Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160-166)
MR FRANK
GARDNER, OBE
2 NOVEMBER 2005
Q160 Ms Stuart: Would
you like to say what you think of the World Service's decision
to launch an Arabic television station, and whether that is helpful?
Mr Gardner: I think
they are going to have a job competing with the rather more glamorous
channels that are out there—the satellite channels. It is
a pity they could not have got this right 10 years ago, when they
got into bed with Orbit, who then pulled the plug. If you remember,
World Service Arabic television was a joint venture between the
BBC and Orbit, which is owned by the King's cousin in Saudi Arabia;
so up popped Muhammed Al-Masari, slagging off the Saudi Government;
and the Saudi's simply pulled the plug and said, "we are
not funding this; we are not paying for somebody to slag us off"—forgive
the vernacular. In those intervening years, there was definitely
a vacuum. The only television that Arabs could watch was the very
turgid state television, which was dreadful. However, up popped
Aljazeera, who said, "thanks very much; we will have all
the journalists laid off by the BBC". A lot of people said,
"Qatar—where?" Qatar has proved everybody wrong;
it is a major force in international affairs, Aljazeera. The joke
in the Gulf is that Aljazeera is the capital of Qatar. It is a
very powerful and influential satellite network, and others have
tried to copy it—Abu Dhabi Television, Al Arabia. BBC Arabic
Television has really got its work cut out for it; it is coming
late to the party. It will be interesting to see if it works.
What I would say, in a very clear answer to "what more should
we be doing?"—the British Government needs to get more
Arabic-speaking people, be they Muslim or Christian, on to the
Arabic channels. You had a thing called the Islamic Media Unit;
you had a very good spokesman—Gerald Russell, who spoke
perfect Arabic—and then he was laid off or moved, and it
has more or less collapsed. While we are sitting here, there are
people on air, live, criticising Britain and criticising Western
policy; and there is hardly ever anybody to defend it. It needs
to be somebody with good Arabic, who has spent time there, who
understands the Middle East—and you need lots of these people.
This is something that should have been done long ago, but I am
astounded that, four years after 9/11, it has not been done. It
is a real failure of government policy. You need to get more people
out there, in their language, speaking in the way that they know.
The Israelis are brilliant at it. Look at Netanyahu: on the first
anniversary of 9/11 I was up on the rooftop above Ground Zero,
and there was Netanyahu going from one channel to another, speaking
the language that Americans like. He has got their dialect and
vernacular. It was very easy for Americans to say, "I can
understand what he is saying." In many ways, the Arab world
and the rest are so far apart on this—they understand us
much better than we understand them, so there needs to be more
understanding there, I think.
Q161 Mr Purchase: I want
to touch on this Aljazeera phenomenon. As I understand it, it
is the only programme that is widely believed in the Middle East
and Gulf regions, and BBC and CNN are just not on the agenda any
more. When you say that it will be interesting to see how the
BBC copes with that, I think you could have found another form
of words which would equally have been in the vernacular. Putting
that to one side, you interestingly suggest that perhaps we should
be trying to get Arabic speakers, with a message—however
it is put across—into the Aljazeera networks, in order to
make an impact on people who have come to believe that only Aljazeera
can tell them the truth. But would Aljazeera be prepared to hear
that message?
Mr Gardner: I think
so. They are quite broad-minded. Even though, if you were to do
a straw poll of every producer and correspondent in Aljazeera,
they would all be very hostile or anti the invasion or occupation
of Iraq, a lot of them, even before that, were relatively anti
Western policy, because of the Israeli/Palestinian question. A
lot of them are Palestinians. Remember that Aljazeera was one
of the networks that were broadcasting those dreadful pictures
of Mohammed Al-Dura, the 10-year old Palestinian boy who was shot
in that crossfire in Gaza. To some extent, the news they are putting
out is playing to the gallery, both in terms of the people who
are putting it out and the people who are watching it; and ultimately
it is events on the ground that will make a difference. The withdrawal
from Gaza was something that meant a lot to people in the Arab
world because they are so sick of promises and talking. I spent
years covering all the negotiations at Sharm El-Sheikh over the
Arab/Israeli peace thing, and there is a lot of talking but not
a great deal of action. I am not pointing fingers of blame here,
but I am just saying that Arabs are rather tired of hearing talking.
Having said that, there is this vacuum with very few people to
defend Western policy. Aljazeera does interview Israeli ministers.
A lot of their audience think they should not, and complain. They
say: "Why are you talking to the enemy?" But Aljazeera
say, "No, we have got to do this. If we are going to air
something from bin Laden, let us hear from the other side of the
spectrum."
Q162 Mr Purchase: Do you
feel sufficiently strongly about that, that we ought to be making
some kind of recommendation in our report about getting people
on to Aljazeera?
Mr Gardner: Not
just Aljazeera, but you need to be making people available for
the Arab media per se—not just Aljazeera but the
print media, the online media, radio. There should not be just
Frances Guy and her Islamic World Awareness thing in the Foreign
Office; there should be a room this big. Take the media seriously.
I am not saying that because I am in the media; I am saying it
because I have seen the effect of it. A classic example is that
I used to go down to these summits in Sharm El-Sheikh in 2000-01,
and there would be King Abdullah there and Clinton and whoever—Arafat
and all the various leaders—and the Israelis would bring
with them a whole panel of people, all usually retired generals
with perfect English. They would come to us and say, "we
have General so-and-so here; would you like to have him available
for interview?" In the media you often have very little time,
particularly in broadcasting, and you are on air in 17 minutes—"great,
we need a clip from this guy—quick, get somebody in".
