What a difference a day makes
Phew!! What a day it has been. One of the privileges of working in the media is that you can watch TV in working hours without feeling guilty. It could all have been so different. This morning the internal cable network at Radio Netherlands went off, and I feared we might miss something important. But the engineers came up trumps and had it working again before lunchtime.
What transpired in the hours that followed will go down as truly historic television. It may not have been as dramatic, or impressive, as the tearing down of the Berlin Wall - but in its own way, the symbolism of what we witnessed is huge. Iraqis in the very heart of Baghdad tearing down a statue of the dictator who had ruled them through fear for a quarter of a century - albeit with the help of a US tank - reminded some commentators of the fall of Ceaucescu in Romania.
There was a heart-stopping moment when a US marine placed the Stars and Stripes over the face of Saddam. Would this anger some in the crowd? Thankfully, wiser counsel prevailed and the US flag was removed before anything happened - though the repercussions may be serious for the credibility in the Arab world of US assurances that this is not an occupation.
Media-wise, expect a lot of developments in the coming days and months. Some pro-Saddam media was still operating in northern Iraq today, but the Satellite Channel seems to finally have been silenced. Not for long though, I suspect - today the feeds on all the satellites we checked - Eutelsat, Arabsat and Nilesat - are displaying the same professional colour bars, suggesting that someone already has an uplink working and ready to go. They could be planning to use the satellite service as a programme feed to a network of terrestrial transmitters. Tarek in Cairo is keeping a close watch on the Iraqi frequencies.
8:14:02 PM 
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