Pakistan press under siege

KARACHI — Fear that a BBC documentary would expose government
corruption and ineptitude has led to a series of Gestapo-style attacks
on Pakistan newsmen who have been tortured and held incommunicado at
secret locations.

The most recent arrest came on the weekend as Najam Sethi, the
liberal editor of the investigative weekly, the Friday Times, received a
knock at his door 3 a.m. Saturday. When his wife, Jugnoo Mohsin, also a
journalist, opened the door, she was pushed to the ground. The intruders
came in a motorcade of 20 vehicles. The law-enforcement personnel barged
into the editor’s room and beat him and his wife.

When she asked about the arrest warrant she was told she would soon
be getting her husband’s body. They locked her in a bathroom before
whisking the renowned editor away. Sethi was not even allowed to put on
his slippers or glasses. For four long days, the desperate wife kept on
running from pillar to post to ascertain where her husband was being
detained. A government spokesman would only say that the editor has been
arrested by Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence.

The government has accused Najam Sethi of delivering a seditious and
anti-government speech in New Delhi, India. In that speech, which was,
in fact, an editorial that had appeared in Sethi’s Friday Times, the
editor had attacked the mis-rule of his country left, right and center.

“Where is the law?” asks Dr. Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s former
ambassador to the U.S. and editor of The News, Islamabad. Lodhi says she
herself has been under tremendous pressure not to criticize the
government’s policies in her writings for two years now; the regime had
even asked her employers to fire her, but Maleeha remains defiant.
Sethi’s arrest proved that although Pakistan “would be entering the 21st
century after seven months, the rules on the ground still resemble those
in Orwell’s novel, 1984 — Big Brother watches you everywhere,” says
member of Parliament Kunwar Khalid Yunus.

Yunus’ party, too, faces a government witch-hunt in Pakistan for
alleged links with India. The government argument is that since India is
a hostile nation with whom Pakistan had fought three wars since
independence from British rule in 1947, Sethi should not have spoken his
mind on the soil of that country. Independent men of letters in
Pakistan, however, insist on an intellectual’s unfettered freedom of
expression. The Friday Times has been baring the truth of Pakistani
society for over a decade now and has been a thorn in the side of
various governments that came into power since then. Sethi was arrested
twice earlier — once for protesting against state mistreatment of the
people of southwestern Baluchistan province in the 1970s and the second
time for his
critical writings during the last military regime (1977-88). Sethi’s
wife, Jugnoo, had filed a petition in the high court — second highest
court in the country, after the supreme court — but to her dismay, the
court dismissed her petition. The Punjab high court ruled Wednesday that
since Sethi was being suspected of being an Indian agent, the case fell
in the purview of the extra-civilian Army Act, 1962. Sethi’s arrest was
the fourth incident of journalist harassment in the past two weeks
because of the BBC documentary. A former correspondent of the Far
Eastern Economic Review, Hussain Haqqani is still under arrest in
capital Islamabad.

Yet a third journalist, Najam’s colleague, M.A.K. Lodhi, was arrested
and beaten up by the police but later released, while the house of
senior journalist Imtiaz Alam was raided and his car taken out and
burnt. All these journalists aided the BBC in preparing the documentary
against the government.

Pakistan’s Press got freedom from draconian black laws less than 15
years ago. The Press remained muzzled for a quarter century under
different military dictatorships, who had at the time enjoyed Western
blessings because of the Cold War considerations. It was only in 1985
that the Press got relative freedom.

However, analysts opine that a remnant of the martial law period
still pervades the mentality of the civilian policy planners and rulers,
including Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his aides. Sharif made his
debut in politics during the days of the last dictator, Gen Ziaul Haq,
and steadily increased both his financial and political fortune over the
years.

Since Zia was Sharif’s chief mentor, the critics of the premier say
he has yet to value and respect various social institutions, including
the Fourth Pillar — the press. Some of his detractors liken Sharif’s
talk of the supremacy of parliament to the omnipotence of the Bundestag
under Adolph Hitler. The Sharif government has not shied from using
certain crude methods to quell the voice of dissent and make various
institutions of the state buckle under executive pressure. In one such
incident, suspected government-backed goons attacked the highest court
of the land, the Supreme Court of Pakistan, in 1997. One reason why the
BBC documentary was a spine-chiller for the government is that
over-third of the Pakistani populace is unlettered, and “the visual and
the oral” have a tremendous impact. Pakistan’s own electronic media is
under strict state control and their “news reports” are taken with a
pinch of salt.

The arrest and intimidation of journalists is the second frontal
attack on the Press in less than four months. Earlier, the government
used alleged tax evasion for arm-twisting of the country’s largest
newspapers, the Jang Group. Jang offices were raided, newsprint seized,
warehouses sealed, all while the government sought the dismissal of 14
of its critics — to be replaced by darlings of the regime. U.S. Deputy
Secretary of State Strobe Talbott personally phoned Sharif to release
the arrested journalists. Likewise, Assistant Secretary of State Karl
Inderfurth and Bob Holum, requested the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S.
to release the journalists and respect freedom of expression.

But Islamabad has brushed aside these appeals as an “unwarranted
interference” in its internal affairs and has asked Washington to mind
its own business.