration. A jihadist revolt in the Red Mosque in central Islamabad, a city of tree-lined avenues and plush villas for the elite, shook the country’s establishment. Commandos quelled the uprising in June at the cost of over 100 lives. Since then a wave of suicide bombings against the army, police, politicians and high-value targets across the country has killed 800 people, according to Pakistani officials. The army is now using helicopter gunships and artillery to combat a radical Islamist cleric who has launched a ‘holy war’ in the favourite tourist spot of Swat, a scenic valley that is a four hour drive from the capital. No skiing then this year for Islamabad’s monied classes.

In Peshawar the vortex of forces tearing Pakistan in different directions is visible in the fear of the journalists whose freedom to report has been battered by Musharraf’s press clampdown, in the new barricades set up to foil suicide attacks on the military’s elegant barracks buildings and in the metal detectors and armed guards set up in recent months to prevent bombers entering restaurants. Marhaba is too poor to afford such protection and its empty benches betray the nervousness of guests. “This was a very peaceful place before,” says the landlord’s agent, Namir Ahmad Safi. He professed himself nonplussed at the stories that surfaced in the wake of the attack that the former owner Haji Sadruddin had been so close to the authorities that he drew accusations of spying for them. Militants amplify their reach via intimidation, enforcing their strict interpretation of Islam that frowns on education for women, enforces a strict separation of the sexes and condemns frivolity. “The main issue here now is militancy,” explained Zulfiquar Ali, a local journalist for Dawn, a national newspaper. “It affects health, education, business, security - everything.”

Peshawar has always been the gateway to the badlands, the last stop before armed guards were needed for the trip up the Khyber pass and its gun culture was legendary. British troops would set off from its magnificent fort in the 19th century for bloody misadventures in Afghanistan. Now a modern motorway puts it just two hours from Islamabad and the challenges to central control that Peshawar held at bay are sweeping past the town towards the capital.

Why should we care? We should care for the sake of Pakistan’s 160 million people, of course, since the vast majority are focused on earning a living and bringing up their families. We should also care because at the extreme Pakistan risks becoming a failed state, one which has become so consumed by fighting insurgency that the economy slumps, any semblance of democracy is abandoned and the military, the centre of real power in Pakistan for much of its history, is trapped in a war against its own people. International angst would focus then on the security of the nuclear arsenal. Possessing the bomb gives Pakistan more geopolitical attention than it might otherwise deserve. It underpins the nightmare scenario, which is currently outlandish but has enough logic to it to merit the attention of all of us.

Yesterday I spent a sombre evening of recollection and commemoration at the Kurt Schork Memorial awards in London. Founded in honour of my friend and Balkan reporting colleague Kurt Schork, the awards celebrate the achievements of freelance journalists and local reporters. These are the brave men and women who provide so much of the material used by international media but get little of the recognition enjoyed by the journalistic stars.

Alas, for the second year, one of the awards was posthumous. Sahar al-Haideri, 44, a journalist with the independent Aswat al-Iraq (Voice of Iraq) news agency, was killed by gunmen in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul in June. She left a husband and three daughters. Sahar, who also worked with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, was put on a death list by insurgents who objected to the clarity and fearlessness with which she reported the murderous campaigns of intimidation being waged by sectarian groups in Iraq.  The award recognised Sahar’s bravery and stubbornness, qualities exemplified by Kurt, who was killed in Sierra Leone in 2000 while on assignment for Reuters. A colleague read extracts from an article by Sahar on the brutal “honour killing” of a 17-year-old girl from the Yezidi sect which sparked a horrifying round of reprisal attacks and ethnic strife. The audience was shocked into silence. One of the 2006 awards went to Steven Vincent, who was shot in Basra, southern Iraq, in August 2005, for writing about the infiltration of local police by death squads.

The war in Iraq has been the deadliest conflict ever for journalists, according to media watchdogs. Figures vary, depending on which organisation you consult, because they categorise journalists and media support workers differently. The Committee to Protect Journalists counts 123 journalists and 42 support workers killed by hostile action in Iraq since March 2003.  The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders group counts 206 journalists and media assistants killed in Iraq with two still missing and 14 kidnapped. The International News Safety Institute records 235 media casualties.

