Aboard the Democracy Train

by Nafisa Hoodbhoy

  I discovered a strange notoriety in the furor that had been caused by the attacks. Soon after the incident, as my father drove home he was confronted by the police. A traffic light was changing from orange to red when my father had passed through and the constable signaled my father to stop.

  Traffic violations are extremely common in Karachi but when a police officer finally catches up with a motorist, the music begins. As my father stopped his car the policeman sauntered over, opened the side door and slid into the back. That, everyone in Pakistan knows, is the prelude to taking a bribe.

  My father mischievously exploited the situation.

  “Do you know who I am?” he asked the policeman.

  “No” the cop replied with some trepidation.

  “I am Hoodbhoy, father of Nafisa… you know the reporter from Dawn who was attacked recently.”

  The policeman was impressed but decided to check out the facts. I was at home for lunch during my reporting assignments when I got a phone call from the police official, who had decided to check out my identity. When I confirmed who I was, he named the person with him, saying, “He claims he’s your father. Should I let him go?”

  I could just see my father, with his sense of fun, testing out the policeman. Embarrassed, I demanded he be released at once. A short while later my father walked in chuckling, saying the policeman had apologized profusely for the inconvenience!

  Exchanging Places With Daniel Pearl

  A decade after my knife attack, Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl went missing in Karachi. He was on perhaps the world’s most dangerous assignment. The wounds from US retaliation against 9/11 plotters – who had been traced to Afghanistan – were raw when Pearl arrived in Pakistan to investigate Al Qaeda militants’ links to the military and multiple affiliated intelligence agencies.

  I felt like I had traded places with Pearl. In 2002, I taught in Western Massachusetts, where Pearl had worked as a reporter in the 1980s. While I lived in his neck of the woods, the WSJ reporter arrived in Karachi to probe the Al Qaeda network, talking to some of my contacts in the city about how militants had regrouped to escape US bombardment in Afghanistan.

  In a nation where the sentiment is (at best) moderately anti-US, Pearl’s timing couldn’t have been worse. In a Karachi, fast evacuated by foreigners, he stood out as an American and a Jew. Whilst the military ostensibly sided with the US, journalists who sought to reveal its covert ties with militants were treated like spies. It did not surprise me, therefore, when Pearl’s kidnapping provoked former President Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf to express irritation at the “undue interference” in the nation’s internal affairs.

  Local reporters too watched Pearl’s brief foray into Pakistan with skepticism. My colleagues in Karachi knew he had gone missing but did not leap into action. Just as Pearl went missing, a former newspaper colleague of mine was picked up as he investigated the shady links of a mafia don linked to the December 2001 attack on the Indian parliament in New Dehli. As journalists built up pressure, he was released but remained uncharacteristically silent.

  Although the Bush administration’s invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 brought thousands of journalists to Pakistan’s border areas, Pearl paid the ultimate price for leaving the pack. After Pearl was revealed to have been killed, I met the last person he had contacted in Karachi prior to his disappearance: former chief of the Citizens Police Liaison Committee (CPLC), Jameel Yusuf.

  The CPLC chief, who often gave me scoops on political crime, told me that he had briefed Pearl about Al Qaeda’s affiliations with terrorist networks in Pakistan. However, Yusuf says that Pearl did not divulge anything about his mission in Pakistan. With his Sherlock Holmes instincts, the CPLC chief noticed that Pearl’s cell phone rang twice while he was in his office. But the intrepid reporter did not mention who called and left, saying he had an appointment.

  The CPLC’s recovery of Pearl’s cell phone and perusal of his phone bills would enable them to trace his kidnapping to a British-born militant of Pakistani origin, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. Sheikh was allegedly partnered with the sectarian Sipah Sahaba Pakistan and the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi – franchise groups linked to Al Qaeda, which had recently been forced out of Afghanistan.

  Under Western pressure, Pearl’s alleged kidnapper, Omar Sheikh was arrested as he took refuge with a former Musharraf associate and former ISI official, Brig. Ejaz Shah, who then worked as Punjab Home Secretary. As the highly-connected Sheikh’s case came up for trial, the CPLC chief was threatened against testifying. Yusuf told me that Pearl’s case had forced him to adopt extra security.

  “For the first time, I have been going around with an armed back-up,” he said in a voice that typically grew low when he became fierce and resolute.

  Pearl Becomes a Player in Media Politics

  In this environment where Western journalists could ill afford to take risks, Pakistan’s print journalists bravely dug in murky waters. Kamran Khan – who had escaped a knife attack along with me in 1991 – wrote an article in The News which linked the prime suspect behind Pearl’s kidnapping, Omar Shaikh with the Islamic militants who had attacked the Indian parliament in New Dehli in December 2001.

  The Musharraf government reacted angrily to the article – which hinted at the ISI’s involvement in Pearl’s kidnapping – and stopped all advertisement of the newspaper. The News’ editor, Shaheen Sehbai was asked by the government to fire four journalists who were suspected as “trouble makers.” When Sehbai asked the publisher of the paper, Mir Shakil ur Rehman, who wanted to fire him, he was told to see ISI officials.

