What to say when you can’t?
Adiah Afraz
Let’s not talk about Salmaan Taseer’s murder now. It is simply too dangerous to tread that ground. And since the whole crux of the contention rests on choosing one’s words carefully, a person who writes in English simply cannot run the risk of being misinterpreted or misunderstood.
So let’s talk about the proverbial brighter side instead. Forget the deaths, the killings, the backwardness and the narrow-mindedness, and let’s talk about a progressive country where more than 98 million people use mobile phones. This might be the country with an international repute for being the hotbed of violence, injustice and human rights violations. Yet this is the country whose individual philanthropy and voluntarism rate exceeds that of the US and the whole world put together. The same hotbed of violence and injustice is home to the lawyers’ movement, the biggest non-violent uprising for the restoration of the rule of law. And the same hotbed of human right violations has the most defiant and vibrant media that recursively exercises the biggest of all human rights, the right to speak.
If anything, this is the country of stark contradictions. A country where people might have mobile phones to use, but they spend hours on end without electricity, cook their meals on coal during winters, and schedule their midnights around CNG quests. A country where lawyers might take to the streets for the sake of justice, but the same lawyers, in huge numbers, would openly support blatant forms of vigilante justice. A country that might break records of philanthropy, but would also break its own record of suffering five hundred bomb blasts a year. A country whose media reporting might be the most defiant and the most vibrant, but its reporting environment would be the most insecure and the most turbulent.
An ordinary Pakistani is not surprised at the contradictions any more. Load- shedding is an old story and CNG shortage is becoming a habit now. As for endorsing vigilante justice, our tragedy is that we all believe that institutional justice is out of our reach. So convinced are we that justice is not for ordinary people that the idea of vigilante justice seems perfectly acceptable. Anyone who has seen the Sultan Rahi films of the ‘80s and still follows their modified versions with gun-toting adolescents out on the streets to avenge some wrong or to restore some familial honour, can understand how the acceptance of vigilante justice is our cultural reality. This is the country of honourable people, and for honour they can kill.
And yet we cannot talk about these killings or the killers. It is too dangerous to do that, especially for the media persons. In fact, for Pakistani journalists bad working conditions do not mean load-shedding or CNG shortage. Bad working conditions for them mean harassment by the agencies, intimidation by influential individuals, real threats to their lives, and a general sense of insecurity that prevails throughout their careers.
The end of last year saw the incident of members of the Lahore Press Club’s governing body being beaten up at the hand of the land mafia. A few months before that, a senior investigative journalist, Umer Cheema, was kidnapped and tortured by unknown assailants. He was stripped, tortured and humiliated, was hung upside down and his head was shaved. Later he was left on a roadside to fend for himself.
In the past one decade or so, the fear of death is not just a fear anymore. It has become a dangerous reality as well. It is being reported that more than twenty Pakistani journalists have died under mysterious circumstances in the past few years. These include those five journalists who lost their lives in the tribal areas from 2000 to 2006.
The mysterious circumstances surrounding all of these deaths have ranged from being shot point-blank in broad daylight to being abducted and killed in remote areas. In most cases the killers are not even identified, let alone caught and brought to justice.
Those whose deaths can actually be connected to the kind of reporting they did include Jang correspondent Zubair Ahmad Mujahid, columnist Dr Chishti Mujahid, Geo TV reporter Musa Khankhel, Express TV reporter Mohammad Ibrahim, and, most recently, the young Geo reporter Wali Khan Babar.
Wali Khan Babar, 29, was shot dead by unidentified killers. He has been described by his colleagues as inquisitive and dedicated; a reporter who always looked for an angle in his stories. A young reporter just trying to do his job.
Imran Khan said in one of his interviews to CNN that a sense of insecurity has seeped into the general public. The reason for this is that if the government cannot provide security to its provincial governor, it is assumed that it cannot provide security to the ordinary man.
The question is: what is the implication of this sense of insecurity for the journalists? It is assumed that journalists make the biggest enemies in the government. So if the government cannot protect its own governor despite a 24-hour security cover, what can an unarmed ordinary journalist, without any security cover, expect from the government or the law-enforcing agencies?
Omer Cheema’s abductors still return from time to time, despite the extensive media coverage his ordeal had received, and despite the assurances by government officials on adequate security to him. It is difficult to imagine how a person continues to work when faced with a life-threatening situation?
So the crux of the contention is to be careful about what to say. But the question is how can a person be careful about what to say, especially when it is his job to say without fear, and say it out loud?
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