By Jon Pattee
Senior English Editor
Albawaba.com
Want to launch a dotcom in the Arab world? Whip up US public support for a war with an Arab country? At the rate public relations giant Hill and Knowlton is expanding in the Middle East, both services could soon be just one easy phone call away.
Rewind to 1990. The US public is divided over whether to go to war with Iraq.
Enter 15-year-old “Nayirah,” who tearfully testifies before US congressmen that she saw Iraqi soldiers take babies from incubators and leave them to die on a cold hospital floor. Press reports later reveal that the story was cooked up with the aid of PR experts, who were hired by Kuwait to build US public support for a war. But by the time the truth hits the press, a narrow congressional vote has put America at war. Just days later, two 2,000-pound laser-guided US bombs shred over 200 Iraqi civilians in one fell swoop.
Fast forward to 2001. Comtrust, the e-commerce infrastructure business unit of Emirates Telecommunications Company (Etisalat), issues a press release after receiving an e-business award.
The connecting thread? Both Nayirah’s account and the dotcom press release involved the services of Hill and Knowlton, the globe-spanning PR firm that in mid-2000 announced a new specialist division “designed specifically for companies involved in the internet economy” in the Middle East.
With such ambitious projects, could Hill and Knowlton find the time to flack for Old Scratch? Yes, according to the Colombia Review of Journalism. A 1992 CRJ article by Alicia Mundy reports how a Hill and Knowlton executive told members of the firm’s Washington staff, “We’d represent Satan if he paid.”
FROM DICTATORS TO DOTCOMS
Hill and Knowlton was founded in 1927 and currently has 70 offices in 33 countries. It is owned by a $6 billion ad conglomerate, the WPP Group.
The PR giant says that its Gulf arm “has worked with internet clients including arabia.com, dljdirect-eUnion.com, 14M.com as well as e-business assignments for IBM, Lucent and Brokat.”
DITnet calls Gulf Hill and Knowlton “the leading public relations consultancy in the Middle East.”
The firm’s move into Mideast dotcom territory is based on a wider web in the IT business community. Globally, Hill and Knowlton claims to have worked for over 150 internet-related companies including beenz.com, gap.com, and GoTo.com.
The dotcom division “will have its Middle East headquarters in Dubai and will be supported through Gulf Hill and Knowlton offices in Bahrain and Jeddah as well as affiliates throughout the region,” according to a company press release.
“Gulf Hill and Knowlton is 51% owned by local investors, and 49% by Hill and Knowlton,” Gulf Hill and Knowlton’s UAE office manager, David Baker, told Albawaba.com.
GROWING PAINS
What kind of deals helped Hill and Knowlton grow into the strapping e-PR titan it is today?
In the past, the firm’s US operations earned hefty sums from foreign governments interested in buffing up their image abroad.
According to the Third World Traveler web site, citing a 1992 report by the Washington, DC-based Center for Public Integrity, in the early 1990s Hill & Knowlton had “$14 million in receipts from countries with documented records of abuse, torture and imprisonment, including Kuwait, Indonesia, Israel, China, Egypt and Peru.”
Added to that is roughly $11.5 million the firm earned while working for the Kuwaiti-government funded Citizens for a Free Kuwait, according to Arthur E. Rowse’s article, How to Build Support for a War, in CRJ’s September/October 1992 issue.
The written “testimony” about incubator babies by “Nayirah” – who turned out to be the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter - was part of this campaign. According to Rowse, it was “prepared with the aid of Hill and Knowlton.” Amnesty International, which at first swallowed the story, later investigated the “incubator baby” reports and found they were backed by “no reliable evidence.”
Rowse reveals that during the congressional debate on whether to approve military action in the Gulf, “H&K’s U.S. operations chief Robert Gray sent a memo to Citizens for a Free Kuwait warning of the ‘lessening of the U.S. public’s enthusiasm for pursuing a military operation’ and calling for more atrocity charges from ‘eyewitnesses,’ a term he put in quotation marks.”
Another account of the Hill and Knowlton approach to PR appears in a July 1997 presentation to the Independent Policy Forum by Harper’s Magazine publisher John R. MacArthur.
“I went to visit Citizens for a Free Kuwait, or what was left of it, a few months after the Gulf War ended when I was doing research on my book,” recounted MacArthur, author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War.
