Curbs on the media

FREEDOM is now under attack. Bit by bit, the press is losing whatever it had gained over the decades since Mohammad Khan Junejo began the process of liberalising the media while Gen Ziaul Haq still ruled. On Monday, the government took fresh measures to gag the electronic media, with which it has been unhappy — at war is a more appropriate description — since its legitimate coverage of the demonstrations that followed the presidential reference against Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry on March 9. The amendments made in the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority Ordinance 2002 arm Pemra with draconian powers, which include the power to seize equipment and seal the premises of an offending TV channel. The amendments authorise Pemra to move on its own. Quietly also, Pemra has been transferred from the cabinet division to the information ministry. This is a retrogressive step. Earlier, Pemra had been transferred from the information ministry to the cabinet division in keeping with the government’s policy that regulatory authorities — like the National Electric Power Authority or the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority — should operate on their own without being under pressure from the relevant ministry. However, Pemra’s transfer back to the information ministry will mean that Mr Muhammad Ali Durrani’s office can resort to bullying to ‘fix’ a given channel.

The government has upped the ante, and things are now moving towards regression. The first indication of the government’s anger over the legal community’s protest against the treatment meted out to the ‘non-functional’ Chief Justice was the police attacks on the offices of Jang and Geo in Islamabad on March 16. Since then relations between the government and the media have gone downhill. The worst came on May 12 in Karachi when the MQM, a government ally, was seen involved in the attack on the offices of Aaj TV for several hours. That widened the chasm. However, what seemed to have got on the government’s nerves was the live coverage of the seminar at the Supreme Court auditorium in Islamabad. After all, it was a seminar, and if some speakers got carried away by their rhetoric and said things that sounded more political than legal, it was a reflection on their failure to make a distinction between the two. But the government should have claimed credit for the degree of dissent expressed there. Instead, it let this opportunity slip, and Friday’s meeting of the corps commanders took “serious notice” of what the Inter-Services Public Relations press release called the “malicious campaign against state institutions…” This confrontational approach is not going to help either the nation or the rulers.

As the election approaches, people expect the atmosphere to improve rather than become tense and stifling. The noose around the media is tightening; today, it is the electronic part of the freedom of expression, tomorrow it may be print journalism. The journalists’ reaction has been spontaneous, and there is no doubt that the government will invite serious censure from abroad, since Pakistan’s internal scene is being closely watched by the world. Internally, there will be more protests, more rights bodies and liberal sections of the opinion will join hands, and there will be greater turmoil, which the military-led government could find difficult to control. The government should note one simple rule in such situations: the greater the repression, the greater the resolve for defending freedom.

Law of the militants

THE real issues can be lost in the maelstrom of politics. Big names and their utterances naturally dominate the headlines but sometimes the smaller print is of greater import in terms of where the country is headed. Take, for instance, what is happening in Bara in Khyber Agency and in Darra Adamkhel in Frontier Region (FR), Kohat, due south of the NWFP capital. In Bara, which nudges Peshawar, a woman and three men were executed on Monday on charges of adultery — by order of a committee, not a court of law. Vigilantes, acting on a tip-off, ‘arrested’ the four and hauled them up before a jirga which decreed that they should be mowed down with kalashnikovs. The quartet was luckier than the two men and a woman who were stoned to within an inch of their lives on similar charges in Khyber Agency in March, and were finally put to death in a hail of gunfire. Crowds watched and cheered on both occasions. In Darra Adamkhel, the local Taliban have introduced a 10pm curfew, announced that they will shoot the driver of any vehicle that does not stop at their checkposts, made it the law that reporting on the militants’ activities is ‘unpardonable’ and have promised an armed campaign against ‘indecency’ starting July 1. What we have in place here is a parallel administration with the powers of judge, jury and executioner. The Taliban are now an institution, not just a band of extremists.

The outlook is bleak. The situation has spun out of the control of a government that is concerned first and foremost with self-preservation. It seems unable to establish the writ of the law even in the federal capital, let alone at distant places in the NWFP. Tank, a ‘settled’ district in the NWFP, is completely at the mercy of militants who launch audacious attacks against civilians and government installations at will. The noises emanating from the National Security Council notwithstanding, it is clear that the state is helpless. All the deals and other acts of omission have not worked. Firm action is the need of the hour.

