Pakistan Is One of the Most Dangerous Countries in the World for Journalists
By
Khaled Ahmed
December
12, 2020
On November
9, Pakistan’s Supreme Court granted bail to the owner of the country’s largest
media group, the GEO, after a 10-month-long detention condemned by the rights
groups as suppression of the press. The country’s not-so-legally-immaculate
National Accountability Bureau (NAB) had accused Mir Shakilur Rehman of
illegally leasing government land in 1986 and of having ownership rights
transferred to himself in 2016 when ex-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was ruling
Pakistan.
Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan
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Normally,
it doesn’t take that long for NAB to step back and let its inadequately challenged
victim go. The courts were reluctant to touch his case till the Supreme Court
thought the man had rotted in a NAB cell for too long without being convicted
for a crime he was supposed to have committed 34 years ago. The NAB, of course,
didn’t care; nor did Pakistan. In the World Press Freedom Index for 2020,
Pakistan ranked 145 out of 180 countries.
Imran
Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf — the last word meaning “justice” — looked the other way
as if it actually enjoyed Rehman’s maltreatment. Deeper in the state, Rehman’s
journalists had been roughed up over time, as in the case of Hamid Mir, a
popular anchor in Rehman’s GEO TV, who was shot at in Karachi in 2014. In 2018,
investigative journalist Ahmad Noorani was trailed for miles before being
attacked with an iron rod on a busy street in Islamabad.
Then in
2020, Radio Free Europe reported that a prominent Pakistani journalist
Matiullah Jan had been abducted in July from Islamabad by several men, only to
be released after the kidnappers were satisfied that he had “learned his
lesson”. In June 2018, a British-Pakistani woman journalist and columnist, Gul
Bukhari was abducted for “a few hours” by “unknown personnel” in Pakistan. In
February 2020, the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ) reported that
“a Pakistan law enforcement agency” had threatened to slap terrorism charges on
one of the country’s most prominent government critics, journalist Gul Bukhari.
The CPJ said: “The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has asked Gul Bukhari, a
columnist and democracy activist, to appear before an inquiry probing online
propaganda against the government, national security organisations, and the
judiciary.”
As if in
response, the Imran Khan government urged the British government to take action
against Bukhari for using “British soil for her nefarious activities” against
Pakistan while abusing “freedom of speech rules and western values”. It went
further: “Her venomous social media activities promote divisive tendencies and
incitement of violence.”
TV anchor
Hamid Mir’s top-rated show, Capital Talk, is popular among those trying to know
the underside of Pakistan’s real politics. Declan Walsh, in his book Nine Lives
of Pakistan (2020), tells us he was shot at in 2014 while going to Karachi: “As
Mir was being driven from Karachi Airport, a gunman stepped onto the road.
Bullets thudded into the vehicle. Mir dived onto the back seat. As the car
zigzagged through the Karachi traffic, Mir speed-dialled his producer. ‘They’re
killing me! They’re killing me,’ he cried. The car made it to a hospital where
Mir was rushed into surgery. He had been shot six times — in the pelvis,
bladder, legs, and shoulders.”
There are
many “parties” working as “non-state actors” who may dislike your reports and
come after you. In the interior of the province of Sindh, a journalist can be
kidnapped and killed by an offended landlord called “wadero”. In 2011, Saleem
Shahzad, a freelance journalist, was brutally murdered. Instead of its mandated
six weeks, it took the five-member inquiry commission on his death six months,
23 meetings, and 41 depositions to present its findings. As expected, in its
146-page report, which was forwarded to Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani, the
commission said it still didn’t know who had killed Shahzad.
Original
Headline: In Pakistan, the media is
intimidated by both state and non-state actors
Source: The Indian Express
URL: https://newageislam.com/islamic-society/pakistan-one-most-dangerous-countries/d/123735
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