Abstract
National broadcasters in Pakistan are now targets as terrorists change their tactics towards journalists, reports an academic
Earlier this year two attackers on motorcycles shot a technician, a guard and a driver of the popular mainstream media outlet, Express TV, in the commercial hub of Karachi. The banned religious extremist group, Tehreek-e-Taliban, claimed responsibility for the attack. Accusing the mainstream media of defaming them, the militants’ spokesman, Ihsanullah Ihsan, told journalists in a call from an unidentified location: “We will continue to target the media if they do not stop propaganda against Islam and the Taliban.”
The emergence of religiously motivated groups during the last decade has turned Pakistan into one of the most insecure countries for journalists. The media are confronted with two challenges. First, what means should they employ to protect vulnerable employees and second, how to cover terror without promoting militancy? Here it is important to know that television channels in Pakistan are blamed for inflated coverage of militant groups, which glorifies militancy itself.
Since the headquarters of the national media are in big cities, producers and journalists have tended not to understand the terrorism that has plagued the country's peripheries. Violence in the north-western Pashtun belt and the south-western Baluchistan province – both areas hit by militants – has been covered insensitively. National media have tended to ignore the threats to the lives of local journalists who report for them from these dangerous areas.
Taliban militants, for their part, stage violence as spectacle to attract mainstream attention. Their core leadership is based in the country's remote and hilly border areas. Now, they are desperate to extend their reach to the country's heartland. Being shrewd students of violent psychology, they understand that they can get attention disproportionate to their power. Media support is crucial in achieving maximum deterrence through minimum resources. To ensure coverage, the Taliban are not only dealing violently with individual journalists in conflict zones, but also extending terror to the heart of media offices in urban cities. By staging daredevil attacks in the full attention of the national media, they are making their presence felt even in places where they are physically absent.
Since the deregulation of airwaves in 2002, the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority has issued more than 90 private TV licences. In a country with a population of some 180 million, around 65 TV outlets operate, including 38 channels telecasting news and current affair programmes. Violence and private electronic media emerged pretty much at the same time, following the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. The national media are broadly confined to Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. No TV licence was issued to interested private parties from Baluchistan and the Pashtun belt, where the ethnic Baluch and ethnic Pashtun communities live with terror. (The only Pashtu language TV channel, AVT Khyber, claims to represent Pashtuns, but its ownership is non-Pashtun. More so, its headquarters also lies outside the Pashtun belt.)
The ethnic Pashtun and Baluch journalists in the Pashtun belt and Baluchistan provinces serve as information conduits for the national and international media, though their role has largely been limited to feeding spot news or sending explosive visuals to their respective channels. They tend to receive neither regular salaries nor conflict allowances. Since they report from the semi-lawless hinterlands, they live outside the pale of organisational power and politics. They are employed to verify militants’ claims or their deaths in drone strikes. In some cases they are consulted only by phone, which tends to remove the context from the process of news production.
Back in the cities, the national media have played a big role in national discourse on issues. The TV channels established their power when they played a pivotal role in the reinstatement of the deposed chief justice of Pakistan in 2007. A year later, the same media were instrumental in bringing an end to the military regime that had ruled for nine years. There is no such journalistic attention to detail in the troubled hinterlands. Instead, the drone strikes, gunship sorties and deadly suicide attacks of those regions have merely been used by the national media to build audiences.
That interest in spectacle has made them ignore much of what has been developing on the ground. In the Pashtun belt, local journalists have had little opportunity to inform the mainstream population about the plight of their own community or to mobilise their privileged urban colleagues to come to their help. Some 49,000 civilians are estimated to have died in Baluchistan and the Pashtun belt. Among the more than 80 journalists killed in Pakistan, over 60 are either ethnic Pashtuns or Baloch. Until now, this has been a local rather than a national problem for media.
Death threats and murders have become an essential part of journalists’ lives in the conflict zone, with only actual killings getting any attention. The representational worth of the attack has come to depend on its “aesthetic value” for news channels. If a journalist's physical wound is worthy of creating a spectacle, the issue is sensationally highlighted in urban media. Otherwise, violence against ethnic journalists goes under-reported, or not reported at all.
