Pressure in Pakistan
By Massoud Ansari Posted Jul 1 2002
No eyebrows were raised when Javed Ashraf Qazi — the former chief of the country’s most powerful and infamous intelligence agency, Inter-Service Intelligence, and the federal minister for communication under the present military regime — gave his definitions of the two types of journalists working in Pakistan.
In a marathon interview, which was televised live on a government-controlled station, Qazi said, “There are two categories of journalists in Pakistan, ‘rightists’ and ‘leftists or the liberal’.” According to his explanation, the rightists are patriots, while the other side works for India and provides sensitive information to the enemy country for just two bottles of liquor. This charge, if proven, is tantamount to blasphemy in Pakistan.
Without quoting any names, he said that these journalists published fabricated stories that are now being exploited by the enemy country.
“But we have not done anything to these journalists, and they are still roaming around in the country,” he said.
The interview, full of venom against the media in Pakistan, was aired when controversy arose after the resignation of Shaheen Sehbai, editor of Pakistan’s largest and most influential English-language daily, The News. According to Sehbai, he was threatened by ISI agents who broke into to his office and told him, “either get in line or be ready for the stick” after he published a detailed interrogation account of Sheikh Omar Saeed, one of the masterminds behind the kidnapping and killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
Sehbai said that a few ISI agents first barged into his office on Feb. 17 and demanded he pull the story, in which Sheikh Omar directly linked ISI operatives to the planning, financing and execution of several attacks. After Sehbai refused to oblige them, they tried to influence him through his proprietor. But when he still refused to pull out the story, the government suspended all its advertisements — accounting for over half of the income of the newspaper — in order to silence the paper completely. The government told the owner that the advertisements would be restored only when he removed four journalists from the newspaper: Sehbai, Kamran Khan, Rauf Klasra and Amir Mateen, the Washington bureau chief.
Khan had written an article suggesting that Sheikh Omar was involved in the attack against the Indian parliament last December. Mateen, based in Washington, had revealed that during President General Parvez Musharraf’s last official journey to the United States, some of his ministers had “remained in the shadow” for security reasons. He also filed a story that President Musharraf’s son, who is presently studying in the United States, had applied for American citizenship. Meanwhile, Sehbai and Klasra had already complained a few weeks earlier about pressures exerted by secret agencies.
Sehbai had been picked up by ISI sleuths a couple of years ago and underwent severe physical torture before he slipped away to the United States. From there, he sent his resignation and released a copy to his friends in the media.
“I’m resigning because it is better for me to resign than to become a part of the conspiracy to mislead the people of Pakistan,” he said in his resignation letter. The letter also said that he chose to join his family in the United States to live to fight another day.
In the wake of local and international pressure from media-watch organizations, Khan and Klasra have been allowed to continue working for their newspaper, while Mateen has been called back from the United States, where he has been working for the past several years. Sehbai’s resignation has been accepted, and he is presently in self-exile in the United States.
Working as a journalist in Pakistan is a dangerous profession even at the best of times, but it is becoming an increasingly risky enterprise.
Initially, when Musharraf took over the country in the wake of the military coup on Oct. 12, 1999, the media in Pakistan were given free reign, and the newspapers carried stories that exposed the misdeeds of the previous government. They were even allowed to report against the Musharraf government during this period. But the honeymoon period of the media’s independence in Pakistan was soon curtailed, and threats intensified, especially after September 11, when the military government repudiated the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Islamic militant groups at home in order to align itself with the United States in a global “war on terror.”
The military government has become more sensitive and has started exerting pressure on journalists. It is demanding that media organizations tow the line and report events by keeping “national interests” in mind. Despite repeated affirmations by government officials that they support freedom of press, there have been a number of incidents involving violence against journalists in Pakistan.
Pakistan’s other major English-language daily newspaper, Dawn, published a write-up based on a list released by the International Press Institute that showed that a number of editors and news writers have been victimized at the behest of the regime. Many publications have been compelled to close their shops.
Following publication of his investigative report on Daud Ibrahim, the most wanted man in India, a stringer for the Times in Pakistan was picked up by ISI sleuths and tortured for the entire night.
In a bid to gag the press, gun-toting law enforcement agency personnel raided the offices of the Dawn and subjected the paper to a four-hour inspection. In March 2000, unidentified bandits riding in a Jeep picked up Shakil Shaikh, a chief reporter for the daily publication, The News. They blindfolded him and then beat him for several hours, saying, “You write too much. Now you will not write anymore.”
Likewise, towards the end of September 2000, a local reporter based in Peshawar, a city located along the border with Afghanistan, was abducted and detained incommunicado for nearly a month by military intelligence, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists’ sources. However, following his release, he asked colleagues not to publicize his case.
In November of the same year, a uniformed officer assaulted a senior Dawn reporter following a minor traffic incident. Faraz Hashmi was badly roughed up by an army major after he irritated President Musharraf on one of his live televised news conferences. Masood Maik, a reporter at the daily Nawa-e-Waqat, was demoted by his newspaper, under government pressure, after he committed the same crime of asking a direct and unpleasant question of President Musharraf.
In September, government press department officials censored an issue of Newsweek magazine that contained an article called “Talking is Dangerous.” The piece reported on the prosecution of Shaikh Mohammed Younus, a professor who had recently been sentenced to death for allegedly making blasphemous remarks about the Prophet Mohammed during his lectures.
Besides this, during the two-and-a-half-year Musharraf regime, at least four newspapers have been shut down after the government claimed that they published highly sacrilegious and blasphemous stories.
In its recent report released about Pakistan, CPJ says that the ISI in Pakistan is operating with considerable independence, giving rise to speculation that its domestic and foreign policy agenda might not be entirely aligned with that of the Musharraf government. “In this environment, local journalists who were targeted tended to keep a low profile rather than risk further reprisals by calling attention to themselves,” the report said, demanding the government “ensure the safety of journalists” and “guarantee the right to inform and to be informed.”
As the existing laws in the statute book are not enough to strangulate the freedom of the press, the military government is also planning to introduce a “press council” to act as a watchdog over the “irresponsible” press in Pakistan. However, no working journalists have been associated with the process undertaken by the government and newspaper owners to redraw the new codes of reporting in Pakistan. According to government plans, this new press council, which is due to start functioning shortly, will be empowered to ensure implementation and revision of the Ethical Code of Practice for journalists, publishers, editors and newspapers. This council will entertain complaints from individuals and organizations, and action could be taken against all those who report the events “irresponsibly,” a government official said. “The new laws introduced would quash government powers to ban a publication on its own but would provide measures to ensure that the media follow a stipulated code of ethics and behave responsibly.”
Observers believe the actions of the military government against independent media workers is part of a systematic effort to muzzle the free press in the face of the failure of the government to check extremists’ activities and bloodshed in targeted killings in the country. These observers believe that as general elections are nearing in the country, the military government is showing signs of nervousness and impatience with its criticism of the press. And one journalist asks, “Does the government want to hide its failure in bridling the extremists by gagging the independent and liberal press in Pakistan?”