What is clear is that the vast majority of deaths are of Iraqis reporting on their own country. CPJ says 85 percent of those killed are Iraqi. Rodney Pinder, who leads INSI, put the figure higher last night, reminding the audience that most of the deaths were deliberate murder. “The targetting is vicious. Journalists can’t even admit to being journalists,” said Pinder. The pattern is repeated elsewhere. It is not foreign correspondents who are most vulnerable, but local journalists trying to uncover crime, corruption and official misdeeds who are most at risk globally.

Some of the pain has been felt at Reuters. Three of our Iraqi staff were killed in Baghdad in July, two by fire from a U.S. military helicopter, the third shot by gunmen. Two other Iraqi journalists working for us and a Ukrainian and Palestinian have been killed by American soldiers since the 2003 invasion. Our friends at Aswat al-Iraq, which has been supported by the Reuters Foundation, have lost three reporters, including Sahar, this year.  

Amid the gloom, what consolation? Journalism has never been an easy profession and each violent death in the industry poses difficult questions. But it would be wrong to retreat and give up. After all, the Schork awards are there to acknowledge success, not failure. They celebrate the ability of brave people to get stories out to readers who need them. Sahar’s husband, Hassan An-Naqeeb, paid a fitting tribute to the best of our profession, and gave his wife a moving epitaph, with his words: “The truth is an honour beyond all honour.”

Sean Maguire is Editor, Political and General News at Reuters

Interesting reader question asking if Reuters has a reporting presence in Myanmar and whether that influenced our 1998 decison to stop calling the country Burma.

Yes, we do have a reporter based in Yangon. His name is Aung Hla Tun and he has worked for us for about 15 years. He reported bravely and openly throughout the recent disturbances, providing the world’s media with detailed coverage of the protests and their suppression. He took the photograph that accompanies this post.

And no, his presence in Mynamar had nothing to do with our name change. We take great care over the safety of our staff. But the naming decision was based on other factors. Many other  international news organisations without reporters based in Myanmar have made the switch.

It was pointed out that the BBC still calls the country Burma. The British broadcaster argues that is because its audience is more familiar with that name than with Myanmar. That’s one where we differ from our colleagues at the BBC.  

The recent violent crackdown on anti-government protests has thrust Myanmar back into the spotlight and with it the question of what news organisations should call the country.

Reuters has called it Mynamar since 1998, when we switched from using Burma. At the same time we altered our style on Rangoon, the country’s main city, to Yangon. The changes have long been unpopular, particularly with exiled pro-democracy protesters. They argue that accepting the ruling junta’s 1989 decision to change the English version of the country’s name is legitimising the military authorities, who have ruled since a 1962 coup d’etat. The junta refused to accept the victory of The National League for Democracy, the party of Aung San Suu Kyi, in elections held in 1990 and since then has vigorously quelled political protest. Reuters is supporting “an illegal coup” by calling the country Myanmar, say readers who have emailed us recently.

Renaming places is always fraught with controversy. Reuters has no political agenda and seeks to use language that is neutral and accurate.  We switched to Myanmar when the term became widely used, almost a decade after the military rulers made the change. They did so, they said, to distance themselves from the colonial-era term Burma and to bring the English-language name of the country closer to how it sounds in the Burmese language.  Reuters has no view on the merits of that argument. When we changed we noted that the United Nations had switched to Myanmar, as had the Association of SouthEast Asian Nations, and that Myanmar was becoming common usage.

Most international news organisations use Myanmar, including Agence France Presse, Associated Press, The International Herald Tribune, The Straits Times and the South China Morning Post. Some, such as the New York Times,  say “Myanmar, formerly known as Burma,” while others say “Myanmar, also known as Burma.” British newspapers prefer Burma.

The United States government and the British government refuse to call the country Myanmar, in an expressly political gesture of support for opponents of the military leadership.     

