The media’s sting

IN the last decade the media has made itself felt and, at times, even feared in the subcontinent. If the press has taken to investigative reporting in a big way, private TV channels vie with one another to flash breaking news and expose wrongdoing with abandon.

Some of the issues which have long been debated in Britain and the United States will confront us pressingly and demand an informed, balanced answer. We do not dwell in the realm of absolutes. Even the most precious of rights need to be balanced with the rights of those affected by the media’s exposure and by the legitimate interests of society.

Since 2001, India has been rocked by sting operations by TV channels. Confidence won, the correspondent entered the targeted premises under a false identity and concealed cameras. His TV channel flashed the damning images and created a political storm, raising its TRP as well. In 2001 no less a person than the president of the BJP, Bangaru Lakshman, was caught on camera accepting precious dollars which he carefully placed inside his briefcase. The defence minister, George Fernandes, resigned because a close associate was compromised. He wormed his way back.

In December 2005 as many as 11 MPs were caught accepting hard cash as consideration for raising certain questions which the decoys asked them to raise. They were expelled from parliament after an inquiry. Right now an inquiry is afoot on the bags of money displayed in the Lok Sabha on July 22 this year by some MPs who alleged that they were being bribed to vote in the manner desired by their donors on Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh’s motion of confidence. The TV channel found the investigation inadequate and did not telecast the drama it had captured before the bags were taken in the house. The footage was given over to the parliamentary inquiry after it was put on the TV screen on public demand.

It is not a peculiarly Indian phenomenon. TV channels elsewhere in South Asia are unlikely to lag behind. Predictably judges and ministers expressed their strong disapproval, if not disgust. Absent in the discourse is any effort to reflect on the fundamentals and experience elsewhere, as in Britain, to go no further. It is accepted that the citizen’s right to know is inseparable from his right to freedom of speech. Like all rights it is subject to “reasonable restrictions imposed by law” on grounds specified in Article 19 of the Constitution of Pakistan.

If the state employs ‘trap witnesses’ to catch officials who take bribes, is the media to be barred from using similar methods to expose crime or corruption? The British Press Complaints Commission was set up by the press itself to monitor a code of conduct drawn up by senior editors. The state has no role in this.

Para 7 of the Code was applied in The Sunday Times case in 1994. On July 10, 1994 the paper published a story under the headline: ‘Revealed: MPs who accept £1,000 to ask a parliamentary question’. Within hours, two Conservative MPs, David Tredinnik and Graham Riddick, were suspended from their jobs as parliamentary private secretaries.

The Sunday Times revealed on July 17 the details of its investigative work over six months, following a tip at a lunch in January by a leading businessman that he had paid MPs to table parliamentary questions. Records of thousands of questions were sifted. MPs known to have links with some of the 50 consultancy firms that hover around Westminster were asking questions of direct interest to the companies those firms lobbied for.

It was decided to test 10 Tory and 10 Labour MPs. All the Labour MPs refused. Two of the Tories were caught red-handed by a member of the paper’s ‘Insight’ team, Jonathan Calvert. Using his real name, he posed as a potential investor in a drugs company that was developing a cure for a throat infection called ‘Thising’s disease’. The firm’s name Githins was also an anagram of Insight. This was done to demonstrate how easy it was to table bogus questions.

On July 17 — note the despatch — the Press Complaints Commission gave its ruling. On July 11, 1994 Mr Graham Riddick, MP for Colne Valley, had complained to the Press Complaints Commission that information contained in The Sunday Times’s article of July 10 was unfairly obtained through subterfuge. He maintained that such information was readily available elsewhere and raised his complaint under clauses 7(i), 7(iii) and 18 of the Code of Practice.

The Commission said:

“The article described how a journalist posed as an investor interested in buying a firm. He offered the complainant £1,000 to table a question in the House of Commons to the Secretary of State for Social Security about any work done by the firm (the name of which had been invented) for the Department….

“The Commission is the appropriate body to decide whether The Sunday Times has breached the PCC’s Code of Practice and it sees no conflict with the role of the Committee of Privileges in so doing. The speaker of House of Commons has informed the Commission that she does not see any conflict between an adjudication by the Commission based on the Provisions of the code and any investigation by the Committee of Privileges....

“The Sunday Times told the Commission that they undertook this investigation after being told by a prominent businessman that it was common practice for MPs to be paid to table question in Parliament and the ‘going rate was £1,000’. The newspaper’s receipt of this information coincided with rumours which they had picked up in the House of Commons that MPs were being paid for putting down questions.

“An examination by the newspaper of thousands of parliamentary questions appeared to confirm their suspicions but not to offer exact proof. The newspaper contended that the use of subterfuge was the only method by which the matter could be investigated.

“The Commission accepts the newspaper’s explanations for their behaviour. The subject matter of the article raised issues of serious public interest which the newspapers had a right to pursue. In all the circumstances of this case, the commission considers that the subterfuge used was justified as the only effective investigative tool available by which the information concerned could be obtained.”

This ruling provides a classic precedent which no judge or minister can ignore in Pakistan or in India. The media should sting wrongdoers and expose them.

The author is a lawyer and an author.

Not wood, not stones, but men?

ONE can understand why footage of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis in their concentration camps at Auschwitz, Dachau, Belsen and Buchenwald during the Second World War was never shown to the general public.

It would have driven, as Mark Antony once said, “hearts and minds to mutiny and rage”.

It was only during the trials at Nuremberg of Nazi leaders held culpable for crimes against humanity that the films taken by Allied cameramen at those infamous camps were screened. Images flickered in the darkened courtroom of bodies being bulldozed into a common grave, their limbs flailing like brittle sticks caught in a thresher. There were simply too many corpses to be afforded the dignity of a separate burial.

