In December 1993, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly declared May 3 World Press Freedom day, to remind governments of their duty to respect the right to freedom of expression enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The date was not chosen arbitrarily; May 3 is the anniversary of the Windhoek declaration, made by a group of African journalists in Windhoek, Namibia, after that country’s struggle for independence from South African rule ended in 1990. The document called for world leaders to never allow freedom of the press to come under threat and when it was put before the General Assembly it inspired representatives to enshrine a day as reminder of the importance of a free press to democratic government. Those were heady days at the UN. The world was changing after the end of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain, apartheid had ended in South Africa, and many countries had recently completed their journeys towards democratic government. Pakistan was a leader among developing countries, recently coming out of a period of martial law, and adopted this resolution enthusiastically, while looking forward with the rest of the world to an era of open government and greater global prosperity. Today, however, the situation stands sadly reversed. The events of 9/11 and their aftermath have seen a steady growth in government powers for surveillance and detention around the world. Technology developed in the telecommunications revolution, besides giving people the internet and greater connectivity, has allowed governments to increase their tools for mass surveillance and constructing detailed personal profiles of individuals. The recent revelations of US whistleblower Edward Snowden about mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA) highlight the growing conflict between individual privacy and state security prerogatives. Formerly the world leader in press freedom the US slipped 13 places to 46 in Reporters Without Borders’ (RWB’s) press freedom rankings this year.
In Pakistan, it was after 9/11 that electronic media was deregulated by the government of President Pervez Musharraf in 2002. The subsequent explosion of private television channels, private publications and online journals has given the Pakistani press greater power. However, that is arguably not the same as greater freedom. Today Pakistan ranks 159 in RWB’s press freedom ranking, dropping eight places since last year, and it is also the most dangerous place for journalists in the world according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Between the years 1992-2005, 13 journalists were killed in Pakistan. That figure has since increased exponentially. Since 2006, 65 media persons, including reporters and workers, were killed either in the line of fire or in targeted attacks. Media organizations are regularly the targets of violence, particularly by militants in the tribal areas who have claimed numerous attacks on media houses they felt were critical of their activities. Threats to Pakistani journalists come from state and non-state actors alike, according to Amnesty International, which in its latest report said that Pakistani authorities have “almost completely failed to stem human rights abuses against media workers or to bring those responsible to account”. An Amnesty representative indicated that despite more state guarantees for media freedom, the situation on the ground remained one of intimidation where “the climate of fear has already had a chilling effect on freedom of expression”. This is a fact many Pakistani journalists can attest to. Though the government slammed the report, the recent attacks on journalists Hamid Mir and Raza Rumi, among others, show how true that description is. Sadly, in the rest of the world as well, journalists face increasingly authoritarian resistance to their right to collect and disseminate information for the public. RWB reports: “Countries that pride themselves on being democracies and respecting the rule of law have not set an example…Freedom of information is too often sacrificed to an overly broad and abusive interpretation of national security needs.” The challenge for the press is to remain objective and ethical irrespective of government depredations and fulfil the public trust we inherit. In spite of the advances of the last few years, it appears the struggle for press freedom still continues. g
TTP’s ambiguities
The purported Taliban intention to hold talks with the
government and the government’s desire to bring the talks to some logical conclusion have fallen flat owing to mismanagement and lack of trust between both the parties. The inevitability of the lack of trust cannot be argued about any further. The frustration of Chaudhry Nisar with the Taliban’s committee for its flip flop method of working out a peace deal has revealed the absence of common areas of interest between the government and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Whatever has been done to appease the TTP by the government such as releasing its prisoners without reciprocity has failed to make any difference. Even when the ceasefire had been in place, the attacks never stopped. Low intensity hits were carried out to keep the government off-balance. The so-called dialogue process does not seem to have reduced terrorism. The policy of retaliation for any deadly attack, as has happened in the aftermath of the Islamabad fruit market explosion, seems to be the reason behind the relatively calmer atmosphere. Now that the TTP has pulled out of the ceasefire agreement and the Jamaat-e-Islami has said rather loud and clear that the Islamic clauses of Pakistan’s constitution should be implemented, the failure of the peace process has started looming. It seems that unless the dialogue toes the TTP’s line, the ambiguity surrounding the peace process would keep growing thicker. It is this ambiguity or the political objective of the Taliban’s committee that has forced Major Amir to pull out of the peace dialogue as one of the government’s mediators.
According to Major Amir, a claim reinforced by Chaudhry Nisar, the Taliban are less to be blamed for the stalled dialogue than its negotiating committee that had been playing to the gallery for point scoring. It seems as if the Jamaat has taken over the lead position, huddling the mullahs together to decide about the fate of terrorism vis-a-vis the state. Of late the tension between the government and the army over managing the TTP had been exploited as well to stall the talks. The demand that the army is given centre-stage, suggesting that it is the army calling the shots and the government is simply hiding behind a facade, created even more confusion.
For the unpredictability surrounding the peace dialogue, the government is to be blamed the most. If the desire is to keep violence at a minimum by keeping the TTP engaged in dialogue so that peace could be maintained, the government is digging a deeper grave to bury the country’s future.*