Always nice to hear praise from the media industry for our work. Follow The Media reckons Reuters owns the story from Myanmar. It notes that CNN was sourcing some of its coverage to Reuters.com, the only access to Reuters news for the Atlanta-based outfit after it ended its contract with us.

I posted recently that news agencies need to deliver indispensable and unique content to customers if they are to be more than providers of low-value commoditised information. Myanmar is a case in point - Reuters has a reporting presence there while most others do not. Yangon is a very difficult and dangerous place to operate and the Myanmar authorities are refusing visas to journalists. Without access to agencies like Reuters, online readers and other news organisations would be relying on incomplete accounts from bloggers and opposition sources within Myanmar.

Of course the other major agencies like AP and AFP are operating in Yangon. Wholesale customers and readers can decide which of the news agencies are doing the best job delivering vivid, real-time coverage of the crisis. Being ‘most different’ is indeed what counts.

Monetizing that is a challenge, of course. Follow the Media notes the perennial tension between what you deliver to customers for a fee and what you put online for all to see (and for CNN to quote).

A lot of media interest recently in CNN terminating its contract with Reuters. It was the end of a 27-year relationship in which Reuters supplied the Atlanta-based outfit with a wealth of text news, pictures and television images. CNN says it wants to grow its own content stream, Reuters says commercial terms could not be agreed.

Some piquancy subsequently when Reuters was first to source and distribute a new video tape by Osama Bin Laden, the first in three years from al Qaeda’s leader-in-hiding. The New York Times reported considerable discomfort for CNN at being unable to access the material. It would be tempting to blow our own trumpet on this were that not an invitation to all and sundry to mock when we aren’t first with a story. One account of how Reuters pipped CNN to the OBL tape suggests it could easily have been CNN’s triumph.

Competition is fierce across all parts of the news landscape with rival agencies keenly monitoring their performance against each other. Can anybody win that race? Are agencies like Reuters, Bloomberg and the Associated Press converging on the same stories as coverage budgets shrink and alternative information sources proliferate on the Internet? Yes, suggests dotcom-era star analyst Henry Blodget - all the agencies are essentially producing the same material. That paints a vision of commoditised, undifferentiated news streams that will struggle to command a premium in a difficult media marketplace. Is it the reality?

Not to my mind. Check out Beijing reporter Chris Buckley’s exclusive report last week on Chinese officials paying to lock up complainants in a violent, private prison. The ‘black jail’ will stifle discontent ahead of a Communist Party congress that Chinese leaders do not want interrupted by social protests. Chris Buckley’s strong sources and local awareness are the hallmark of distinctive journalism.

Take a look also at Dmitry Solovyov’s piece from Siberia on melting permafrost polluting the atmosphere with the odour and planet-warming CO2 of mammoth dung. Dimitry’s story has already drawn critical fire.

I posted recently that at Reuters we prefer gender neutral terms for people’s occupations. Where possible we use the same term for men and women, e.g. mayor or poet, not mayoress or poetess. But we stay away from less common usages, such as ‘chairperson,’ and avoid absurd non-discriminatory coinages such as ‘peopleslaughter’ (for ‘manslaughter’).

A colleague asked why then in soccer stories do we use linesman instead of FIFA’s preferred ‘referee’s assistant’? I turned to Reuters sports editor Paul Radford for help. A woman in a Reuters soccer story would be the referee or the lineswoman, Paul told me. Women officiating in professional soccer is relatively new and still rare. When we write about it the gender of the official is often the point of the story, he noted.

The term ‘referee’s assistant’ was devised by FIFA a few year’s ago but is considered cumbersome by many, argues Paul. Has it caught on? A brief web search throws up examples of its use in Britain’s Guardian newspaper and The Daily Telegraph but more examples of ‘linesman’. Judging the moment when a linguistic usage has become common and should be adopted is always tricky for news organisations.

Sean Maguire is Editor, Political and General News

Reuters Photo by Fatih Saribas of French lineswoman Nelly Viennot in a Champions League game in Istanbul in 2002