Reporting Pakistan

by Meena Menon

  That was the first time I was at the Supreme Court; it’s an unusual modern building, with its stress on angles and straight lines. So used to colonial, gargantuan buildings, I found its clean lines very un-court-like in appearance. Even the prime minister’s secretariat had more character. The courtroom was large and spacious, with mikes thankfully, but there was limited space for the media. Khan was known for his off-the-cuff remarks and being wishy-washy as a politician, though he still cut quite a dash. His cricketing popularity and appeal to youth was not good enough for him to win the General Elections as Sharif swept the polls. His party was already losing support and some of the PTI contacts I called up had left to join other parties. Some were upset with his alleged proximity to the Taliban.

  For the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), I usually spoke to Farhatullah Babar who was press attaché to the President till he retired. He was friendly and knowledgeable, and always accessible on the phone. General Musharraf’s party, the All Pakistan Muslim League (APML), had Aasia Ishaque as spokesperson, and she was important for all matters related to the general, even his cases and health issues which were increasingly in the news after the treason trial was launched. I met politicians in the National Assembly, including Farooq Sattar of the MQM, Ramesh Kumar Vankwani (the only Hindu elected parliamentarian) from the PMLN, Rehman Malik (now senator), Aitzaz Ahsan and many others. When my visa extension was in doubt, the information minister, Pervaiz Rashid, assured me that it would be extended as he had spoken to Nisar (the interior minister). Rashid usually came to the National Assembly press room and smoked non-stop while chatting with journalists. That was when I managed to ask him, but his assurance didn’t help. Journalists used to walk out of Parliament in protest against attacks on the media which happened often, and gather outside on the main road. The media was under grave threat and for every journalist, honest reporting could come at a price. Traffic would stop for a while and furious speeches would be made. There was a sense that the government would do nothing to stop these attacks, though Mr Rashid would be besieged with demands to protect journalists.

  S.A. Shamsi of the JeI would often call and invite me for press conferences of their chief, Syed Munawar Hassan, which I attended in a small, cramped office opposite the Holiday Inn hotel. I did meet Hassan who told me that he would let me ask questions in future since I was from India. Often I would be the only woman journalist there and outrageous statements were the norm. Hassan would later be in the news for his statement that the TTP chief, Hakimullah Mehsud, who was killed in a US drone strike was a martyr which offended the army satraps no end. The PMLN office was closer to my house and the spokesperson often reminded me of the lavish parties thrown by one of my earlier colleagues. I don’t know if I was being given a hint, but I didn’t take him up on it. He was cordial, and his wife, a TV journalist, was helpful in news coverage. There would be some desultory press meets on the Kashmir issue for which we would be invited, but little else. The prime minister didn’t have a press meet while I was there, and his joint ‘stake-outs’ and national addresses were televised. I was on the MQM mailing list which was busy with a lot of press statements and reactions. The PPP invited both the Indian journalists to cover their infamous Jiye Sindh celebration at Mohenjo Daro, and had made all arrangements. I did apply early enough, but as usual there was no response. So when there was a chance for us to cover art and culture, which I was advised to later, we were not allowed to go there either.

  It was important to be on the mailing list of embassies and high commissions, and most people obligingly added me except for the Chinese embassy. After repeated calls, I spoke to a Mr Liu who didn’t understand what I wanted. When I finally managed to explain to him that I would like to be added to the mailing list and be invited for press meets, he sounded shocked, and after a pause, he said, ‘There is no precedent.’ Indians were never on their mailers, but he said he would consider it. Obviously, he didn’t because I was not added to their list.

  A lot of time was spent in meeting people and filling out forms for identity cards and permission to cover the National Assembly and Senate. Soon after I arrived came the news of the thirty-three-year sentence of Dr Shakil Afridi being overturned by the Frontier Crimes Regulation Commission in Peshawar. Dr Afridi was suspected of helping the CIA track Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in 2011, while being part of an undercover polio vaccination drive in the area. His lawyer, Samiullah Afridi, was most helpful over the phone and first insisted on telling me that my name in Persian means ‘love’. Dr Afridi’s case went through many twists and turns, and I reported each one of them, thanks to his friendly lawyer, but a year after I returned, Samiullah was killed. He was already facing threats while I was there and had almost decided to give up being Dr Afridi’s lawyer, and there were reports he had left the country, which is what a lot of people facing death threats and who have the means to, seemed to be doing.

  In the first week of my arrival, LoC tensions were increasing, with the chief of the Pakistan Army staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, going to ground zero, and statements from Sartaj Aziz, the prime minister’s national security and foreign affairs adviser, one of the longest-serving politicians in the country, whose candid memoirs7 I enjoyed reading.