  The international uproar that followed Pearl’s murder led Musharraf’s administration to pass the “Defamation Ordinance” which imposed a fine of PKR 50,000 (almost USD 900) and a three-month prison sentence for “libel.” For journalists who earned a pittance and had no security from their newspaper bodies, the amount was a powerful deterrent against investigative reporting in areas where the military ostensibly carried on its anti-terror operations.

  While Musharraf ruled within the US sphere of influence, my forays into the border areas of Afghanistan led me to discover how journalists were alternately threatened and abducted and had their homes bombed and families harmed as they attempted to sift fact from fiction in Pakistan’s ostensible “War on Terror.” That post-9/11 period would be the most trying for journalists – caught between Taliban militants and security agencies.

  In December 2005, when the eighth reporter, Hayatullah Khan went missing from the Waziristan tribal area, alarm bells sounded throughout the journalist community. The Taliban denied they had abducted him. Musharraf’s media spokespersons, too, claimed ignorance about his whereabouts. Still, the pains they took to convince me that the disappeared journalist was a “terrorist,” and the level of detail they possessed about the missing journalist struck me as highly suspicious.

  Six months later, Hayatullah’s family got a telephone call from a Major Kamal, who tersely informed them that the missing journalist’s body had been dumped in Miranshah, North Waziristan. The family discovered Hayatullah had been shot at close range, with his hands still tied in military handcuffs.

  Although the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan called for credible reporting, the Musharraf government strongly discouraged journalists from their professional activities. Foreign journalists found at the Afghan-Pakistani border were shipped back to their host countries while their fixers were taken aside, interrogated and imprisoned. Journalists caught near US air bases were charged under the “Official Secrecy Act” and produced in court only after their disappearances were challenged by the professional media organizations.

  Pakistan’s Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Shaikh Rasheed – known for his crude, plain speaking – told me that journalists were stopped from investigating the border areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan “because their findings are often at variance with the government.”

  With the military left as the sole spokesman for Pakista
n, the foreign media got contradictory reports about the effect of US missile attacks. A classic case occurred in January 2006 when the military claimed that a missile attack in Bajaur had killed the son-in-law of Al Qaeda’s spokesman, Ayman Zawahiri. This was contradicted by then Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, who was in turn contradicted by President Musharraf.

  Even as the foreign media relied on military spokespersons for their news stories, Peshawar based journalist and well-known expert on the Taliban, Rahimullah Yusufzai told me that the New York Times report that Zawahiri’s son-in-law was killed was floated by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies without conducting the necessary DNA tests.

  In an attempt to give his side of events, Musharraf’s media team used the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority or PEMRA (enacted through an ordinance in 2002), to block the media’s coverage of public opposition to his rule. Cable operators were warned against beaming channels which covered anti-Musharraf rallies, failing which, their licenses could be revoked. Predictably, the axe fell on channels that depicted the humongous crowds that galvanized around the Supreme Court chief justice he had ousted, Iftikhar Chaudhry.

  President Musharraf met his Waterloo as the feisty broadcast media joined civil society to battle the emergency he imposed in Nov 3, 2007. It was an all-out battle by the media and one with high economic stakes, as television channels, GEO, Aaj TV and ARY lost millions in advertising revenue. Thereafter, the Pakistan Broadcasters Association, the Association of Television Journalists and its parent organization, Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists mounted a successful campaign to restore censored programs and show hosts who had been banned, all of which helped to end the emergency

  A Brave New Media

  Almost two decades after the attack on my person, the media landscape in Pakistan has transformed. Not only has the rocky path toward democracy taught politicians and journalists a few lessons, but also the nation embraces a vibrant electronic media.

  Today, as Pakistan’s experienced print journalists take over the reins of private television and radio channels, the public is exposed to riveting news and current affairs. International television and radio, beamed in by satellite, have added their voices to the medley. It has transformed Pakistan’s media into a major revenue-generating industry where the electronic media dominates the marketplace discourse.

  For the most part, the PPP government has left the media free. That has also opened it up for criticism, as commercialism drives raucous programming. The print and electronic media has engaged in mudslinging and personal attacks – including poking fun at President Zardari. They join the global networks – the Internet, YouTube, blogging and texting – that provide unprecedented freedom for Zardari’s opponents.

  In his early days, President Zardari walked in the shoes of his military predecessor as he barred television channels from filming crowds clamoring for the reinstatement of the chief justice. The move did not sit well with the PPP’s liberal leadership. PPP’s Federal Information Minister Sherry Rehman had as the editor of Herald in 1991 resisted the crackdown on the media. She was the first to register her dissent by resigning from her official position.

  Overall, PPP Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani has resisted invoking the PEMRA ordinance against news channels, which thrive on sensationalism and unbalanced reporting. Instead, the government has suggested the media monitor itself through a “Code of Ethics” – meaning that it should avoid images or material that may “endanger national security or offend viewer sensitivities.”

