Abstract
As I sat with a Dutch journalist at a restaurant in Peshawar, two well-dressed gentlemen asked me to follow them. I left my embarrassed colleague and followed them to the exit. Introducing themselves as intelligence operatives, they expressed displeasure over the way we discussed the plight of civilians in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, an area hit by militants. Before the officials left, the senior one asked me to meet them again. “We expect you to be mindful of our national interests.”
A year has passed since then during which time two more sleuths have visited me; they tried to convince me to keep them informed about foreign journalists visiting the province. In other words I was asked to spy on the foreign journalists I sometimes meet in the region. The issue ended once I left the country for higher education.
One cannot deny the duty of state agencies in responding to the deteriorating security situation in Pakistan. Half a dozen military operations have already been launched to curb the rising tide of militancy in the northwest and some parts of Baluchistan province. Similarly, a huge U.S. war machine is fighting Taliban insurgents across the border in Afghanistan. Terror attacks are rampant inside Pakistan, and have devastated the official machinery. Therefore, worries on both sides of the divide are natural.
Yet the issue is not about official concern to ensure civilians' protection. The security apparatus, instead, seems more interested in silencing dissenting voices. Journalists are treated as no less than villains once they start questioning the state response to terrorism. Sometimes journalists are harassed for highlighting the damage to civilian property or concerns about the heavy militarisation of the area. Owing to this clash of interests, taming independent voices seems to have become as important to the security forces as fighting militancy.
How should journalists respond to these definitions of national interests? What would happen if all independent voices were suppressed? Can a journalist be forced to wear official spectacles to analyse the anarchy and bloodshed in the region?
Asking such questions becomes all the more important in the less privileged and troubled areas of Pakistan, where journalists hold state policies responsible for multiplying the sufferings of ethnic minorities. Local journalists serving in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and some parts of Baluchistan do not report only on violence, they also share ethnic affinity with the terror victims. Once a reporter walks over the spongy flesh of charred human bodies scattered at the site of a terror blast, national interests turn into quotidian ethnic concerns.
Caught in this double jeopardy, the local journalists cannot move either way. If professional and social compulsions bound them to expose what is really going on in this violent situation, official pressure restricts them from looking for the method behind the chaos. In simple words, a journalist is forced to avoid demystifying the wave of bloodshed, causing despair all around. The silencing of dissenting voices is justified in the name of the national interest.
In many instances, marginalised journalists consider threats a blissful warning to help escape direct attempts on their lives. Not everyone is so lucky. During the last four years, more than 24 journalists have been killed in Baluchistan. In a different context, exactly the same number of Pashtun journalists lost their lives in the country's northwest. It is hard to ascertain who killed them. We know only that they were killed for their selfless, independent journalism. For the third consecutive year, Pakistan topped the list of the most dangerous countries for journalists, with the loss of 13 journalists in 2012.
And 2013, not even two months old as I write, has already been stained with the blood of three more journalists who lost their lives in the horrendous explosion in Quetta in which about 90 people lost their lives.
Few people care to look into the ways in which dissenting voices are silenced in the troubled areas of the country. Security officials hardly understand the gravity of the situation. Years of military dictatorship have groomed them to consider marginalised areas as their strategic backyard. This approach continued after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. The state machinery did not handle seriously the rising tide of reactionary militancy in the bordering northwest. Since then a coherent counter-terror strategy has been missing. Uncertainty is bred by a conflict in which shadows fight and civilians are treated as guinea pigs. Despite the death of more than 40,000 civilians in this conflict, journalists are forced not to analyse the situation independently.
If opposing views based on the peripheral loyalties of Pushtun and Baluch journalists are twisted by the state security apparatus, low ethnic representation in the mainstream media has rendered marginalised journalists pariahs in their own fraternity. While the mainstream media react very publicly to any urban journalist being targeted by state or non-state elements, there is no similar interest in highlighting the plight of marginalised, local journalists.
In 2011, the murder of the Islamabad-based journalist Saleem Shahzad caused ripples in the national and international media. It forced the authorities in Pakistan to set up an independent investigative commission. Similarly, a threat to another Islamabad-based news anchor was made part of the mainstream media discourse. During the same period, journalists in Baluchistan were killed under mysterious circumstances. Following kidnappings, their mutilated bodies are dumped along the roadsides. The media outlets, however, hardly see any pattern behind this organised crime.
Why so little interest in the marginalised journalists in the urbanised media landscape in Pakistan? In a TV interview, the president of Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists, Shaukat Paracha, said they had raised voices for Pashtun and Baloch journalists on every world forum and ensured compensation for those killed in the line of duty. Journalism in Pakistan is largely an urban profession. Journalists serving in big cities depend on the government to obtain foreign trips with dignitaries. They cannot afford to challenge the ongoing repressive culture, which so far has effectively throttled dissident voices in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Baluchistan.
Of course, the urban media system has developed a mechanism to resist violence against journalists. They do give a cursory glance every year at the number of journalists killed in the country. This coverage, however, is hardly meant to challenge the oppressor. Rather it gives the impression of objectivity and even opposition, effectively to serve the status quo. This compromising approach has benefited the mainstream journalists and the state at the expense of independent journalism in the peripheral conflict zone. As a result, threats to the lives of marginalised journalists are not reported and their killings are normally ignored. This suppression of independent voices is so effectively carried out that militants fighting in the northwest seem to have changed their strategy in dealing with journalists. Earlier, militants usually invited journalists for interviews and even paid for their trips. Recently, however, the outlawed Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan leaders declared a war on the media in Pakistan. In response to these threats, foreign outlets, particularly the BBC in Peshawar, withdrew staff to the federal capital Islamabad in order to overcome the fresh round of militants' threats. In the face of these dangers, press clubs in the conflict areas should come forward as a network to raise the issue of journalists' security with authorities and media owners.
Otherwise, marginalised journalists will continue dying, sealing the fate of independent journalism in the conflict zone of Pakistan.