A primitive practice

IT is disappointing to note that despite greater awareness of social customs and attitudes that bring misery to the female population, there has been no let-up in the number of cases where young girls are made to pay for the sins of their elders. Practices like swara and vani — where girls, sometimes as young as two years, are married off to much older men in order to settle a dispute — are rampant in several parts of the country, despite periodic interventions by the courts. Such customs are not confined to communities where the jirga has the last word. Indeed, these have struck deep roots even in urban areas where the level of enlightenment is supposedly greater. In this context, the recent example of a resident of Karachi who sold his daughter to a beggar for Rs50,000 to settle his gambling dues comes to mind. According to the man’s wife, he had previously threatened to “sell” her as well and was contemplating doing so to his other daughter. Cases such as this one are the hallmark of an uncaring society whose most vulnerable member — the girl child — is sacrificed in the name of tradition or traded off by family members for personal gains.

There have been comments of late that civil society in Pakistan is finally waking up and taking a stand against injustices as the reaction to the judicial crisis shows. One can only hope that this kind of awareness and response will extend to equally pressing social issues that have been ignored for generations, such as deeply-ingrained customs and attitudes that add to the misery of the most helpless in society. No law to curb such traditions and no measure to change primitive mindsets will be successful unless civil society shows the courage and resolve to root them out and usher in more compassionate values.

Let them have their say

THE purpose behind the crude media curbs (reinforced by the new amendments to the Pemra ordinance) introduced in Pakistan is reasonably transparent: the government, faced with an unexpected hostile upsurge, wishes to exercise some sort of control over what the public is allowed to see and hear.

It evidently hopes that the impact of the unprecedented movement spearheaded by the suspended Chief Justice of the Supreme Court can be mitigated by restricting the movement’s access to the oxygen of publicity.

At this stage of the game, that’s probably a flawed assumption: the damage to the government’s credibility will easily outbalance any temporary benefit it can hope to achieve through such means. What’s more, there are ominous indications that the steps taken thus far are just a beginning.

The language used by the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority in communicating the new rules to private television channels is broad and vague enough to be used as a justification for harsher measures at the government’s whim.

For instance, it prohibits anything that “maligns or slanders ... segments of social, public and moral life of the country” or “is against basic cultural values, morality and good manners”. This gibberish can mean more or less anything the authorities want it to mean.

Pemra is more direct in proscribing anything that “contains aspersions against the judiciary and integrity of the armed forces of Pakistan.” Similar language has been employed in a warning, apparently issued under pressure, by the Cable Operators Association of Pakistan, which has vowed to stop transmitting any satellite channel whose contents reflect poorly on the “armed forces, judiciary and integrity of Pakistan”.

The armed forces have historically been something of a holy cow even during periods when they were not directly wielding power. A glass jaw, however, is hardly compatible with the army’s undiminished ambition to be a key player in the political arena.

To be fair, it ought to claim no more privileges than any other party, lest ordinary folk be compelled to wonder how a force that finds it hard to cope with a bit of criticism can be expected to guard the nation against external dangers.

The overreaction to Dr Ayesha Siddiqa’s Military Inc is a symptom of the same syndrome: if the book is based on flawed research, then it should be possible to refute it point by point, instead of vilifying or threatening the author. And the recent statement in support of General Pervez Musharraf by the corps commanders was obviously intended to dispel speculation that the president’s primary constituency may no longer be wholeheartedly behind him.

The Musharraf administration is in the habit of claiming credit for permitting a considerably greater degree of press freedom and media diversity than had hitherto been the norm under military and civilian regimes alike. The claim isn’t entirely fatuous, but it is increasingly of historical interest only.

The government did indeed issue many licences for private TV channels that, for all their shortcomings, inevitably offered an alternative to the mundanity of the state-owned national broadcaster, PTV. At the same time, newspapers initially encountered few problems in reflecting a diversity of opinion, which often included sharp criticism of the regime in Islamabad.

However, the laissez-faire approach to the media lasted only as long as it did not seriously interfere with the government’s grasp on power.

For some time now, newspapers have been under increasing pressure via the time-dishonoured method of curbs on government advertising, while the electronic media is being subjected to less subtle methods of control in the wake of the crisis sparked by the bungled attempt to dislodge Iftikhar Chaudhry.

Going by present indications, it seems likely that the situation will deteriorate in the months ahead. The satellite channels have already been subjected to raids by the security services and suspension of transmission. If they give in to the intimidation by censoring content deemed hostile to the authorities, their credibility will plummet: after all, their raison d’etre lies in their relative independence.

Some of the operators appear to be convinced that their licences will be suspended before long. The changes to media regulations announced on Monday are designed to have a chilling effect on the quality and volume of the debate on Pakistan’s future.

Such actions are generally against the national interest. No nation has ever benefited from penalties against the freedom of expression, or from being kept in the dark. Of course, hardly anyone anywhere in the world would advocate an unrestricted free-for-all. There are rules, regulations and inhibitions even in the most liberal societies — although in many cases the regulatory bodies are protected from partisan politics. But it is inevitable that objections will be raised when the prohibitions in question are directed chiefly at insulating the government of the day.

That appeared to be the case in Venezuela, where the government recently refused to renew the broadcasting licence of the country’s oldest channel, Radio Caracas Television, thereby driving it off the air and sparking public protests against the action.

On the face of it, RCTV was penalised for its vociferous and unrelenting opposition to the government of Hugo Chavez. The level of its vituperation, however, was way higher than anything Musharraf and his cohorts have had to contend with.

Five years ago, for instance, RCTV played a leading role in instigating a coup against Chavez and in rallying support for the coup-makers. Among its methods was the manipulation of video images to suggest that government troops were firing on anti-Chavez demonstrators.

When a popular uprising led to the restoration of democracy within a couple of days, RCTV went into denial: it broadcast cartoons instead of showing Chavez’s dramatic return to Caracas. Undeterred by the defeat of the coup, the channel continued to advocate the overthrow of the elected government and enthusiastically threw its weight behind an oil industry strike that threatened to derail the Venezuelan economy.

Unlike most of the Pakistani channels that today face the wrath of the generals, RCTV was a brazenly partisan entity that unequivocally devoted its energies to undermining the Chavez government and its initiatives. And it wasn’t by any means the only media organ of its kind. When Chavez was initially elected president in 1998, the forces ranged against him included most of the privately owned newspapers, radio stations and TV channels.

That victory as well as his subsequent triumphs — not least his re-election last year by a substantial majority — were all the more convincing because they were scored in the face of the mainstream media’s animosity.

It is claimed that other private channels as well as newspapers have scaled back their virulence in response to government pressure. It has also been reported that the Chavez administration uses government advertising as a lever to influence the press — a method familiar to most newspapers in Pakistan.

This may or may not be the case, just as it’s difficult to ascertain the veracity of the charge that journalists working for RCTV and Globovision (the latter a satellite channel that takes much the same line on domestic politics) have been receiving funds from the US via the notoriously ideological National Endowment for Democracy.

The government-aided demise of RCTV is one of Chavez’s first significant measures to be opposed by a majority of Venezuelans — up to 70 per cent, according to some reports. Not all of these reports reveal, however, that in a large proportion of cases, the opposition is based on the fact that the channel transmits popular game shows as well as what are known in Latin America as telenovelas: soap operas that serve as the opiate of the masses.

According to some government statements, RCTV’s licence wasn’t renewed precisely because of its penchant for sleaze, rather than its tendencies towards subversion. It would be disingenuous to pretend, however, that the soaps alone would have sufficed to invite such a drastic measure.

Since its inception, the Chavez administration has made some admirable efforts towards the redistribution of wealth and the reassertion of Venezuela’s economic sovereignty. Health and education have progressively been made available to segments of the population that were previously denied access to such “privileges”, and state-funded radio and TV networks include Telesur, which reaches all parts of Latin America.

The pace of change has accelerated over the past six months, notably via land reforms, the nationalisation of vital resources, and a decision to opt out of the World Bank and the IMF.

It would be a shame to allow the Bolivarian experiment in 21st-century socialism to be sullied by the same sort of mistakes that bedevilled the socialist experience in the 20th century. There is much that Venezuela can learn from Cuba’s triumphs and travails, but it would be a grievous error to emulate the Castro regime’s dismal record on the freedom of expression.

Ultimately, the relegation of RCTV may prove more harmful than the channel’s bitter mixture of bile and soap suds. There are better ways of countering such influences, including public-sector radio and TV networks that are allowed to be independent and lively, rather than used as dedicated vehicles for unimaginative official propaganda.

This observation applies to Pakistan as much as to Venezuela. It is always reassuring to find state broadcasters — be it the BBC in Britain, Australia’s ABC or RAI in Italy — being accused of bias by the government of the day, because it suggests they must be doing something right. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is all but unknown in the Third World.

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