Saturday, February 15, 2020
#Pakistan's clampdown on the freedom of expression - Draconian rules
IN an exercise that bears all the telltale signs of a clampdown on the freedom of expression, the government has approved a set of rules through which it plans to regulate social media. Under these directives, social media giants such as WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook and others will be required to establish a physical presence in Pakistan, register an office in three months, set up database servers here in the coming year and oblige the government when it requests user data and content. The rules also dictate that the tech companies remove content deemed ‘extremist’ by the government — failure to do so will result in an Rs500m fine. What is most troubling is how broadly these rules define extremism, as “violent, vocal or active opposition to fundamental values of the state including the security, integrity or defense of Pakistan, public order, decency or morality, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”.
Government spokespersons have offered various justifications for these measures. Fawad Chaudhry says the move is an economic decision that will increase advertising revenue. The PTA suggested these rules are a statutory requirement to initiate official engagement with these tech giants. Firdous Ashiq Awan revealed that the regulations will help protect ‘national integrity’. Some also point out that it is, in fact, the PML-N-sanctioned Peca which formed the legal basis for these rules. But without the scrutiny of parliament or input from digital rights groups, these rules raise serious questions and are yet another reminder of how eager the state is to gain access to encrypted citizen information. No doubt, authorities have legitimate concerns about the presence of hate speech, terrorism and child pornography on these forums. The government has also voiced its reservations against the selective editorial discretion of these platforms when it comes to the Kashmir issue. While there are genuine concerns, there is also the reality that Pakistan has a history of controversially invoking notorious euphemisms such as ‘morality’, ‘security’ and ‘integrity’ to justify its control of free speech. Activists and journalists have been harassed under similar pretexts. The recent trend of the state pursuing sedition cases against those critical of alleged state excesses is an example of the authoritarian approach to dissenting voices. In this environment, the manner in which these ominously worded rules were hurriedly released is cause for deep concern and are rightly being criticized.
The Asia Internet Coalition, which is an industry association of tech companies, has categorically stated that the rules appear to erode the personal safety and privacy of citizens and that they also undermine free expression. They have urged the government to ‘reconsider’ them. If the government wishes to engage with these companies and is sincere about a digital economy, it would be better off adopting a less hostile and more transparent approach.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1534610/draconian-rules
Pakistan’s Efforts to Silence Dissenters Amplifies Their Causes
The colonial-era relic of “sedition” is being used in present-day Pakistan to whip dissenting politicians, outspoken journalists, writers, poets, artists, lawyers and rights activists.
The offense is defined in section 124-A of the Pakistan Penal Code that charges citizens with jeopardizing safety and stability of the state, spreading hatred and feelings of disloyalty among the people, and creating public disorder.
This section, which India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had once termed “highly objectionable and obnoxious,” should have been scrapped after the end of the colonial era that paved way for the emergence of two independent states of India and Pakistan out of British India in 1947. But the legacy, among many others, lingers on to silence opponents and tame the forthright and undaunted.
Charging political opponents with “sedition” by labeling them “ghaddar” (traitor), anti-state, and foreign agents to suppress their voices is an old tactic in Pakistan. But it has touched new heights over the past year due to its arbitrary use to silence the critics and opponents.
Fatima Jinah, sister of Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinah, who is officially known is Quaid-e-Azam or the greatest leader, was among the first who was labelled as a threat to Pakistan. She was then labeled as a foreign agent when she challenged the then -military dictator Ayub Khan. Her death is shrouded in mystery, many believe she did not die a natural death.
“How could you question someone’s patriotism” was the key question raised by a Pakistani court while hearing a case concerning the arrest of civil rights activists in the country’s federal capital Islamabad on January 28.
Justice Athar Minallah, the chief justice of the Islamabad High Court, then granted post-arrest bail to 23 activists who were protesting the arrest of Manzoor Pashteen, leader of the two-year-old civil rights movement PTM or Pashtun Tahafuz (Protection) Movement. Pashteen was arrested in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar on January 27 under five different charges, including conspiracy and sedition.
In what seems to be Pakistan’s new normal, those following the state narrative on national, regional and international issues in toto are the true patriots, while those challenging the official line are reckoned among the ranks of traitors, anti-state, foreign agents.
This standard of patriotism encompasses a wide range of issues including national politics, regional conflicts, relations with other states, and militant proxies with the fresh addition of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the much-multibillion project involving Chinese investment in infrastructure development.
