There’s deception to every rule
http://www.dawn.com/weekly/dmag/dmag10.htm
By Anjum Niaz
Farzand-i-Rawalpindi is the new Information Minister. Sheikh Rashid Ahmed needs no profiling. The man’s an open book. Loud as a thunderclap, over time, we have heard him holler, abuse, swear and filibuster. Histrionics have been his forte - both inside and outside the House. Colourful, feisty, chest puffed out, he’s also an author and a jailbird. His dirty diatribes at the sitting prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, won him the portfolio of culture when it was Nawaz Sharif’s turn to rule.
Michael Jackson and Madonna were promised to us, but Sheikh Rashid could not swing their ballyhooed arrival as our mullahs went ballistic.
After Sharif fell, the press logged stories of shady plot deals around Islamabad, lucrative land grabbing, salacious wife squealing and scandals galore of the Overseas Pakistanis Foundation. The man in the eye of the storm, of course, was Sheikh Rashid.
Today, Providence and Pervaiz Musharraf have again handed him the baton - this time to police the press. What havoc is wreaked, who can tell?
Loath to lollygag, the new Information Minister will be tasked with finishing the travesty of reforms - emasculating the press - through the four odious ordinances sired by his predecessor, Nisar Memon. As a parting kick, Memon and his wisenheimers sought to smother the freedom of the press by gratuitously getting the cabinet to approve the ordinances without consulting the APNS (All Pakistan Newspaper Society) and CPNE (Council of Pakistan Newspaper Editors).
Had it not been for a vibrant press that exposed Sharif’s shenanigans and welcomed Musharraf when he seized power three autumns ago, the General would have had to undertake a massive PR exercise to launch himself at home and abroad (Bush didn’t even know his name). As is the curse, the mandarins at the Information Ministry - always kowtowing to the ISI and the ruler of the day - ‘rewarded’ the press with the four “black laws”.
Ann Cooper puts it succinctly. Says the Executive Director for Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ): “Ordinances and press laws are often a sign of an insecure government that wants to control what the press writes and sets penalties for the reporters criticizing the president or his administration.”
Elected officials have a duty to submit themselves to public scrutiny “and the core job of the press is to observe how the government operates, whether there is any corruption or misuse of power, but the minute the wrongdoing is made public, the government jumps in and claims that the press has violated rules - that’s ridiculous.”
Cooper, a journalist for 25 years, oversees the New York-based CPJ, the only organization in the world dedicated to defending journalists around the globe. “We are like reporters, we research, monitor and quickly expose attacks on the media and press freedom.”
With a window office on the 12th floor mirroring Manhattan’s lengthening silhouettes of steel and glass while the afternoon is winding down and the police sirens below bleating away, her neatly-arranged office is a pool of calm. The incumbent - a study in sobriety - appears a mature woman in command, fully cognizant of her onerous responsibility to promote freedom of the press throughout the world, and fiercely defend the right of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal.
“Sometimes, I ask myself, ‘why continue?’ when cases such as in Nigeria go on for years while the journalists rot behind bars, or when some governments don’t even bother to respond to our protests,” reflects Cooper. “But, when we talk to the families of the incarcerated and to the journalists themselves, we get enormous support and are told that our being out there makes an absolute difference.”
She recalls Najam Sethi’s case. “I was visiting a friend in Connecticut that weekend and she got a call from Pakistan that Najam had been taken away. The caller didn’t know that I was there. We got the news out quickly. Of course, his was a high-profile case, hence the more pressure we put, the more attention it attracted.”
Cooper says that some diplomats stationed in Pakistan or for that matter any other country get to know the journalists and are often a “good source of help.” The CPJ also sends out letters of protest to the State Department, “We have a representative stationed there who personally briefs them.”
“The State Department will not speak out against a foreign government with which it has friendly relations and thinks ties may be damaged.” But in Sethi’s case, the Americans were not too thrilled with the Sharif government and were happy to openly and loudly protest his arrest. Even the World Bank President, James Wolfensohn, jumped in and threatened to cut off aid if the Editor of The Friday Times was not released.
Well, that may have been the last milestone for the freedom of press. After 9/11, America’s willingness to speak out on freedom of the press or human rights’ violations has been affected: “There are certain countries (Pakistan) that are looked upon today as better allies than in the past because of their geo-strategic location,” remarks Cooper.
Kavita Memon, Asia’s Programme Coordinator for CPJ, has visited Pakistan and met with many journalists. She’s almost daily in touch with some from here. Letters of protest have gone from CPJ to Musharraf each time a journalist has been murdered, imprisoned and hauled up. “The routine surveillance and harassment by state intelligence agencies, specially the feared ISI controlled by the Pakistan Army, operates with considerable independence, giving rise to speculation that its domestic and foreign policy agenda might not be entirely aligned with that of the Musharraf government,” notes Memon.
She also points out Islamabad’s visa extension refusal to Washington Post Rajiv Chandraasekaran, a US citizen, and to the expulsion of Christina Lamb and Justin Sutcliffe of Sunday Telegraph “for reporting on the ISI.”
Lamb’s notoriety in Pakistan is an old story. In Benazir Bhutto’s era, the 21-year-old, intrepid Financial Times correspondent sidled up with an army high-up and sent a sensational dispatch back home about an expected coup that the FT fatuously splashed the next day.
Pakistan’s icon of press freedom, Zamir Niazi, whose book The Web of Censorship is a prescribed read for students at Ivy League universities, is today, flying solo against the poseurs in Pakistani press.
Anticipating another labour of love, I shoot off an e-mail to him.
“It’s more a labour of anger and frustration!” he archly relies. “For the last three decades, I have fought for freedom of thought and expression. The press is really free to a great extent,” reminding me that while the newspapers of today are “better printed and better produced,” with more pay to its workers, “but look at the content…believe me, with a few honourable exceptions, the majority of reporters are on the payroll of one or another agency.”
A scholar of international acclaim, who has dedicated his life researching, analyzing and writing on Pakistani press, he now feels let down by his own ilk. “Most journalists/reporters/writers shun reading books or absorbing themselves in serious study,” he laments. “You will not believe that even senior persons, including some editors, do not read their own newspapers.” He has contempt for journalists who enjoy all kinds of “perks and privileges” and when their demands are denied, “they cry foul.”
As a crusader for this very class of people who wield the pen, Niazi, who wrote his famous book, The Press in Chains, is a bundle of angst who now wants the title changed to The Books in Chains - Libraries in Flames.
What a sad reflection of our times.