Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
The silencing of Pakistan
The state is trying to decimate dissent in hopes of resuscitating a political order that has lost all vitality.
Pakistan is silencing discussion on a growing number of topics, causing concern among human rights activists, journalists and political dissidents in the country. A Committee to Protect Journalists report [See below] published in September this year concluded that the country’s powerful military establishment is using fear, intimidation and even violence to pressure the media to self-censor. In October, journalists and media workers held rallies across the country to protest against measures aimed at curbing newspapers’ circulation and TV channels’ transmission in certain areas. A number of high-profile TV anchors who were critical of the security establishment’s interference in Pakistani politics were fired from their positions.
Recently, I myself was targeted by this ongoing silencing campaign. Earlier this month, along with three other rights activists, I was barred from speaking at the 4th Faiz International Festival - a three-day music, art, debate and literature event named after renowned socialist poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz whose work and life exemplified defiance and resistance against authoritarianism. The irony could not be starker.
We were told that there was “external” pressure for our removal, including threats of cancelling the entire event if the organisers did not remove us from the schedule. It was clear that we were not welcomed there because of our past criticisms of the country’s military establishment.
The festival went forward as planned, without our participation, but the organisers placed an empty chair on the stage during the sessions that we were supposed to attend. This was their way of silently registering their protest against censorship.
A ’fifth-generation warfare’
The current crackdown on free speech in Pakistan stems from the security establishment’s belief that a pervasive “fifth-generation warfare” is being waged against the country. The “fifth-generation warfare” is an awkwardly woven narrative that suggests that the country is besieged by enemies who are using their proxies to control the minds of Pakistan’s “vulnerable” youth. It is a form of paternalism, one which is seen in one form or another in all paranoid, authoritarian states throughout history, and it is employed to target the usual suspects in Pakistan: human rights activists, progressive intellectuals, critical journalists and the political opposition.
The Pakistani state has never been confident of its own viability as a political entity because it views the country’s ethnic faultlines and geostrategic position as perpetual threats to national cohesion. Yet, the “silent martial law” that is clouding political debate in the country is entangled with a formally democratic set-up. This unstable intersection between a civilian government and military control is propelling a new type of political practice that has both comical and tragic dimensions.
The comedy stems from the tragic fact that people are too scared to directly name the military establishment in their criticisms. This fear has led to the creation of a large set of euphemisms that are commonly used in critiques. For example, writers often use terms such as “the boys”, “angels”, “unknown individuals” or even “extra-terrestrial creatures” (a term popularised by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif) when referring to the country’s secret agencies.
During the election campaign earlier this year, Iqbal Siraj, a candidate from Sharif’s party PML-N, alleged publicly that his warehouse was raided, his men were harassed and he was personally threatened by the personnel of a secret agency who wanted him to switch loyalties. After two days, presumably under intensified pressure from the same forces, he backtracked from his earlier statement, claiming this time that it was the “agriculture department” that raided his warehouse over “tax concerns”. Since then, the term “agriculture department” is often used satirically when discussing issues involving the security apparatus, including the contentious issues ranging from forcefully disappeared persons to electoral rigging.
But sometimes, the euphemisms are simpler and more traditional. When I was informed of my removal from the panel at the Faiz Festival, the organisers used the ubiquitous “they” - the meaning, with all the implied and latent threats, understood by all parties. “They” did not want my participation.
Blurred lines
The biggest tragedy of Pakistan’s double system of oppressive military control and seemingly democratic civilian rule is the fact that, unlike direct military rule with a firmly regimented list of do’s and don’ts - or indeed a well-functioning democracy where free speech is fully protected - the lines between acceptable and unacceptable speech remain blurred.
Officially, there are few restrictions on free speech in the country and many journalists, intellectuals and political activists get away with scathing critiques of the establishment. But then many others run into trouble with the same forces over much politer versions of the same critiques. For example, I was barred from the Faiz Festival while many others who had often presented harsher critiques of the security establishment than myself were permitted to speak.
The excessive contingency of the situation makes all the actors involved more anxious about the precise place of the red lines that ought not to be crossed. It also leads to the impression that there is little method to this madness, and that the fates of many are decided by the whims of anonymous local intelligence operatives.