It is as easy to understand as this: When former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif questioned the military’s role in supporting proxies, he was loathed as sympathetic toward India and was targeted with a vicious campaign of “Modi Ka Jo Yar Hai, Ghaddar Hai” which means whoever is Modi’s friend, is a traitor. Cyril Almeida, the journalist who reported the 2016 story linked above had to temporarily leave Pakistan. In October 2019, Almeida announced his resignation from Dawn and the end of his Sunday column.
On the contrary, no feathers were ruffled when Prime Minister Imran Khan told the audience at a think tank event in New York in September 2019 that Pakistan’s army and military spy agency trained al-Qaeda and then maintained links with the militants afterwards. Moreover, it was Imran Khan who wished victory for Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with the hope that his victory will pave way for “some kind of settlement” in Kashmir.
In fact, traitor, foreign agent and infidel are the time-tested tools being used in Pakistan to silence and vilify opponents. Many of the Taliban who conduct suicidal missions that target individuals, places and political parties have been brainwashed about the faith and religious views of their targets. For them, politicians like Benazir Bhutto, Bashir Bilour, Salmaan Taseer and many others were infidels, out of the ambit of Islam.
Similarly, once declared as traitor, anti-state or a foreign agent, and that too by the state-backed propaganda machine, an individual or group of individuals not only lose due standing in the society, but also face dire threats to their lives.
For example, former spokesman for the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), Pakistan military’s media wing, Major General Asif Ghafoor warned the PTM leadership that “their time is up” during a wide-ranging news conference at the military’s general headquarters in April 2019, he accused them of getting money from Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) and India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). There were times when some nationalist leaders used to be accused of working for and getting money from the Russian KGB.
The charges and arrests, threats and abductions, taking television shows and interviews off the air and blocking social media accounts are most likely intended to inspire self-censorship. But unlike the past, such measures seem to be proving counterproductive in the age of social media.
Filmmaker and actor Sarmad Khoosat’s movie Zindagi Tamasha got more publicity on social media when Pakistan’s Central Board of Film Censors advised him against its release. A radical Islamic group had called for protests against the film, which was scheduled to be released on January 24.
The same month, authorities raided the offices of a Pakistani publisher and confiscated Urdu translation copies of author Mohammed Hanif’s book. Published in 2008 in English language, A Case of Exploding Mangoes is a satire about the mystery surrounding the death of Pakistan military dictator General Zia ul Haq in a plane crash in 1988. News about the raid, with widespread condemnations and people’s quest to get more information about the Urdu-translated version of the book, were everywhere on social media within no time.
Pashteen’s January 27 arrest, apparently meant to suppress his voice, triggered a debate on social media in Pakistan besides attracting wide coverage internationally. It may have taken him months, if not years, to get such attention had he not been arrested.
Like Pashteen, a majority of the leaders accused of sedition or labeled as anti-state and foreign agents demanded their political and social rights guaranteed under the constitution. “We are not seeking a violent revolution, but we are determined to push Pakistan back toward a constitutional order,” Pashteen wrote in a New York Times op-ed in February 2019.
Then and now, the struggle is the same. Only time has changed. And the changing times demand a change in the approach. Instead of silencing the lawful demands of the peaceful citizens, it is time for the state to accept and recognize their lawful rights.
Pakistan’s Army Continues to Mollycoddle Terrorists and Hound its Critics
Mohammad Taqi
There are enough reasons to be skeptical about the recent sentencing of JuD chief Hafiz Saeed.
Pakistan’s all-powerful army has a long history of siring, pampering and letting loose jihadi terrorists, at home and across borders. It has also sold-out or shunned certain jihadis when they have spun out of its orbit, and occasionally fought them when they bucked its diktat. It has signed scores of agreements with the jihadis, feted and garlanded their leaders, and appeased them when it wanted. No civilian leader or government has had any say in this project nor the ability to curtail its blowback.
The recent news that Ehsanullah Ehsan, the ex-spokesman of the infamous terrorist group, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) – who was in the Pakistani army’s custody for over two years – has fled to Turkey, shows that the top khaki brass continues to mollycoddle terrorists of assorted hues. The army has many problems, but poor discipline is certainly not one of them. It is an extremely organized outfit with a top-down, well-knit and well-defined command and control structure. A most-wanted, high-profile terrorist escaping from its detention is unimaginable. The army’s coyness about Ehsan’s escape and its friendly media rationalizing Ehsan’s “contributions” to the army’s effort to neutralise the TTP smacks of collusion, not incompetence on the part of the captors. And there is no way in hell that the army has cut a deal with a top TTP operative, without the knowledge and approval of the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), General Qamar Javed Bajwa in the current instance.