Could we ever get the Palestinians? We would be lucky to doorstep
somebody in his language, not in ours, as he got in and out of
his limousine. They are still hopelessly disorganised in terms
of media. It gave the Israeli delegations a great advantage in
terms of getting their message across, and that in a way is what
is happening with the West. We often interview Arabs who speak
very good English, but there are very, very few English, British
people who can speak good enough Arabic to be on these things;
so you need to have people available to try and explain what government
policy is.
Q163 Sir John Stanley:
Have you any firm evidence, as opposed to speculation, that has
appeared in the press that the US has used Saudi Arabia as a place
where torture under interrogation is carried out under the US
extraordinary rendition procedures?
Mr Gardner: No,
I have seen no evidence of that, nor have I heard that. I have
heard unconfirmed reports that that goes on in Egypt, Jordan and
Syria, but not in Saudi Arabia.
Q164 Sandra Osborne: Can
you tell us something about the security situation in the United
Arab Emirates and where that country fits into the international
war against terrorism?
Mr Gardner: Yes.
We lived in the UAE from September 1997 to January 2000. Since
we left nearly six years ago, Dubai has changed exponentially.
Every time people think that it cannot build another skyscraper,
you blink and it has built another 10. That place is changing
very fast. Security has not been a big issue there. The internal
security situation used to be an issue in the past, in that there
was a bit of friction between the Al-Makhtoums, the ruling family
of Dubai, and the Al-Nahyans, the ruling family of Abu Dhabi;
but they have long ago resolved any differences, and it is this
federation of seven United Arab Emirates, what used to be the
Trucial States under British protection. Dubai particularly is
an international conduit for both good and bad things. It was
long a centre for smuggling gold into India. It has often been
used as a place for money-laundering, particularly by Russians
who were coming out of the CIS states with just wads of cash,
and buying up electronics and going back. Nobody ever asked where
the money came from. I used to live in Bahrain as well, and Bahrain
had a very tight financial system because they had close links
with the Bank of England, so the monetary agency worked very closely
and was very strict on money-laundering. Dubai did not have those
tight, stricter controls. When I used to be a banker, we were
always rather wary of doing business in Dubai because we could
not be sure of where the money came from. It is very much a home
of Hawala transactions, which are paperless, record-less transactions,
all done over the phone. I will explain how this works. I have
a sum of money, and I go to you, a money dealer, in a back street
in Dubai, and I say: "I want to send this money to my brother
in Pakistan." I hand you over the money, say $20,000, and
he makes a phone call. At the other end of the phone is his mate,
another money dealer, who hands over $20,000 to my brother in
Pakistan. There are no auditable records of this; it is all done
on trust. It is done very much on trust. It is an ancient system
and it allows people to evade strict financial controls. There
has been a lot of concern that this has helped terrorists to get
funding. It is known for a fact that some of the funding for the
9/11 attacks did pass through a bank in Dubai, not through the
Hawala system, but through an actual bank. It has surprised a
lot of people that Dubai has not yet been hit by a terrorist attack,
but Dubai is a huge melting pot. If al Qaeda hit Dubai, it would
be an own goal. There is evidence that the UAE authorities have
acted against al Qaeda-linked terrorism there. Somebody was arrested
at Dubai Airport after a tip-off by Western intelligence services.
He was a North African and was brought back to France. It has
not been a problem until now. I am quite certain that al Qaeda
has supporters, possibly even operatives there, but there have
been no signs so far that they have chosen to make any big attacks.
It would be disastrous for everybody but also for the Makhtoums.
A lot of the UAE ruling families are merchant families, who used
to love going hunting in Afghanistan and Pakistan—falconing.
They would take their birds with them and fly off to Belushistan
or to Afghanistan. Some of them even used to go hunting with Osama
bin Laden in the 1990s, so there are links there, simply in terms
of friendship links, rather than financial.
Q165 Sandra Osborne: Are
you aware of the government taking any measures to tighten up
the financial situation?
Mr Gardner: They
have, but I have not studied them in detail. They have made some
attempts. If you talk to the Foreign Office you will find that
there are a number of people in Customs and Excise who, every
now and then, are stationed in the British Embassy in Dubai. It
is the only country that I know of where Britain has two embassies.
There is an embassy in Abu Dhabi and another actual embassy, not
a consulate, in Dubai, so as not to upset the Makhtoums. That
is how it works.
Q166 Chairman: Given the
geographical location of UAE between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and
concerns about Wahhabism on one side and the Iranian Hezbollah
link on the other side, from your perspective is there a threat
of terrorism coming through from the Iranian side as well as the
Saudi side?
Mr Gardner: If
there was, I do not think it would come through UAE; it would
more likely come through Bahrain, which has a Shi'ite majority.
Roughly 65% of Bahrainis are Shi'ites. There was a problem with
Iran; Iran used to claim Bahrain as its own, and there was a big
problem there in the nineties when about 33 policemen died altogether
in a low-level insurgency there. The UAE is essentially non-political.
I have never met any Emirati who is interested in politics: he
wants his plot of land, his villa, his four-wheel drive, and his
holidays twice a year to Orlando or Paris. They are not interested
in politics there.
Chairman: It sounds like
a good life, if you can get it! Thank you very much, Mr Gardner,
for coming along and answering our questions. We look forward
to seeing you again at some future time.
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