The chaos of the situation raises larger questions about the contemporary era, particularly in light of the melting away of political certainties on a global scale. Not only is the international financial system and the neoliberal ideology undergirding it incredibly unstable, but the nation-state form, the arena par excellence for political claim-making, is itself threatened by the accelerating flows of resources, ideas and people. In other words, the framework that structured postwar politics is now falling apart, exposing the rigidity of our political forms to the openness of the unknown, with all the anxiety such an encounter entails.
It is then not surprising that fear of “foreign elements” is propelling political thought and action around the globe, displacing debates over resource distribution and other social justice issues. For the Trump administration in the US, it is the immigrants; for Europe, it is the refugees; and for India’s Modi, it is Muslims and “secularists” who threaten the homogeneity of the nation-state. These communities become the internally excluded part of the nation, acting as phantoms against whom an imaginary identity is cemented. And since they are the displaced focal point for the anxieties generated by rapidly collapsing political, economic and material certainties, they become targets for the vilest forms of abuse that they must repeatedly endure to sustain a fragile nationalism.
What we are witnessing is the nation-state’s struggle to understand, or even define, the threats it currently confronts. Terms such as “fifth-generation warfare”, “hybrid warfare” or accusations of “foreign agents” are imprecise attempts to define any phenomenon that appears to exceed the normative language available to the state, turning our political chaos into a properly linguistic crisis. This state of affairs betrays an anxiety that a gap has opened up in the status quo, which can no longer be sutured using conventional methods of control. And it is here that censorship fails most spectacularly. The very act of suppression and removal only widens this anxiety, since prohibited content often takes on a life of its own as a symptom of the widening cracks, further haunting the present through its very absence.
The difficulty of the situation is that the gaze of the state deployed to judge the proliferating threats in society is unable to turn inwards to interrogate its own role in perpetuating the chaos that it so fears. In Pakistan, this lack of introspection is compelling the state to decimate all forms of dissent in hopes of resuscitating a political order that has lost all vitality. The challenge, today, then is not only one of resisting the worst excesses of a paranoid establishment, but also of intensifying the search for new ideological and institutional coordinates for constructing political communities. This means that we have to open ourselves to the challenges presented by the foreignness of the new, with all the patience and creativity it demands, if we are to move beyond the endless violence and haunting silences that mark our present.
Ammar Ali Jan
• Al Jazeera, 27 Nov 2018:
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/silencing-pakistan-181127110104579.html
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
• Ammar Ali Jan holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. He teaches at Forman Christian College, Lahore.
Journalists, media workers hold rallies against downsizing, curbs
ISLAMABAD: Journalists and media workers held rallies across the country on Tuesday in protest against downsizing, stopping of advertisements and measures aimed at curbing newspapers circulation and TV channels’ transmission in certain areas.
The protest rallies were held on the call of Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ-Afzal Butt group).
In Islamabad, journalists and media workers took out a procession that set off from the National Press Club and ended at a roundabout near the Parliament House. Members of civil society, lawyers, doctors, teachers and labour union leaders joined them to express their solidarity with media houses.
Speaking on the occasion, PFUJ president Afzal Butt demanded that the government break its silence over the issue.
“Instead of imposing curbs on free flow of information and stopping government advertisements, the information ministry should hold owners and managements of TV channels and newspapers accountable who were not paying salary to media staff and some of them even sacking journalists,” he said.
Speaking on the occasion, senior lawyer of Supreme Court Ali Ahmed Kurd expressed his solidarity with journalists and media workers and condemned unannounced curbs placed on media organisations.
He said that free thinking and freedom of expression were basic rights of the people and these rights were must for progress of any society and the nation.
Veteran journalists Nasir Zaidi, Nasir Malik and Nusrat Javed, civil society activist Tahira Abdullah and leaders of several trade unions also addressed the rally.
They said the country’s leading newspapers and TV channels were facing unannounced restrictions, while circulations, distribution and broadcast of some TV channels had been stopped in certain areas of the country.
They also condemned the owners and managements of some media organisations who were not paying salary to their staff in time and said that in some TV channels, anchors and top executives had been hired at hefty salary packages, but salary of low-paid workers was being delayed for two to three months.
