Pakistan media

The US’ decision to keep Pakistan in dark about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden was no surprise seeing the history of Pakistan’s intelligence services. On May 29, Sayed Saleem Shahzad, the Pakistan bureau chief for the Asia Times, headed to a television studio to be interviewed. He had just written a story linking the Pakistani military with terrorists believed to have orchestrated a recent raid on a Navy base.

He never arrived. Two days later, his battered body was discovered about 150 miles south of Islamabad. Shahzad’s death straightaway brought Pakistan into international limelight for its horrific reputation of being a dangerous place for journalists. Pakistan’s enraged journalist community directly blames the Inter-Services Intelligence agency for Shahzad’s killing, but ISI denies the charge.

About a dozen journalists have been killed, kidnapped or tortured by the government secret services and insurgent groups since 2009. In such a scenario I have also lost six of my colleagues in last nine months. I got to know these journalists while working on stories, participating in training programs or developing source networks in the country’s largest province bordering Iran and Afghanistan. Family members and professional colleagues back home in Pakistan attribute the reporters’ targeted murders to state secret services and death squads. These type of killings generally  go unnoticed by the authorities and official pressure on media has further blocked leaking out of any news concerning their deaths.

During my tenure with Pakistan’s leading English newspaper, Daily Times (from 2005 to 2010), Mohammad Khan Sasoli, president of a local press club complained to me that an underground anti-nationalist group, the Baloch Musla Defai Tanzeem was constantly threatening him and other members. The group, nationalists allege, is sponsored by the Pakistani secret services and paramilitary forces. “The threats are consequential,” he whispered in my ear over tea at a teashop in Quetta. “The government-backed groups will kill me if I cover the Baloch nationalist parties, something that I am committed to do as a journalist.” As my 36-year-old friend feared for his life, we wrote letters to the editor at some of the English newspapers in Pakistan urging for his security, but to no avail. Finally Sasoli was shot dead in December while returning home from the press club.

I worked with Siddiq Eido, another journalist friend, to develop a network of reporters in the coastal area of Mekran. Eido focused on human rights reporting. The government was annoyed with his coverage of the disappearances and extra-judicial killings of political workers from the Baloch ethnic minority at the hands of the secret services. His friends later disclosed Eido had received threatening phone calls from “private numbers, which are often used by the secret services. Eido continued to fearlessly report from Balochistan, and was kidnapped by suspected government officials on December 21. In an editorial in The Baloch Hal, I urged the government of Pakistan to respect and protect journalists and human rights activists who are covering the conflict. The government snubbed our appeals for Eido’s safe release. Four months later, his bullet-riddled body was discovered in a mountainous area in his native Mekran.

Similarly, twenty-five year old Lala Hameed Hayatan, a correspondent of the Urdu language newspaper Daily Tawar was kidnapped on October 25 by security forces. He was kept in illegal detention without criminal charges or access to the courts. A month later, Hayatan’s body was recovered from a local river on the eve of the Muslim festival of Eid. His killers left a message in his pocket describing the murder as a “gift of Eid” to further agonise his friends and relatives. The Pakistan government has done nothing to investigate these murders. The only journalist, whose murder was investigated in the last decade was the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Pakistani authorities were forced to act due to the US and international pressure.

On February 2009, the editor-in-chief of Urdu newspaper Daily Asaap, narrowly escaped an attempt on his life in Quetta city. The paramilitary forces later closed and occupied his newspaper office for several days. Two more newspaper offices, Daily Balochistan Express and Daily Azadi, were occupied by the paramilitary forces for criticising government policies. The free media continue to suffer at the hands of an increasingly intolerant military that overshadows a powerless Pakistan regime. Few organisations like the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists are protesting hard, but they are restricted to urban parts of the country, while the reporters in rural Pakistan are facing the threats alone.

(Malik Siraj Akbar is the Humbert H. Humphrey fellow at Arizona State University and  editor of The Baloch Hal, an online newspaper.)