“I went to see a Mr. Ibrahim, who was the titular head of CFK. The first time I realized something fishy was going on [was] when he pulled out a stack of atrocity photographs. I went through them and thought this looks pretty awful -- people with odd pieces of metal jammed into their bodies in various places.
“It looked quite horrible, but the photographs were a little out of focus. I went through them a second time and I realized that they were mannequins. They had literally dressed up mannequins as torture victims!
“This is not to say that Saddam did not kill Kuwaitis and did not torture Kuwaitis but these fraudulent photographs became the stock and trade of the Hill & Knowlton campaign.”
QUOTATION MARKS?
“PR does dictate ethical demands -- if you are unethical, you are not going to buy the trust of the media,” according to Alexander McNabb, group account director at Spot On Public Relations, which bills itself as the Middle East’s leading PR firm for technology and telecommunications.
Asked how Hill and Knowlton’s track record might affect its venture in the region, McNabb characterized their work as “admirable.”
However, McNabb had advice for all companies, PR or otherwise: “If you’re going to go out and say ‘I’m as white as you can whitewash a white person,’ you’re asking for it.”
Hill and Knowlton chairman and CEO Howard Paster, according to Gulf H&K's Baker, agreed to respond to emailed interview questions regarding the firm’s history and plans. However, a week after the questions were sent, Paster still had not responded to Albawaba.com.
SINNERS VS. WINNERS
Despite the global dotcoms slump, the Middle East probably looked like a ripe target for Hill and Knowlton when the specialist division opened back in 2000.
Up until 1994, one IT industry analyst told Albawaba.com, there had been little or no news getting out to the world about the expanding regional dotcom business.
“The dotcom sector in particular needs PR,” said the analyst. “Unless you have happy, shiny press releases going out, all you’ve got is an address on the internet.”
How might Hill and Knowlton’s track record, such as the “incubator babies” incident, affect its capacity to churn out convincingly happy, shiny press releases, particularly in the Middle East?
Perhaps not at all, according to Hill and Knowlton’s assessment of today’s globalized business world.
“The original Inquisitors differentiated between sins which were venial and could be forgiven without the need for the sacrament, and those which were capital and merited damnation,” Hill and Knowlton executive VP Tony Burgess-Webb proclaims in his presentation Sinners vs. Winners in the Age of Accountability, adding: “Such clear-cut definitions do not work in the current complex global business environment.”
THE BENEFITS OF PR
So what kind of promise does Hill and Knowlton’s Mideast dotcom strategy hold -- for the firm, and for people in the region?
For its part, the company’s dotcom specialist division “has made a steady start,” says Gulf Hill and Knowlton’s Baker. “Part of our business is getting people to realize the benefits of public relations, which is still relatively new in the region.”
People in the region, particularly Iraqis and Palestinians, could have learned a lesson in “the benefits of public relations,” and how it can rewrite agendas, had they been present at the UN Security Council on November 27, 1990.
On that date, according to Rowse, “H&K…somehow gained access to the UN Security Council prior to a…session at which the council expected to debate a resolution dealing with a Palestine issue. Despite several protests, US Ambassador Thomas Pickering…allowed several self-avowed eyewitnesses to atrocities – rounded up for the occasion by Citizens for a Free Kuwait and Hill and Knowlton – to testify at both the morning and evening sessions. Two days later, the council set the January 15 deadline for the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait.”
BRAND NEW DAY
“We are the only company operating within this region that has the resources to match today’s reality as well as tomorrow’s ambitions of the dot com generation in the Middle East,” proclaims Hill and Knowlton’s July 2000 press release on the launch of the Mideast specialist division.
Indeed, despite the storms of the past, Hill and Knowlton’s allies have not deserted them, since company alums are picking up top jobs in both public and private sectors.
One standout is Hill and Knowlton’s DC office general manager, Torie Clark, who according to the March 20 edition of O’Dwyer’s PR Daily, has been tapped by the Bush administration for the post of US Defense Department spokesperson.
Meanwhile, Hill and Knowlton’s past is dead and buried, at least if you talk to Baker.
“It was before my time,” he told Albawaba.com when asked about Hill and Knowlton’s “incubator baby” episode. “All I can tell you is that our company, and in the Middle East in particular, is growing very rapidly…and our income is growing very fast.”
“Ignorance,” intones Hill and Knowlton’s Burgess-Webb on the company web site, “is no excuse in a court of law – nor of public opinion.”
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
