Aboard the Democracy Train (15 page)

In December 2005, when the eighth reporter, Hayatullah Khan went missing from the Waziristan tribal area, alarm bells sounded
throughout the journalist community. The Taliban denied they had abducted him. Musharraf’s media spokespersons, too, claimed ignorance about his whereabouts. Still, the pains they took to convince me that the disappeared journalist was a “terrorist,” and the level of detail they possessed about the missing journalist struck me as highly suspicious.

Six months later, Hayatullah’s family got a telephone call from a Major Kamal, who tersely informed them that the missing journalist’s body had been dumped in Miranshah, North Waziristan. The family discovered Hayatullah had been shot at close range, with his hands still tied in military handcuffs.

Although the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan called for credible reporting, the Musharraf government strongly discouraged journalists from their professional activities. Foreign journalists found at the Afghan-Pakistani border were shipped back to their host countries while their fixers were taken aside, interrogated and imprisoned. Journalists caught near US air bases were charged under the “Official Secrecy Act” and produced in court only after their disappearances were challenged by the professional media organizations.

Pakistan’s Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Shaikh Rasheed – known for his crude, plain speaking – told me that journalists were stopped from investigating the border areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan “because their findings are often at variance with the government.”

With the military left as the sole spokesman for Pakistan, the foreign media got contradictory reports about the effect of US missile attacks. A classic case occurred in January 2006 when the military claimed that a missile attack in Bajaur had killed the son-in-law of Al Qaeda’s spokesman, Ayman Zawahiri. This was contradicted by then Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, who was in turn contradicted by President Musharraf.

Even as the foreign media relied on military spokespersons for their news stories, Peshawar based journalist and well-known expert on the Taliban, Rahimullah Yusufzai told me that the
New York Times
report that Zawahiri’s son-in-law was killed was
floated by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies without conducting the necessary DNA tests.

In an attempt to give his side of events, Musharraf’s media team used the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority or PEMRA (enacted through an ordinance in 2002), to block the media’s coverage of public opposition to his rule. Cable operators were warned against beaming channels which covered anti-Musharraf rallies, failing which, their licenses could be revoked. Predictably, the axe fell on channels that depicted the humongous crowds that galvanized around the Supreme Court chief justice he had ousted, Iftikhar Chaudhry.

President Musharraf met his Waterloo as the feisty broadcast media joined civil society to battle the emergency he imposed in Nov 3, 2007. It was an all-out battle by the media and one with high economic stakes, as television channels,
GEO
,
Aaj TV
and
ARY
lost millions in advertising revenue. Thereafter, the Pakistan Broadcasters Association, the Association of Television Journalists and its parent organization, Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists mounted a successful campaign to restore censored programs and show hosts who had been banned, all of which helped to end the emergency

Almost two decades after the attack on my person, the media landscape in Pakistan has transformed. Not only has the rocky path toward democracy taught politicians and journalists a few lessons, but also the nation embraces a vibrant electronic media.

Today, as Pakistan’s experienced print journalists take over the reins of private television and radio channels, the public is exposed to riveting news and current affairs. International television and radio, beamed in by satellite, have added their voices to the medley. It has transformed Pakistan’s media into a major revenue-generating industry where the electronic media dominates the marketplace discourse.

For the most part, the PPP government has left the media free. That has also opened it up for criticism, as commercialism drives raucous programming. The print and electronic media has engaged in mudslinging and personal attacks – including poking fun at President Zardari. They join the global networks – the Internet,
YouTube
, blogging and texting – that provide unprecedented freedom for Zardari’s opponents.

In his early days, President Zardari walked in the shoes of his military predecessor as he barred television channels from filming crowds clamoring for the reinstatement of the chief justice. The move did not sit well with the PPP’s liberal leadership. PPP’s Federal Information Minister Sherry Rehman had as the editor of
Herald
in 1991 resisted the crackdown on the media. She was the first to register her dissent by resigning from her official position.

Overall, PPP Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani has resisted invoking the PEMRA ordinance against news channels, which thrive on sensationalism and unbalanced reporting. Instead, the government has suggested the media monitor itself through a “Code of Ethics” – meaning that it should avoid images or material that may “endanger national security or offend viewer sensitivities.”

Although the numbers of journalists detained and interrogated by the security agencies have dropped, a growing number of these incidents now occur in the volatile Balochistan province. In such instances, the PPP government becomes a bystander. The task of protecting these journalists falls to Pakistan’s thriving journalist federations, which receive support from international groups working for the freedom of the media.

With Pakistan’s border areas in the grip of an insurgency, reporting from the tribal Pak-Afghan border is among the most dangerous professions in the world. Taliban militants do not hesitate to kill journalists perceived as pro-government or leaning toward a rival faction. In these border areas, where cell phones are barred and traveling is dangerous, there is little access to information. That has effectively ended independent reporting and instead led to the concept of “embedded journalists,” – whether they embed with the army or the Taliban.

It is in this brave new world that journalists are engaged in a new dance with the three forces that control Pakistan’s destiny – the US, Pakistan’s army and its elected government. The PPP government – itself in the US orbit of influence – desperately needs better coverage, but also knows the consequences of taking on a combative media.

Decades of experience under dictatorship and civilian rule has taught Pakistan’s journalists to preserve the freedom that makes them among the better-informed and more powerful media organizations in the region.

The Pakistan’s military ruler’s off-color remarks, uttered during his official visit to the United States in September 2005, infuriated many women and men around the world. Their response appeared to puzzle the President. The point, he told a gathering of women who came to hear him at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, was that Pakistan was being unfairly singled out, even though rapes occurred all over the globe.