Karachi
Dozens of journalists along with human rights activists and political leaders marched from the Karachi Press Club to the Governor House and staged a sit-in to protest against unannounced censorship and layoff of their fraternity members.
The protest march and sit-in, jointly organised by the Karachi Union of Journalists (KUJ) and All-Pakistan News Employees’ Confederation (Apnec), warned the government against any action on the freedom of expression and demanded that the media owners protect economic rights of their employees.
Addressing demonstrators, PFUJ secretary general Ayub Jan Sarhandi said the struggle for freedom of the press and for the rights of working journalists and media workers would continue despite all odds. The struggle, he said, was part of the countrywide campaign of the PFUJ and it would not let anyone usurp democratic rights of the people and ensure economic well-being of journalists and media workers.
Lahore
The PFUJ, Apnec and Punjab Union of Journalists held a protest against downsizing, censorship and non-payment of salary to journalists and media workers.
A number of journalists gathered at the Chairing Cross on the Mall Road and protested against imposition of censorship on media outlets.
The journalists said the censorship was damaging the media industry and resulting in downsizing.
“Hundreds of media workers have already lost their jobs and the government should not force them to take to the streets,” they said.
Punjab Minister for Information Fayyazul Hassan Chohan met the protesting journalists and said the government would contact the owners of media houses for payment of salary to journalists and media workers.
He said the government would stop advertisements to those media organisations which did not pay salary to their workers.
Peshawar
Journalists and media workers started their protest march from the Peshawar Press Club and gathered at Sher Shah Suri Road.
The protest was organised by the Khyber Union of Journalists (KhUJ) on the call of the PFUJ.
KhUJ president Saif-ul-Islam Saifi, Peshawar Press Club president Alamgir Khan, political leaders Sikandar Hayat Khan Sherpao, Maulana Abdul Jalil Jan, advocate Farah advocate Haji Mohammad Afzal and the president of the KP Chamber of Commerce and Industry addressed the participants of the protest.
Speaking on the occasion, leaders of the media community recalled the ordeal faced by journalists and other media workers during the recent militancy when around 115 journalists lost their lives while performing their duties, but successive governments neither launched any investigation into the matter nor arrested the culprits or extended any financial support to members of the affected families.
Quetta
In Quetta and other parts of Balochistan, hundreds of journalists, editors, media workers and local newspapers’ owners also staged protest rallies.
Members of the Balochistan Union of Journalists, Quetta Press Club and workers of different print and electronic media organisations staged a protest rally outside the Quetta Press Club.
Dawn Report
• Published in Dawn, October 10th, 2018:
https://www.dawn.com/news/1438058
Pakistan military ’quietly’ stifling press with intimidation
Press freedom group says media outlets are being forced to self-censor including through violence against reporters.
12 Sept 2018
The CPJ report gives voice to several Pakistani journalists, who say they have been subjected to intimidation tactics [AP]
Freedom of the press is under threat in Pakistan where its powerful military has used fear, intimidation and even violence to push journalists into self-censorship, a media rights group said.
A report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) released on Wednesday said the Pakistani army has “quietly but effectively set restrictions on reporting” by establishing “lines of control” to gag the media.
The strategy includes “barring access to regions ... encouraging self-censorship through direct and indirect methods of intimidation, including ... allegedly instigating violence against reporters”, CPJ said.
“Privately, senior editors and journalists say the conditions for the free press are as bad as when the country was under military dictatorship, and journalists were flogged and newspapers forced to close.”
The military, Pakistan’s most powerful institution, routinely denies interference in politics or with the media.
While the army has not responded to the report, Pakistan’s Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry said the government has not received any complaints of intimidation from journalists.
’Controlling narrative’
For its report, CPJ spoke to journalists and media organisations, including Geo News, Pakistan’s most popular television news channel, and the English-language newspaper Dawn.
The report said cable distributors had stopped distributing Geo’s programmes, cutting off about 80 percent of Pakistan’s households ahead of general elections.
Reuters news agency reported that at least two sources at Geo News said in April the army asked them to refrain from reporting on alleged military involvement in the incarceration of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who was removed from office in July 2017 by Pakistan’s Supreme Court.
Similarly, the editor of Dawn said the circulation of the newspaper was blocked in several places at the behest of the military.