Struggle for survival
Left with no institutional support, ethnic journalists work for the national media while surviving under militants’ threats. Sometimes they go underground in the hope that time reduces militants’ animosity. This defensive strategy temporarily helps journalists to avoid giving space to militants, but it is no guarantee against violence. Many journalists take militants’ threats for granted and accept the risk of death. In some cases they settle issues with militants either by apologising or by using the help of tribal intermediaries. On my latest trip to Pakistan, in January, I asked a tribal Pashtun journalist why he sticks to journalism despite militants’ threats and a bomb attack on his family in which six of them were injured. “What alternative do I have in an economy hit by conflict?” Under this kind of threat, it is inevitable that some local journalists compromise their coverage. The result is that the Taliban gain some strategic advantages in the way they are portrayed in the national media.
There is some desperation in Taliban as a result of the emerging scenario in Afghanistan. The strained relationship between the U.S. and the Hamid Karzai government over the issue of signing the Afghan defence pact has created uncertainty about the future structure of power in Afghanistan, which affects the Taliban in Pakistan. So far their dependence on the Afghan Taliban has won them some ideological and physical support in Pakistan, but the Pakistani Taliban do not know what share in power their Afghan comrades can achieve across the border. They know their power depends on their organisational strength, which demands that they extend their reach to urban areas. They have a network of like-minded, conservative youths studying in religious seminaries in every big city. According to official statistics, 361 people were killed and 487 injured in 46 incidents across Pakistan in the first 45 days of 2014. Most of these attacks were carried out in cities, particularly in Karachi.
The government initiated a dialogue process with the Taliban leadership, but despite a so-called ceasefire, Taliban splinter groups are constantly attacking government installations and, increasingly, journalists at national level. The urban journalist and columnist Raza Rumi was recently attacked in Lahore in an incident in which his driver died.
Despite peace talks with the government, the Taliban will not stop the terrorism that is a vital part of its political agenda. If it is to have an effect, it needs to get media coverage. So, in their efforts to tame the national media, the Pakistani Taliban are beginning to employ the terror tactics they have been using against ethnic journalists in the regions.
Mixed bag of rhetoric
The militants recently issued a 29-page decree in which they declared open war on the national media. Employing a mixed bag of jihadi rhetoric, the document juxtaposes religious injunctions with the prevailing journalistic “malpractices” to create a rhetorical effect. The document prescribes different punishments for journalists. The much-publicised decree is a refined version of another fatwa, which the Taliban issued last year, but was largely ignored. This time the militants’ threat got wide coverage in the national and international media.
In view of the growing ambitions of terrorists, violence against journalists looks likely to increase. Killing three journalists of Express TV in the cosmopolitan city of Karachi and attacking a columnist in Lahore had the effect of promoting the presence of the Taliban. The effectiveness of this strategic violence became evident in the prime-time show of Express TV, in which a Tehreek-e-Taliban spokesman was invited to accept responsibility for the act while the TV anchor in effect assured militants of “satisfactory coverage” – this despite Tehreek-e-Taliban being a banned organisation.
What strategy should journalists adopt? In the absence of an easy solution, the least a media system can do is discourage elements within its own ranks – the ones who run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. Such ideologically charged journalists tacitly support terrorism by considering it part of Islamic jihad and legitimise it by providing militants with an effective public forum. Some analysts believe that the progressive elements among urban journalists don't know what to do now they have found themselves under attack from militants. They need to learn from the experiences of their colleagues in conflict zones. They also need to keep in check elements in their own ranks, given the influence they have with large audiences.
In the Express TV case, journalists will perhaps consider the difference between giving a story balance by accommodating multiple opinions and inviting a spokesman of a banned militant group to admit a crime and preach an ideology justifying violence. If such practices are not discouraged, the time is coming when terrorists will achieve coverage that is no less damaging in its effect than physical harm on journalists.
See overleaf for Express TV's on-air conversation with Tehreek- e-Taliban
This is a transcript of the interview by the Express TV anchor Javaid Chaudhry with Ihsanullah Ihsan, spokesman of the Tehreek-e-Taliban:
