Letter from Pakistan
By Adnan Rehmat Posted Thu, Mar 22 2007
Pakistani journalists seal lips with insulation tape as a symbolic demonstration, during a rally to condemn the police action over a private channel Geo TV, March 16, in Karachi, Pakistan. (AP Photo/Mohammed Khalil)
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The situation is pretty tense in Pakistan at the moment. It hasn't been this bad since 1999 when political tensions resulted in the military takeover by Musharraf. It appears that Musharraf grossly underestimated public response to his controversial decision to sack the top judge of the country. The chief justice has been a thorn in his side, even though Musharraf appointed him in violation of a the rules of judicial appointments, for some months now by short-circuiting the general access of the public to the superior courts by a high profile encouragement of public interest litigation.
Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry has been encouraging news reports to petition against government authorities. In fact one of our Geo TV Tasweer Kahani documentary series programs on illegal trade in kidneys, brought to his notice, has led to the top court ordering legislation banning the trade and properly regulating human organ donations.
The last straw was the chief justice's aggressive censure of the government about hundreds of missing persons that even Musharraf in his autobiography admits have been handed to the U.S. government without due process of law in the drive against al-Qaeda and the Taliban and earning unnamed government officials millions of dollars in head money, (such was the outcry that he deleted this reference in the Urdu translation of his book).
Dramatic details about the agony of missing persons has touched a raw nerve among the public and has led to increasing protests against Musharraf, culminating in Musharraf sacking Iftikhar last week but not before humiliating him for five hours in his military uniform and then holding him incommunicado for two days, preventing his children from going to school and his younger son getting asthma medicine.
Enter Pakistan's amazing broadcast media with TV channels (led by Geo TV, Aaj and ARY), getting their first chance at glory in covering a national crisis in real time. The relentless 24/7 comment on the crisis and footage of the chief justice being humiliated has triggered unprecedented riots led by the lawyers across the country and quickly backed by the political parties. In the last few days we have seen the army humiliated and abused like never before on live TV. Hence the inevitable crackdown on the media.
But what happened next was incredible by any measure. A posse of police ransacked Geo TV offices in Islamabad a few dozen yards from the Supreme Court where I had gone with some colleagues to express solidarity with lawyers. They beat up journalists including some of Pakistan's best-known media personalities and when resisted by the Geo staff and journalists of sister newspapers Jang and The News, who occupy the same building, lobbed tear gas shells in the building to get everyone out. Just the night before arguably Pakistan's best-known current affairs program “Today With Kamran Khan” of Geo TV was ordered closed by Pemra.
Within two hours of the Geo Islamabad crackdown, a bomb alert was sounded in Geo's multi-story complex in Karachi, terrorizing the entire media further. Pemra has also been arm-twisting cable TV distributors into blacking out transmissions of private TV channels across the country. On a live VOA radio program discussing the crisis, Federal Law Minister Wasi Zafar used Punjabi expletives graphically describing what he would do to the family of a journalist critical of the army's involvement in humiliating the judiciary. This has riled the media community, which has been holding daily protests of their own.
A controversial tribunal, the Supreme Judicial Council, established to hear unspecified cases of alleged abuse of office by the chief justice, has been making matters worse. The Council has imposed a blanket ban on reporting of its proceedings, which are on camera anyway, indicating that even the judges of the Council, who have had graphic details of alleged wrongdoings exposed by the media, are joining the government and the army in suppressing the crackdown on the media. However, the media seem to have decided to strike back vehemently. The attack on Geo by police was shown live by the TV channels making available unprecedented indictment of the brute force of the government. The TV channels have been relentless, setting aside their traditional rivalry and blasting the government.
There's no doubt in my mind this is a key moment in Pakistan's evolution: the media informing in real time to a mostly illiterate people in their own language about issues that are deciding their fate. The newspapers are full of articles about businesses lamenting the absence of customers because most are at home glued to their TVs and watching uncensored dissent in action. This has never happened before.
The fact that the channels have largely ignored government warnings to stop commenting or profiling the crisis precipitated by Musharraf means that a critical threshold is being crossed where the power of media is empowering people and forcing Musharraf to appear live on Geo to apologize personally. This probably has to be the most watched apology in Pakistan's history. The channels are repeating it to rub it in for Musharraf, thereby humiliating the army.
As to what will happen next, I believe the prognosis is not good. The pressure will continue in different forms on the media for the simple reason that Musharraf aims to get re-elected, which would be illegal according to the constitution of the current assemblies, whose tenures end in October. He could also try to delay elections so as to appoint hand-picked judges to rule his re-election by default. Musharraf can't risk re-election by a new parliament whose composition he is not sure about, as the current ruling coalition is deeply unpopular. Musharraf cannot tolerate the media making his life difficult. Delay in elections or rigging them will only create more unrest. The opposition parties have already upped the ante by cashing in on a deeply unpopular Musharraf, who is not unlike the dictators that populate Marquez stories. This means he will only get more desperate and hit harder at the scapegoat: the media, which is “creating problems” for him.
Our work is supremely important. The media must consolidate itself and stave off attempts to roll back hard-won freedoms. In the process, the media will help rationalize the balance of powers among Pakistani stakeholders. Call me an idealist, or a fool, but I think it's now or never if we are to let Pakistan choose democracy. Building the media's capacities to continue producing quality, socially relevant content should be our priority. One good way to do this is to engineer a major expansion into the TV sector. That's what everyone in Pakistan will be glued to over the next 15 to 20 months. That's where we can make a difference.