“They’re clearly not happy with Dawn’s policies. They want Dawn to stay away from certain subjects,” its editor Zaffar Abbas said.
The CPJ report said a journalist was beaten in a brazen attack in the capital Islamabad, while another alleged he was assaulted by members of the security forces in civilian clothing in the southern city of Karachi.
“The mindset [of the military] now is to control the total narrative and reduce the diversity of opinion, so anything that is going against their narrative, they see as a threat,” a director at a news broadcaster said.
Indirect pressure
The CPJ report said the army, intelligence service or groups with ties to the military were linked to half of the 22 killings of journalists in the past decade in Pakistan.
While that number is on a decline, the report adds that the military has found indirect ways of intimidation.
“People in the military and sometimes in government have discovered that there are indirect ways of putting influence on the press,” said CPJ Asia coordinator Steven Butler, who wrote the report, citing unexplained abductions and assaults as examples.
The report comes out after the general election, in which the victory of former cricket hero Imran Khan triggered widespread allegations of the Pakistani army fixing the vote.
Some of Pakistan’s biggest media outlets had alleged they were pressured to tilt their coverage towards Khan during the campaign, an accusation the military denied.
SOURCE: NEWS AGENCIES
Drop in journalist killings in Pakistan masks decline in press freedom
September 12, 2018 12:01 AM ET
CPJ report finds military pressures media to self-censor
Washington D.C., September 12, 2018—Pakistan’s press is under pressure as the country’s powerful military quietly but effectively encourages self-censorship, the Committee to Protect Journalists found in its report, “Acts of Intimidation: In Pakistan, journalists’ fear and censorship grow even as fatal violence declines.”The report will be accompanied by a short documentary film and a panel discussion at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.
The report, based on interviews with journalists during a mission to Pakistan this year, found that measures to stomp out terrorism in the country have gone hand-in-hand with increased pressure on the media. The military bars access to certain areas, uses direct and indirect acts of intimidation, and even allegedly instigates violence against reporters to prevent critical reporting. Freelancers and journalists from established media companies said that to avoid retaliation, they often tone down or avoid controversial but newsworthy stories.
CPJ research shows fewer journalists were killed in retaliation for their work in recent years, but impunity remains an issue, with the military, intelligence, or military-linked and political groups the suspected source of fire in half of the 22 journalist murders in the past decade.
“While the decline in the killing of journalists is encouraging, the government needs to counteract pressures that have resulted in rampant self-censorship and threats to the media,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Steven Butler. “Pakistan must address the disturbing trend of impunity and attacks on journalists to shore up this faltering pillar of democracy.”
The report, written by Butler, includes recommendations to Pakistan’s government and news media owners and editors. CPJ’s multimedia producer Mustafa Hameed contributed research and reporting, and produced the accompanying documentary.
A panel will discuss the findings of the report at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., at 2 p.m. EDT on September 12. Hameed will present the documentary. Butler will be joined on the panel by Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Wilson Center’s Asia program; Farahnaz Ispahani, a global fellow at the center; Madiha Afzal, adjunct assistant professor of global policy at John Hopkins SAIS and nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution; and Anwar Iqbal, Washington correspondent for Pakistani paper, Dawn.
Note to Editors:
“Acts of Intimidation: In Pakistan, journalists’ fear and censorship grow even as fatal violence declines” is available in English. For questions, or to arrange an interview with CPJ experts in English or Urdu, email press cpj.org.
###
CPJ is an independent, nonprofit organization that works to safeguard press freedom worldwide.
Media contacts:
Bebe Santa-Wood
Communications Associate
press cpj.org
212-300-9032
• CPJ. September 12, 2018 12:01 AM ET:
https://cpj.org/2018/09/drop-in-journalist-killings-in-pakistan-masks-decl.php
Shutdown of Pakistani TV network hints at army’s bid for control
Geo concedes to military pressure after going off air for two weeks and agrees to self-censor.
Pakistan’s largest and by far its most popular television network, Geo, was pushed off the airwaves in at least 80% of the country last month, many suspected the work of the military, though few would say it.
“First we used to have missing persons, now we have missing TV channels,” said Babar Sattar, a lawyer who regularly appears as an analyst on Geo, referring to the hundreds of Pakistanis whose disappearance has been linked to security services over the years. “Just like with missing persons, everyone knows who the culprit is but saying it out loud would get you into even more trouble.”