Regardless of whether Ehsan made good his escape on his own or was allowed to flee, the buck stops with General Bajwa. That the man who, on behalf of the TTP and later its breakaway incarnation Jamat-ul-Ahrar (JuA), had gleefully claimed the slaughter of thousands of Pakistanis and the maiming of others, including Nobel-laureate Malala Yousufzai went scot-free on General Bajwa’s watch is a disgrace in its own right. But a bigger humiliation is the Pakistani army’s criminal silence over this matter. After all, among the TTP’s most heinous crimes were the wholesale killings of schoolchildren at the Army Public School (APS), Peshawar, murderous attacks on the army itself and desecration of servicemen’s corpses by playing football with their severed heads.
The outgoing Director General Inter-Services Public Relations (DG ISPR), Major General Asif Ghafoor had boasted in April 2017: “I want to take this opportunity to announce that Ehsanullah Ehsan, the former spokesperson of the TTP and a leader of the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, has turned himself in to our security agencies.” Ehsan was never brought to book or faced any trial.
Now he has walked away, without as much as a rap on the knuckles, right out of the Pakistan army’s safehouse. After the parent of a child killed in the APS attack filed a petition, the authorities had, however, told the Peshawar high court that they “would continue to keep him under custody and investigation”. Ehsan has claimed in an audio clip attributed to him that he had opted to flee as the army didn’t keep its end of the bargain. He had clearly been cut a deal, otherwise two years is more than enough time to indict, prosecute and punish a terrorist who loudly and repeatedly owned the murders of thousands of innocents, on behalf of his outfit(s).
The army had paraded him before the cameras and then sat him down – clad in a crisp salwar-kameez suit and waistcoat—with a chosen television anchor for an ostensibly confessional statement. However, Ehsan – appearing extremely comfortable – essentially had indicted the Afghan and Indian intelligence agencies for propping up the TTP. The TTP’s baby-faced butcher, who had gleefully claimed scores of attacks and threatened many more, was being housed in a villa in Peshawar’s suburban Hayatabad Township, in the midst of civilians, indicating that there wasn’t even an intention of bringing him to justice. Ehsan also sired a child during this sham custody.
Kid-glove treatment of terrorists
The Pakistani army’s kid-glove treatment of its favourite terrorists isn’t anything new. The author Arif Jamal had noted that Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operatives had lived largely under custody, enjoyed conjugal visit privileges and while in jail, the mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, “Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi even fathered a son who is being raised as an LeT jihadist”. Jamal wrote that the jihadists had nicknamed the boy Maulana Adialavi, after Rawalpindi’s Adiala prison, where he had been conceived.
One, therefore, has to look at the just-announced conviction of Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the chief of the LeT’s parent outfit Jamat-ud-Dawa (JuD), on terror-financing and organiSing charges, with industrial-strength suspicion. The verdict was perfectly timed before a key meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), in Paris on February 16. In its October 2019 review, the FATF had kept Pakistan on its grey list and given it till this February to take more measures to avoid being placed on the blacklist. Blacklisting by the FATF, a powerful inter-governmental body that monitors terror-financing, and makes policy recommendations to financial entities and governments about threats to the international financing systems, could be a major blow to Pakistan’s sagging economy, which got an International Monetary Fund (IMF) lifeline just last year.
It is not just that the Pakistan army continues to hug its terrorist proxies tight but also that it is systematically and constantly hounding the critics of its jihadist project, which indicates that those policies and practices are very much in place.
The latest target
The latest target of the army’s war on dissent is Gul Bukhari, a fearless human rights activist and opinion writer. Bukhari – who happens to be the daughter of a retired general and daughter-in-law of another one – has been a fierce critic of the army’s anti-democratic policies and its jihadist practices, for years. She had to flee Pakistan after she was abducted by the army’s operatives in June 2018. This time around, Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has apparently issued notice for Bukhari to appear before it. The charge against her is – wait for it – terrorist activities by virtue of criticizing the army on social media. And if she fails to appear before the FIA, her property can be confiscated. Everyone and their aunt knows in Pakistan that the FIA’s anti-terrorism wing would not have initiated such frivolous and malicious proceedings without the army twisting its tail.
Pakistan is under virtual martial law, with Prime Minister Imran Khan merely serving as a civilian fig leaf under General Bajwa.