  Although the numbers of journalists detained and interrogated by the security agencies have dropped, a growing number of these incidents now occur in the volatile Balochistan province. In such instances, the PPP government becomes a bystander. The task of protecting these journalists falls to Pakistan’s thriving journalist federations, which receive support from international groups working for the freedom of the media.

  With Pakistan’s border areas in the grip of an insurgency, reporting from the tribal Pak-Afghan border is among the most dangerous professions in the world. Taliban militants do not hesitate to kill journalists perceived as pro-government or leaning toward a rival faction. In these border areas, where cell phones are barred and traveling is dangerous, there is little access to information. That has effectively ended independent reporting and instead led to the concept of “embedded journalists,” – whether they embed with the army or the Taliban.

  It is in this brave new world that journalists are engaged in a new dance with the three forces that control Pakistan’s destiny – the US, Pakistan’s army and its elected government. The PPP government – itself in the US orbit of influence – desperately needs better coverage, but also knows the consequences of taking on a combative media.

  Decades of experience under dictatorship and civilian rule has taught Pakistan’s journalists to preserve the freedom that makes them among the better-informed and more powerful media organizations in the region.

  PART II

  Human Rights

  Chapter 4

  WHERE HAVE

  ALL THE WOMEN

  GONE?

  “Cry Rape to Get a Visa to Canada”

  You must understand the environment in Pakistan. This [Rape] has become a moneymaking concern. A lot of people say if you want to go abroad and get a visa for Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped.

  (President Gen. Pervez Musharraf in an interview with The Washington Post, September 13, 2005)

  The Pakistan’s military ruler’s off-color remarks, uttered during his official visit to the United States in September 2005, infuriated many women and men around the world. Their response appeared to puzzle the President. The point, he told a gathering of women who came to hear him at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, was that Pakistan was being unfairly singled out, even though rapes occurred all over the globe.

  Brandishing a copy of an Indian newspaper, he said there were examples of several rapes in India in its pages, adding – in the same breath and without a trace of irony – that this was not a time for “point scoring.”

  To Pakistan’s general, who faced the onerous task of leading the nation after his military coup of October 1999, the prosecution of rapists appeared to have little bearing on women’s rights and everything to do with politics. Indeed, the “Zina Ordinances (Enforcement of Hudood)” – which were passed by Gen. Zia ul Haq in 1979 – had, over the years, grown politicized after Islamic parties discounted women’s testimony in rape and instead required evidence from “four Muslim male adult eye-witnesses of pious character” to award a conviction.

  The Hudood Ordinances were passed by Gen. Zia, only two years after he rode on the crest of the Pakistan National Alliance movement, led by Islamic parties, and ousted Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in a military coup on July 5, 1977.

  Under the Hudood laws, punishment was meted out like amputations for theft and flogging for drinking. The uproar from civil society forced these to fizzle out. Women became the most affected by the implementation of the Zina Ordinances, which imprisoned hundreds of them after the courts refused to accept their testimony in rape.

  Although late Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto – who rode a wave of populist support in 1988 – referred to Nawaz Sharif as a “remnant of the Zia regime,” she too was loath to touch an issue that divided the Islamists from the secular lobby.

  In the post 9/11 period when Pakistan was back in the orbit of US influence, the State Department had faulted the Zina Ordinance in its 2005 Human Rights Report. Just before his US visit, Musharraf tried to win American approval by moving a Women’s Protection Bill in the National Assembly that rape be punished under secular rather than Islamic law. Pressure from the Islamic opposition in the National Assembly led him to further water down the amendment.

  A number of women’s groups, which demanded the outright repeal of the Hudood Ordinances, cite the Women’s Protection Act passed under Gen. Musharraf as a hotchpotch of laws. The Act reta
ins the standards for evidence laid down by the Zina law, even though it allows for verification of rape by DNA tests and other secular standards.

  In September 2005, as an audience of disillusioned women took Musharraf on for his comments on rape victims in the Washington Post, he backtracked. “These were just side remarks, which are not to be taken seriously,” he told the Pakistani audience and their US allies. But as the crowd kept hooting, the general shifted gears and began shadow boxing the perceived enemies of Pakistan: “If you can shout, I can shout louder.”

  The Nurses Rape Case

  In 1989, I came face to face with the impact of the Zina Ordinance on women. On a routine visit to the hospital, I learnt that two nurses were raped inside the paying ward of the hospital. One of the paramedics, who sometimes tipped me off with inside stories, came to my newspaper with the seamy details.

  The story fairly sizzled: two nurses had been raped at gunpoint as they left the elite ward. A senior medical student from the affiliated Dow Medical College and his male colleagues had grabbed them, clapped a hand over their mouths and raped them at gunpoint on the empty hospital beds.

  It was the type of issue I had waited to sink my teeth into. I was in my twenties when I returned from the US, filled with indignation at the way women were treated in Pakistan. That would let me see the story rather differently from my male colleagues, who had an average age of 50 years and whose hands were full covering daily news outbreaks.