On 10 January 2018, I was on my way to the Islamabad airport in a taxi, when it was intercepted on the highway. I was almost kidnapped by armed men, who I believe are from the Pakistan Army, but I escaped at the last minute.
I was lucky to escape the country, but my journalist colleagues in Pakistan haven’t been as fortunate. The situation for the press has only worsened under the new Imran Khan-led regime, whose political party came into power in July 2018, and is considered close to the army.
Pakistan’s Clampdown On Freedom Of Press
Given several such attacks (like the one on me) in the last year or so against Pakistani journalists, the press has been pushed into self-censorship. A recent study found out that 88 percent of Pakistani journalists exercise self-censorship when reporting on sensitive issues like the military, religion, human rights etc.
A leading news channel Geo News was taken off cable networks, and one of the oldest newspapers, Dawn's supply continues to remain disrupted in the country while facing treason charges, because these organisations have been critical of Pakistani military.
According to Freedom Network, an independent media-monitoring body, 26 journalists have been killed in Pakistan in just five years, and more than 100 have been murdered in the past decade and a half. What’s worse, a majority of these killings remain unsolved, and are related to conflict reporting.
Threat of Losing One’s Livelihood
Now journalists are even facing economic threats: hundreds of news practitioners have lost their jobs in Pakistan in recent months over a financial crunch that seems manufactured. This, since new media organisations are launching news channels at the same time as some news channels and news papers are shutting down over ad revenues being dried up.
The internet and social media are also being heavily censored in Pakistan, and reports suggest that this trend has increased in the last one year. More than 800,000 websites are banned in the country by the internet regulatory body (according to a recent report).
Giant social media companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been working with the Pakistani government, and have been helping the authorities in my country to silence social media users. Online activists also regularly get abducted by intelligence officials from the Pakistan Army.
In this environment, it is best to stay away from the country as I did for the last year. But even abroad, they are harassing dissidents like me.
Heckling, And Campaigns of Hate
When I recently spoke in Washington, DC at a conference of Pakistani dissidents organised by Husain Haqqani (the former Pakistan Ambassador to the US), who, like me, is in exile too, a handful of Pakistani men tried to gate crash this invite-only event and protested when they were not allowed to come in.
Some Pakistani journalists who reported this incident later claimed that they were tasked by the military official at the Pakistani embassy in DC to use the videos of this staged protest, and give it extensive media coverage.
Then we also faced an organised campaign of hate, initiated against us on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The Pakistani military allegedly runs social media cells with troll armies that attack independent voices in Pakistan. I know of this because I met some such youngsters at a military-run university in Islamabad a few years ago, when I went to give a lecture.
Amid Death Threats & Struggle, Hope for a Better Pakistan
Military personnel involved in managing the press (from back home) have also repeatedly reached out to me directly. Three times publicly via social media, and few times privately via phone, asking me to return, but assuring my guarantee only if I start doing “positive reporting”, and stop writing or publicly speaking critically about the Pakistan Army. (‘Positive journalism’ is a term that the chief of the military media cell General Asif Ghafoor recently spoke about in a press conference).
I was also advised to not visit Pakistan embassies and Pakistan-friendly countries. Similar advisories have been received by other Pakistanis critical of the military.
In this last one year, I have thought many times about giving up my fight to speak up about Pakistan and the wrongs there, and focus on something else in life.
I want to see a Pakistan where human rights are not abused, where pluralism is celebrated and freedom of expression is a guarantee. And a Pakistan where I can return to to live again and not be killed.
https://www.thequint.com/voices/blogs/taha-siddiqui-pakistan-army-freedom-of-press-clampdown-death-threats
No comments:
Post a Comment