  That was also the time India and Pakistan were planning to hold talks at the upcoming UN General Assembly meeting in New York. There was much speculation, which formed the basis for many news stories, and I was soon bored with this kind of reporting based on statements and press releases, though that was the norm. I visited a tent colony in the capital, of Christians who had fled from Meherabad, where the young girl Rimsha Masih, convicted of blasphemy used to live, till she was forced to leave the country. Another development was the arrest of a Kashmiri teenager Mohammed Shoaib who was the nephew of Syed Asiya Andrabi of the banned Dukhtaran-e-Millat in Srinagar. Events happened thick and fast—there was the All Party Conference on 9 September 2013 on talks with the Taliban and the impending release of Mullah Baradar who was a close aide of Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

  The new Pakistan government wanted to help in the peace process and there were endless platitudes on how it wished to facilitate the process, while there would be barbed comments coming from the Afghan side. Before the elections, the Afghanistan High Peace Council (AHPC), led by Chairperson Salahuddin Rabbani, visited Pakistan in November 2013, to meet the released Taliban commander Mullah Baradar in a visit that was not much publicized.8

  Covering Parliament

  I applied for and got passes for Parliament, and unlike India where the sessions are predetermined, here the President could summon both Houses at short notice. So every time this happened, I had to apply and I learnt a lesson not to go through the external publicity office which ranks high on both hospitality and red tape, and thanks to friends who put me in touch with the right people, I had no difficulty in getting the passes regularly. Only once was I stopped at the entrance by a guard who wondered if Indians were allowed inside the Pakistani Parliament.

  The first time I went to the National Assembly, a burly security guard in charge, dressed in a salwar kameez, asked me a lot of questions after checking my identity card. He was friendly, yet there was a steely glint in his eyes; but he never once asked to see my pass after that. I later met him at the special court for Musharraf’s trial. The parking was a little away and we had to walk the short distance to the entrance or go through the basement. The women security guards who searched my bag while chattering incessantly on their phones, would break off to ask me about India, and once they even spoke about the fine Indian cotton and how much they wanted it, especially the whites.

  The National Assembly was quite grand and a little bigger than our own Lok Sabha which I was still to visit—that happened when I was posted to New Delhi after I was asked to leave Pakistan. The printed schedule for the day was kept outside, where there was also a small place to pray. Fridays were particularly memorable. If you didn’t leave before prayer time, it was next to imp
ossible to get out and once I had to apologetically leave with Amir who kept telling me to hurry past people and not to look down, which was difficult if you were trying to make a quick exit, gingerly stepping between rows of people bent in prayer. I realized I was the only woman and I could hear angry muttering. After that, I resolved to leave early if I went to the National Assembly on Fridays. Once I had gone to meet an official in the interior ministry and again it was prayer time. People were kneeling in front of his office and I was unsure as to what was to be done. I stood there uncertainly, till one man sharply told me to stand in the corridor, away from the praying men. I was clearly intruding.

  The National Assembly sessions were a lot more casual than our own Parliament’s. People chatted, sometimes sitting in groups, even with their backs to the Speaker, and went around greeting each other as if this was a social occasion. The speaker, Sardar Ayaz Sadiq, a mild-mannered man, once rebuked them saying if everyone spoke less loudly, they could hear what was being said. The women were mostly dressed conservatively, with their heads covered, except for Shireen Mazari from the PTI whose short, cropped hair was dyed in vibrant colours—I definitely saw red and green apart from white. It was easy to spot her from the press gallery with her colourful coiffure, as she bobbed up and down the aisle or talked animatedly with her back towards us. I attended some of her talks on nuclear energy and found that she was all for civil nuclear cooperation between India and Pakistan. I also remember another memorable line from her when people often fondly talk of India and Pakistan and their innate oneness. She snapped that only the Punjab and to some extent Sindh was close to India, Balochistan was not, it was closer to Iran in a way, and neither was Khyber Pakhtunkhwa which was closer to Afghanistan!

  These sessions never began on time, and there was an interminable wait. During a heated debate, the MQM’s Farooq Sattar asked for the discussion to be continued during the prayer break, which the speaker refused. Only once I remembered pin-drop silence and that was when the prime minister made one of his rare appearances in Parliament. One of the main themes for those covering politics at that time was whether Sharif would come to Parliament or not, and if his press aides were in the gallery, that was an indication of his imminent arrival. The late Raja Asghar, with his elegant crown of white hair, would always sit in the same place in the media section, and write perceptively and accurately about the proceedings. It was a pleasure to read him in Dawn. I met him at parties and he had the most amusing stories to tell.

  We could even sit with our legs crossed in the media section, something which I found the Indian Parliament disallows—there is strict vigilance on how you sit and minders would tell you to sit straight, feet together! And, of course, everyone smoked in the press room outside the Pakistan assembly’s media gallery.

