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MEDIA-PAKISTAN: Shackled by Ruling Elite, Security Forces
By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Feb 17, 2006 (IPS) - Journalists face severe harassment and detention in Pakistan where freedom of expression is guaranteed under the constitution but attempts by the media to challenge the country's feudal and authoritarian structure are quickly crushed.
''In the rural parts of the country, journalists are scared to publish facts, mainly because of the repercussions. Several correspondents have experienced severe thrashings at the hands of the landlords,'' said former president of the Peshawar Press Club, Mohammed Riaz.
Across Pakistan, wealthy landowners, known locally as zamindars, jagirdars or waderas, have exercised a semi-mediaeval control over the lives, beliefs and, crucially, the votes of the largely illiterate rural population to amass immense political power. Together with the army and the bureaucracy, they have ruled the country for decades.
In Punjab province, Sarwar Mujahid, the correspondent of the Urdu-language daily Nawa-i-Waqt in eastern Okara district, was detained for several months for writing about a dispute between tenant farmers and security forces in 2005.
The media has been browbeaten into doing routine stories, ignoring issues of human rights. According to Riaz, political correspondent of the highest-selling English language daily Dawn, journalists are not respected in Pakistan. Labour laws are not implemented, and rural journalists often double up in other jobs because the media is notoriously poor in paying, he added.
Pakistani media owners have compromised on media independence for the sake of government advertisements, and as a result ''investigative journalism is not encouraged,'' he observed.
''We just report the news concerning bureaucracy, police and politicians, where the prime sources are the people in power,'' confirmed Mohammed Zahir, correspondent of a local daily, Aaj (Today), in Mardan district, North West Frontier Province.
The press has been the victim of sectarian violence. In the Peshawar region, the police made no attempt to arrest Islamist activists who, at least on a dozen occasions in 2005, sabotaged the installations of cable TV operators who were deemed anti-Islam.
The international media watchdog, Reporters Sans Frontiers (RSF), observed in its annual report 2005, released last month, that "the struggle against Islamist terrorism, which is very active in Pakistan, has given the authorities a pretext for cracking down on independent news media. Journalists who are critical of President Pervez Musharraf's policies and those working for the foreign press are the leading targets of the security services."
The army has imposed a news blackout on its operations in the areas bordering Afghanistan which started in 2004. Since March last year, it has become virtually impossible to cover the almost daily bombardment in South Waziristan being carried out against the remnants of the al-Qaeda and Taliban.
On Jan. 12, an Al-Jazeera TV crew from Doha, Qatar, was arrested at the Jandola checkpoint in South Waziristan and refused permission to interview people in the Tribal Areas about the military operations underway. South Waziristan is administered directly by the federal government.
Last year, on Mar. 16, Pakistani journalists, Mujeebur Rehman and Younis Wazir, were detained by the military in the same area. They had to spend a night in a detention centre and Rehman's video camera was confiscated.
A month later, an Afghan guide, Sami Yousafzai, was detained for over five weeks for accompanying an American freelance journalist, Eliza Griswold, into the area that has been declared off-limits for the press.
The Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists has condemned the attacks on press freedom on the pretext of the country's involvement in the ongoing "war on terror". There are at least 25 cases of journalists having been arrested, or prevented from circulating freely, or having their equipment confiscated in the area.
A photojournalist, Hayatullah, 35, working for ‘The Nation' daily and the European Photo Agency and kidnapped six months ago in South Waziristan, is still missing.
In June 2005, at least four Pakistani reporters were detained, including a BBC World Service stringer, and threatened, while journalists from Peshawar were prevented from entering the Tribal Areas.
A pro-independence magazine from the Kashmir region called Kargil International, which is against the militancy in Kashmir and wants independence from both India and Pakistan for Kashmir, has not been allowed to resume publication. Owned by Pakistanis, it was started in 1998, but banned by the government in 2004.
Last year, government advertising was withdrawn from a conservative media group, the Lahore-based Nawa-i-Waqt, in February, and from an Urdu-language daily published from Islamabad, Jinnah, in July, for not falling in line.
''As a result, the press has become less and less inclined to tackle subjects likely to cause irritation such as military corruption,'' commented Tariq Khan, an activist of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. (END)
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