Earlier this month, Sattar announced that The News, a daily newspaper owned by Jang Group, the same media house that owns Geo, would not be publishing his column because it was “ordered not to touch sensitive topics”. A few days later, another popular columnist, Mosharraf Zaidi wrote that for the first time in over a decade, The News had refused to publish him too.
Both had written about a protest movement led by thousands of ethnic Pashtuns from the tribal areas against decades of military operations and abductions by security forces. Pakistan’s all-powerful army chief has called the movement, now in its third month, “engineered” – a veiled reference to the country’s arch rivals India and Afghanistan – while a majority of local media have not covered its rallies.
Many TV channels and newspapers are choosing to self-censor content critical of the military in what journalists, rights activists and analysts see as the army’s most powerful and sophisticated push in decades, in an attempt to suppress freedom of expression and manipulate public opinion before July’s general election.
“Given that the military retains a tight grip over cable networks in most districts, all fingers point unambiguously to its shady involvement,” said Dr Farzana Shaikh, an Asia-Pacific fellow at Chatham House. “The latest moves suggest that the military intends to act decisively to regain the initiative and control the narrative in the run-up to general elections.”
The “narrative” the army ostensibly wants to block involves a vitriolic and very public campaign by ousted Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif accusing the military and the judiciary of jointly working against him.
Sharif was removed from office in July 2017 in a unanimous supreme court verdict over corruption allegations, and has for decades had a tense relationship with the country’s powerful military. In recent days, he has travelled around Pakistan addressing rallies and criticising the military and the judiciary for micromanaging politics to keep his party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), from retaining a parliamentary majority.
Geo did not shy from covering Sharif’s accusations in its daily bulletins and primetime talk shows. And in mid-February, it was quietly taken off the air in army-administered residential areas and cantonments.
However, the big blow came on 30 March, when all Geo news, entertainment and sports channels were blocked by cable operators in most of the country.
The channels remained off air for over two weeks and only slowly began to reappear on screens last week after what Geo executives describe as “marathon meetings” with top military officials, including the head of the military’s media wing, in which Geo agreed to cease favourable coverage of Sharif and censor any criticism of the army.
“We won’t completely toe the army line but we will have to self-censor in order to survive,” one executive told the Guardian, requesting anonymity as he did not want to jeopardise the negotiations. “Our coverage of Nawaz Sharif will have to be tweaked.”
The army’s media wing did not respond to calls for comment about the meetings.
“We are being blacked out perhaps because we push a narrative of free and fair elections, of bolstering democratically elected governments, of pointing out the mistakes and transgressions of various institutions, and that doesn’t go down well,” Geo president Imran Aslam said in an interview.
He declined to comment on the negotiations with the military but added that the channels had remained off air for weeks despite the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority repeatedly instructing cable operators to restore it and the chief justice calling the blockade a constitutional violation.
“So who has the power?” Aslam asked.
In Pakistan, the military establishment has for decades exerted great influence over courts, media, and politics. It has also been accused of acting with impunity against suspected militants, dissidents and journalists, using intimidation, torture and even extrajudicial killings. The military denies these accusations.
The army has a particularly tense history with Geo. The network was first ordered to shut by former president Pervez Musharraf in 2007, when it refused to abide by a new media code. In 2014, cable television providers were ordered by the defence ministry and military to drop Geo from their lineup after it aired allegations that the head of the army’s intelligence wing was behind the assassination attempt against its star anchor, Hamid Mir.
Academic and columnist Umair Javed said it did not portend well for media freedom or democracy that Pakistan was “heading into an election where the largest political party in the country believes it is being systematically targeted, and the biggest media house is facing a suppression campaign.”
“Pakistan is being pushed into another season of silence and we will all wake up to dangerous consequences,” Aslam said. “If people don’t like Geo, they can change the channel; but once you take the remote away, next you’ll take their vote away.”
Mehreen Zahra-Malik in Islamabad
• The Guardian, Mon 23 Apr 2018 05.00 BST Last modified on Mon 30 Apr 2018 16.17 BST:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/23/shutdown-of-pakistani-tv-network-hints-at-armys-bid-for-control
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