Gul Bukhari is not the first journalist to face the army’s wrath and she won’t be the last. In fact, one of the first actions of the Pakistan army was to muzzle the independent media, when the first military dictator, General Ayub Khan, clamped martial law. A respected left-liberal publishing house, the Progressive Papers Limited (PPL) was taken over at gunpoint by Ayub Khan’s regime in April 1959. The PPL ran the English daily, Pakistan Times, the Urdu daily Imroze, and an Urdu periodical Lail-o-Nahar. The Pakistan Times had been brought out by the veteran Marxist Mian Iftikharuddin, who had joined the Muslim League, at the prodding of none other than the country’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Not only were the publications taken over but the printing press was appropriated and the properties of Mian Iftikharuddin threatened. In an article titled ‘Ayub’s attack on Progressive Papers’, the venerable editor of the Pakistan Times, Mazhar Ali Khan was to write in 1972:
“Many will probably conclude that the dictatorship’s gravest crime was its deliberate destruction of press freedom because so many other evils flowed from this act of denying to the people of Pakistan one of their fundamental rights”.
This was true then and remains truer now. I have been one of the earliest causalities of the Pakistan army’s present war on dissent, along with the respected Baloch rights champion Mir Muhammad Ali Talpur and veteran editor Rashed Rahman. The noose continued to tighten from there on, with prominent writers, journalists, and even former parliamentarians getting purged out of the publications that had carried their work for years. The common denominator was that all of the sanctioned media personalities were critical either of the Pakistani army’s domestic encroachment into the political domain or its policy to prosecute foreign policy goals through the use of jihadi proxies or both.
Believing its own lies and half-truths
The Pakistani army, for its part, seems to believe its own lies and half-truths, the most pernicious one of which is that it is the guardian of Pakistan’s geographical and ideological frontiers. Nothing can be farther than truth. The army in Pakistan remains a colonial construct in its mindset and actions. It was nothing but a continuation of the British Indian Army, through the regiments, which Pakistan had inherited at the 1947 Partition of India.
It anointed itself as the praetorian guard over the new state in just over a decade but never developed a national character. In its theory and practice, the Pakistani army has maintained a disdain for free speech and dissenting opinions, just like its precursors did during the British Raj. Even the harassment of journalists and targeting their possessions is a direct continuation of the colonial era. One of the first actions of the British Raj after seizing Delhi in 1857 was to hang Maulvi Muhammad Baqir, the owner-publisher of Delhi Urdu Akhbar, and burn his property to ground. Later on, the British seized – at gunpoint – the press and even personal library of the Communist Party of India’s leader Maulana Hasrat Mohani. Mohani had refused to divulge the real name and identity of a contributor who had written an article critical of the British colonial power, in his paper Urdu-e-Mua’lla.
Activists and media persons aren’t the only ones facing the army’s wrath. In the inglorious colonial tradition of jailing politicians and arresting leaders, the army has, through its civilian façade, orchestrated the arrest of two former PMs, Nawaz Sharif and Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, one ex-president Asif Zardari, assorted parliamentarians on trumped-up graft allegations, and political leaders like Manzur Pashteen on cooked-up law and order charges. All of them have opposed the army’s political ambitions, to a varying degree. Pashteen also flayed the army’s double game of showcasing to the world that it is fighting jihadi terror, while harbouring the same terrorists.
Pakistan’s army is unlikely to change its ambitions, strategy and tactics to subdue the Pakistani people without political forces closing ranks to confront it. Civil society activists, rights defenders and advocates, journalists and media persons can certainly raise awareness about what the Pakistan army’s role and goal is, but only organised political parties can do the heavy lifting.
The army has succeeded thus far by playing political parties, or groups within them, against each other. The only way forward is for the parties to close rank on a minimum common program to push the army back towards borders and barracks. Pakistan’s major political parties had signed, what they called a Charter of Democracy (CoD), nearly 15 years ago with the intent to forge unity to push and keep the army out of the country’s political arena. The former PMs, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, were the prime movers of the process.
An updated CoD is the need of the hour but with Nawaz Sharif facing serious health issues and Benazir Bhutto tragically gone, does the available political leadership have the will and wherewithal to pull off something like that? One seriously doubts that, but politics is the art of the possible. And that is where the dissident voices, writers, activists have a role to play – by prodding, nudging and cajoling the politicians to rise to the occasion.
In the most recent development, Pakistani authorities are now seeking to implement laws to gag social media. This ominous move is patterned after China, where the authoritarian state controls social media with an iron fist. In Pakistan, social media has played a vibrant role as a vehicle for dissent. After the traditional media was muzzled, social media platforms have so far been the firewall that the Bajwa-Imran hybrid regime hasn’t been able to cross successfully. Defending these last vestiges of freedom of expression would be imperative for political leaders and cadres, as well as the rights activists.
We’re peacefully demanding change in Pakistan. The military says we’re ‘traitors.’