Brandishing a copy of an Indian newspaper, he said there were examples of several rapes in India in its pages, adding – in the same breath and without a trace of irony – that this was not a time for “point scoring.”

To Pakistan’s general, who faced the onerous task of leading the nation after his military coup of October 1999, the prosecution of rapists appeared to have little bearing on women’s rights and everything to do with politics. Indeed, the “Zina Ordinances (Enforcement of Hudood)” – which were passed by Gen. Zia ul Haq in 1979 – had, over the years, grown politicized after Islamic parties discounted women’s testimony in rape and instead required evidence from “four Muslim male adult eye-witnesses of pious character” to award a conviction.

The Hudood Ordinances were passed by Gen. Zia, only two years after he rode on the crest of the Pakistan National Alliance movement, led by Islamic parties, and ousted Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in a military coup on July 5, 1977.

Under the Hudood laws, punishment was meted out like amputations for theft and flogging for drinking. The uproar from civil society forced these to fizzle out. Women became the most affected by the implementation of the Zina Ordinances, which imprisoned hundreds of them after the courts refused to accept their testimony in rape.

Although late Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto – who rode a wave of populist support in 1988 – referred to Nawaz Sharif as a “remnant of the Zia regime,” she too was loath to touch an issue that divided the Islamists from the secular lobby.

In the post 9/11 period when Pakistan was back in the orbit of US influence, the State Department had faulted the Zina Ordinance in its 2005 Human Rights Report. Just before his US visit, Musharraf tried to win American approval by moving a Women’s Protection Bill in the National Assembly that rape be punished under secular rather than Islamic law. Pressure from the Islamic opposition in the National Assembly led him to further water down the amendment.

A number of women’s groups, which demanded the outright repeal of the Hudood Ordinances, cite the Women’s Protection
Act passed under Gen. Musharraf as a hotchpotch of laws. The Act retains the standards for evidence laid down by the Zina law, even though it allows for verification of rape by DNA tests and other secular standards.

In September 2005, as an audience of disillusioned women took Musharraf on for his comments on rape victims in the
Washington Post
, he backtracked. “These were just side remarks, which are not to be taken seriously,” he told the Pakistani audience and their US allies. But as the crowd kept hooting, the general shifted gears and began shadow boxing the perceived enemies of Pakistan: “If you can shout, I can shout louder.”

In 1989, I came face to face with the impact of the Zina Ordinance on women. On a routine visit to the hospital, I learnt that two nurses were raped inside the paying ward of the hospital. One of the paramedics, who sometimes tipped me off with inside stories, came to my newspaper with the seamy details.

The story fairly sizzled: two nurses had been raped at gunpoint as they left the elite ward. A senior medical student from the affiliated Dow Medical College and his male colleagues had grabbed them, clapped a hand over their mouths and raped them at gunpoint on the empty hospital beds.

It was the type of issue I had waited to sink my teeth into. I was in my twenties when I returned from the US, filled with indignation at the way women were treated in Pakistan. That would let me see the story rather differently from my male colleagues, who had an average age of 50 years and whose hands were full covering daily news outbreaks.

The case grew in the media because the senior nurse, Farhat Sadiq – a dark, plump Christian woman from a community of sweepers – took heart from women’s support and spoke out against her rapist. Although her younger nursing colleague avoided the press, Farhat seemed to think it would help her case to have it publicized.

Barely whispering, she told me how the armed young men had forced the two nurses on the beds as they held guns to their heads. “First one and then the other did it with me,” she told me, eyes downcast and in a voice that trembled with shame.

It was a bold move, given that the odds were heavily stacked against women. Even worse – in a hierarchical society like Pakistan, with its separate laws for women and non-Muslims – the victim was a Christian woman from the poorest community.

Fleshing out the drama in my staid, black and white newspaper,
Dawn
, I found myself in the eye of the storm. I wrote boldly in a society where the news was both male-dominated and rigidly controlled. The Zina Ordinance passed under Gen. Zia had manifested macabre results; with a woman’s own testimony inadmissible in rape cases, judges equated rape with adultery and punished the rape victims instead. It naturally prevented women from reporting rape.

Even then, there were some encouraging trends. The Women’s Action Forum was created by urban, professional women to protest against the outrageous punishments meted out to women victims. The War against Rape, comprised of women and men, followed suit, campaigning to break the silence on rape.

As a woman reporter, I took a different track from the one traditionally used by the male-dominated press. Instead of falling back on sensationalist media practice of publishing the names and details of women victims of rape, I turned the spotlight on the accused. Witnesses told me that the accused, Khalid Rehman and his gang came from a relatively privileged background; as such, I knew they could easily buy their way out of punishment.

The Women’s Action Forum invited me to accompany them as they took the rape victim to a police station to file a First Information Report (FIR). It was dusk when we arrived at the rather dingy police quarters near Civil Hospital. Surrounded by women the nurse Farhat Sadiq, her head covered, looked ashamed but still comforted by the presence of supporters. The policemen looked incredulously at the women from privileged backgrounds spread out in their quarters, who insisted that police register a crime report against a well-off medical student.

The scene would have been comic but for the circumstances. Sitting at his wooden desk, under a dim light bulb, the sub-inspector shuffled his papers, sighed and looked from one charged activist to the other. He was trying to discourage the women from filing a police report. He knew that the accused was well connected and could get him in trouble with a simple phone call to his superior officer.