  I quite liked this casual approach in Parliament where we could chat and giggle with impunity. I went there regularly to check on stories. At that time, the MFN status was about to be granted; it didn’t happen but it was interesting to hear the reactions from the House which were almost always against granting the MFN to India.

  For the first time in the history of Parliament, there was a boycott, and Senate sessions were held outside on the lawn inside white tents. Spearheading this revolt, Senator Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan, author of Indus Saga,9 had some fun at the government’s expense. It was the interior minister’s statement on 30 October 2013 on the number of deaths due to terrorism that led to this protest.

  Attendance was never full in both Houses, but during the nine-day boycott, the Senate hall which was just across from the National Assembly in the same corridor was almost empty. Quickly under a makeshift tent, the mock sessions got under way, with some members sitting on the ground while others had chairs. There was an impromptu visitors’ gallery as well, and a presiding officer. Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan kept saying the figures he provided were correct for the drone strikes and terrorism-related deaths.

  Senator Ahsan from the PPP demanded an apology for the wrong figures. Chaudhry Nisar said that 136 incidents of terrorism were reported from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa between June and October 2013, killing 120 people. However, Ahsan and others said the figure was 187 or so. Already on 30 October, the interior minister had created a controversy when he told the Senate that only sixty-seven civilians and 2160 terrorists had died since 2008 in 317 drone strikes, fourteen of them in 2013. Despite protests from the Opposition and a standoff in Parliament, the minister was indignant. He maintained that his figures were correct and later clarified that the Opposition had issues with only one small portion of his answer, which concerned the number of deaths in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The interior minister blamed a drone strike for killing Hakimullah Mehsud, as if he was some ambassador of peace, the senators said. But unity was lacking in Parliament, with the leader of the Opposition, Syed Khursheed Shah, regretting that a ‘small issue’ was holding up the Senate proceedings. I ran into former Interior Minister Rehman Malik who kept insisting he had met me earlier, and he, too, was firm about the protest till the government clarified.

  Bold and brave

  Journalism in Pakistan has been bold and brave despite the many threats, and between the security agencies and the terror groups life hung on a thread for many professionals. Less than a month after I was there, I wrote about Ali Chishti, a journalist from Friday Times, who was forced to leave his home in Karachi. I did an interview over the phone with Chishti when he came to Islamabad. Despite his ordeal, he hadn’t lost his sense of humour and he told me that when he was blindfolded by his kidnappers, he was partly relieved. ‘I knew then they wouldn’t kill me,’ he said. But before he was released by his tormentors, he was tortured and abused for several hours, and asked why he was writing on national and security issues and on the MQM.

  This incident in Karachi, a city consumed by violence and terror, stood out among the many things that were wrong there. Chishti may have got off lightly compared with what happened to Baloch journalist Abdul Razzak, who lived in Karachi’s Lyari area. He had been missing since March 2013 and his body was found in August that year. It was so badly mutilated that his family could not identify him when they first saw it. In the end, only his arms and legs were sufficiently intact to enable identification, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP). I met many journalists who wrote about Pakistan, like Kathy Gannon, Victoria Schofield whose book10 on the Bhutto trial I enjoyed reading and the Washington Post’s Pamela Constable who relaunched her book11 in the capital, almost apologetic that Pakistan was an over-analysed country. It was shocking that Gannon was shot at while covering the elections in Afghanistan, while the photographer Anja Niedringhaus was killed. Reporting in those regions sometimes had a finality to it. Pakistani writers and journalists were always accessible, and had written many books which helped me understand their country. There was Imtiaz Gul, Ayaz Gul, Babar Ayaz and Ahmed Rashid (who has written most comprehensively about Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Central Asian region); Ayesha Siddiqa, too, for her admirable book Military Inc. Apart from this, I had many friends whom I met daily while reporting and they were always helpful and kind. I am not going to name them as some were harassed even while I was there.

  On most days I would walk to Faisal Mosque, and it was a lovely path with russet trees and the hills on one side. There was a small deer enclosure, with spotted deer and one big nilgai. In the morning a vehicle would stop by with grass bundles. The nilgai and her baby ran around in the small enclosure, stifled and possibly unhappy. Few people even stopped to admire them. I saw very few ‘walkers’, but once there was a man on a beautiful horse on the path.

  While current events or politics and the usual sabre-rattling press releases or press conferences were the order of the day, I looked for other interesting issues. People were helpful and spoke freely even in situations which were dangerous for them. For instance, the Ahmadis who spoke to me, the witnesses in the Shahbaz Bhatti (the former minister who was shot dead) case, were all forth
coming. Without the frankness and cooperation of such people, all the stories I did would have been difficult going, and credit must go to them first. Even in the case of the Afghan refugee camp, the UNHCR provided me an escort to visit the camp, which would have been tough otherwise.