By Mohsin DawarFor two years now, the Pashtun Protection Movement (known as the PTM) has been taking to the streets to demand the observance of our constitutional rights. Above all we have been demanding accountability from the military, which has used the war on terrorism as an excuse to kidnap, kill and intimidate citizens living in the northwest, most of them ethnic Pashtuns. At 35 million, we are the largest single ethnic group in the country. Throughout our campaign for change we have observed strict principles of nonviolence, and we have worked to keep our actions rigorously within the framework of Pakistan’s constitution, which explicitly allows for freedom of speech and assembly. Yet our activists have faced censorship, arrest, and in some cases death. On Jan. 27, the government arrested our leader, Manzoor Pashteen, on charges of “sedition,” the same excuse the British once used to enforce colonialism. The next day, I was arrested during a demonstration against his detention — though I can’t say I was terribly surprised. (Last year I spent four months in prison for my political activity.) I am now free again (for the moment); Manzoor is still in custody. But the campaign against us continues. It is not the elected government of Prime Minister Imran Khan that is behind this crackdown. It is the real government of the country — namely, the military. All of which raises the question: What are the generals so afraid of? Current army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa has made it clear that he has a problem with the constitution. In early 2018, Bajwa criticized the 18th Amendment, which was passed by a unanimous vote of parliament in 2010. It was designed to prevent any further military dictatorships and strengthened the federal nature of the country by increasing provincial autonomy and removing anti-democratic clauses. Any other democracy would have sacked a top soldier for daring to blatantly criticize the constitution. Instead, he was granted a new term in office. Our insistence on the observance of constitutional norms and demands for greater democracy clearly is not to his taste. The generals also regard us a threat because we stand in the way of their larger plans. They are eagerly awaiting the final U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which allow them to welcome the Taliban back into power. Yet our movement, which denounces the military’s support for the Taliban, apparently presents a challenge that they cannot abide. The only Pakistan Pashtuns the generals can tolerate are those who support the Afghan Taliban. Our demands for accountability undermine the destructive status quo, one in which the military selects and cultivates terrorist groups that show a willingness to submit to its instructions. We demand an end to military operations that failed to root out terrorists and indiscriminately targeted civilian populations. We demand the end of extrajudicial killings, so that those who havesuffered can finally feel safe about speaking out. We demand that those who engineered the abductions of innocent people be brought to court to face responsibility for their actions. Above all, we demand an end to the Pakistani military’s support for the terrorists, who are now regrouping again. The recent escape from custody of Ehsanullah Ehsan, a former spokesman for the notorious Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan jihadist group, is a case in point. The scandal has raised fresh questions about authorities’ readiness to give leeway to religious extremists while reserving repression for pro-democracy protesters like the PTM. Those who wish to air extremist ideology still have many opportunities to express their views in the Pakistani media. Our movement, by contrast, faced an almost complete blackout on mainstream media. These days it is at least possible to mention the existence of the PTM, though almost always in conjunction with propaganda and lies directed at us. Even reporters in the English-language media, which usually enjoys greater freedom than its Urdu-language counterparts, find themselves under pressure to limit their commentary or reporting on the PTM.To get our message out, we rely mainly on social media. Even there we face continuous harassment, allowed by the country’s loosely defined cyber-crime laws. Meanwhile, our supporters who are brave enough to take part in public protests face arrest or worse. Those who organize or take part in our political gatherings known that are likely to face sedition charges. The Pakistani establishment, led by the military, has gone to extraordinary lengths to demonize our movement. As the police shoved me into their van after arresting me last month, one of the constables started chanting anti-Indian slogans, as if he thought that this would anger me. This is because the official media routinely accuse us of collaborating with Delhi, an absurd effort to discredit us as “foreign agents.” When the Pakistani regime recruits Pashtuns for war and terrorism, it considers us patriots. But when we ask for our rights, we are no longer even considered Pakistanis. These crackdowns merely reinforce our determination to demand justice. The writing is on the wall for our tormentors. Our people want to live as citizens of Pakistan, not as its subjects.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/14/were-peacefully-demanding-change-pakistan-military-says-were-traitors/#comments-wrapper
Chairman PPP Bilawal Bhutto Zardari strongly condemns the murder of PPP MPA Shehnaz Ansari
In a statement issued here, the PPP Chairman said that Shehnaz Ansari was a committed Party worker whose killing should be investigated properly and culprits punished.
Bilawal Bhutto Zardari expressed solidarity with the members of the bereaved family and prayed for the departed soul.
https://www.ppp.org.pk/2020/02/15/chairman-ppp-bilawal-bhutto-zardari-strongly-condemns-the-murder-of-ppp-mpa-shehnaz-ansari/
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