BBC Worldservice Trust

In Iraq freedom of expression is quite simply, the key to everything. Racked by fear of crime, struggling with inadequate health services, trying to make ends meet in a lawless, corrupting economy, Iraqis are looking beyond the occupation to make choices for change.

That's one reason why polls find that Baghdad residents consistently put the right to freedom of expression at the top of their list of principles to be defended by the country's next constitution.

Where allowed, it's a proven method of containing the excesses of dictators, multinational corporations and political elites alike. Their powers fade under public scrutiny and free access to information.

The new Iraqi media is starting small, finding its feet in a difficult and dangerous environment. Their lists of targets expand daily.

Issues like the illegal sale of stolen drugs in the Baghdad market, sold by the illiterate to the desperate, a trade that kills or maims scores every week. Or the remand prisoners lost in Iraq's chaotic criminal justice system for months before the US and British forces that oversee the jails can find them and deliver them to a judge.

In time, the Iraqi people may get the kind of system where public knowledge of inequality or injustice leads to action for change. That system does not yet exist in Iraq, not now under the US-led occupation and probably not for a while, even after the occupiers step back to make way for an interim Iraqi government in June.

Media coverage is not enough. It takes the right kind of open political environment to put raw information to effective use. In March 1988, US networks broadcast video of Panamanian fishermen slaughtering hundreds of dolphins as they industrially harvested tuna shoals.

Environmental activists organised behind the outrage the films produced; boycotts followed and within two years, dolphin safe tuna became the standard in the world's supermarkets. Of course, there was much less media coverage dedicated to the way the problem shifted when the fishermen relocated to avoid dolphin kills, and much less photogenic species came under threat as a result.

But this kind of alliance between civil society and the independent media can still get results in countries that fall far behind the US on any scale of democratic accountability.

Bangladesh's Daily Star newspaper repeatedly exposed the incompetence of Dhaka's officials in charge of waste management. Stung by press criticism, the city authorities turned to an impromptu alliance of NGOs, Boy Scout packs and scientific experts for advice on how to improve the situation.

Small victories by the independent media, even in repressive states, bulwark the peoples' confidence in their right to challenge the powers-that-be. Marginalised peoples get a voice and a role in the governance of society; the public can challenge the kind of corruption that threatens development.

Defying the opposition of Communist Party grandees, a few determined Chinese journalists stuck with the story behind last year's outbreak of the SARS respiratory disease. For the first time officials were systematically held to account for their failings and their incompetent political bosses named and shamed.

China is a long way from full free expression, let alone freedom of information, but Chinese expectations of the media has been transformed by the experience of reading the truth about SARS'. Everyone would accept that the country's emergency health systems benefited from a dose of openness and public accountability.

The habit of access to information and free expression is one that's hard to break. The courageous Zimbabwean journalist Mark Chavanduka recalls his part in a 1987 story about the spread among Zimbabwe's military of the then little known condition now recognised as AIDS.

Attempts by the state to suppress the story for fear of its effects on the country's tourist trade were resisted. Ministers were replaced and health policy changed to address the true situation.

Since then there have been setbacks - Chavanduka later saw President Robert Mugabe turn back the media freedoms the journalist had used in 1987 to further his country's development. But the genie of free expression has been let out of the bottle. Zimbabweans have not simply resigned themselves to the return of censorship.

Support for Chavanduka's colleagues is high. Mugabe's time to come in power is limited. The free media is with the Zimbabwean people for the long run.

It's an example and a freely expressed message of hope for Iraq's beleaguered journalists and their fellow citizens.