No one watching those films in the mid-1940s could have imagined that less than 60 years later videos of even worse atrocities would be circulated with the insouciance of home movies.

The first one I saw recently showed the public execution of a Pakistan Ranger. He sat cross-legged on the ground and was made to confess his crimes before the camera and an unseen audience. Behind him stood three teenagers, one holding a large knife with a curved blade. Before one could steel oneself for what one feared might happen, the man was pinioned to the ground, with one boy sitting astraddle across his torso, another pinning his legs, while the third with a loud “Allaho akbar” slit the throat of the helpless Ranger.

Relentlessly the camera observed the victim’s death throes, and then recorded the attempts of the young butcher to sever the head from the body. It might have been a scene from a local butchery where an inept novice was being made to learn his trade, except in this case it was not an animal but a fellow human being who was being slaughtered and then decapitated.

And yet, in a sense, it was a young novice being taught his trade — the newest trade in selective murder, targeted genocide and callous killing that has become the hallmark of terrorists.

The second video was equally disturbing. An emaciated unwashed man was the victim, squatting blindfolded, spared the sight of his executioner who was no more than eight, at the most ten, years old. Egged on by his elders, the boy pointed his pistol at his victim’s head and pulled the trigger. He looked off-screen for approval, and on being encouraged further he pumped more bullets into the supine body.

One could not help recalling the image of a similar execution during the Vietnam War, when Brig Gen Nguyen Ngoc Loan sauntered up to a captured Viet Cong prisoner, Nguyen Van Lem, and without so much as a prayer, shot him in the temple at point-blank range. The difference between that picture taken by a professional war photographer, Eddie Adams, and the video shot by an amateur cameraman in Pakistan’s Fata region was more than the fact that the Adams photo won a Pulitzer Prize, whereas the other will hardly find a buyer. It was more than the age difference between the assassins. It was the impact each had on its audience.

Adams’ photograph caused an uproar in the civilised world and evoked a strong denunciation of the Vietnam War. The Fata videos did not deter its Pakistani audience from gorging on meat kebabs immediately afterwards.

It is most unlikely that the four boys will ever, like the South Vietnamese Gen Loan, find refuge in the United States or find employment like he did selling pizzas in northern Virginia. It is equally unlikely that these will be the last murders such boys will be made to commit, or to be filmed when doing so. Their lack of concern, of basic humanity, makes one wonder how inured our society has become to such brutality.

To the average Pakistani, Fata is a foreign land. The 1,116 deaths of Pakistan Rangers are a lifeless statistic; the 2,659 wounded a number from a hospital roster. And yet these were persons whose lives may have been lost but should not be allowed to go to waste.

Each side — whether it is the US-Nato troops or the terrorists — is resorting to target killings. The US forces use the technology of obedient drones to source out their targets among the Al Qaeda commanders, and then strike. The terrorists identify local tribal leaders, and then eliminate them. Each is hoping to decapitate the leadership.

The presence of Arabs and other foreigners in the Fata region is an additional complication. More than 5,000 Saudis, 4,500 Chechens and many Yemenis, Egyptians and Algerians are known to be supporting the terrorists. Charity may begin at home but in this war it is an exportable commodity. At the moment, there are at least 35 Arab charities known to be operating with less than altruistic zeal.

Gradually it is becoming all too clear even amongst cynics that the war against terror is not someone else’s war. The blood that is being spattered across our national visage is ours, the dead our own. Liberals may be vocal but are they as lethal as their opponents? How many divisions does a liberal command?

Wars are not waged by countries. They are waged by people who are impelled into action to defend their system of values, their convictions, their beliefs. Our security ought never to be subcontracted. Only the Pope can take that risk with his Swiss guards. For us, the involvement of the public needs to be enlarged and our consciousness sharpened and heightened by better, timely information. Videos such as the ones circulating of these assassinations may make poor propaganda. In an environment of argumentative silence, their horrific and frightening images speak louder than words.

Which Mark Antony do we need to tell us that we are not wood, not stones, but men?

www.fsaijazuddin.pk

Crisis of values

UNDERLYING the political and social phenomena we are witnessing in Pakistan today is a crisis of values. The entire nation is rent asunder in this regard. It is desirable to effect a transformation from intolerance and dogmatism to basic humanistic values of universal importance. Such a change of direction needs to be on modern and progressive lines.

The fact that many universal values are embedded in the West need not lead to a rejectionist stance by us. In a reversal from bigotry and obscurantism, we should imbibe all that is good and sound, irrespective of whether it originates from the Confucian tradition or derives from Greek thought.

Life in today’s world has become hectic, confused, disorganised and disoriented. The reflective thought of ancient Greece has contemporary relevance as a beacon to humanity. Free and unfettered dialogues in the spirit of the philosophic dialogues of ancient Greece can help in submerging fissures. What is needed is an overall conception, which can be provided by ancient Greek thought.

The underpinnings for the new spirit require intellectual depth. The senselessness and infernos of trouble around the globe are a hallmark of our times. There is need to transcend petty squabbles so as to focus on the real enemies which are organised crime, cunning malice and the use of technology for ulterior ends.

Martin Heidegger in his book Early Greek Thinking states the view that ‘Greek’ does not designate a particular people or nation, nor a cultural or anthropological group. “What is Greek is the dawn of that destiny in which Being illuminates itself in beings and so propounds a certain essence of man.” The study of Greek thought by us would cast significant light on contemporary problems.

Shortly after my assignment to Greece in 1991, I paid a courtesy visit on the rector of Athens University. I observed, as I ascended the steps of the university’s imposing building, the busts of Plato and Aristotle on each side of the staircase landing. This evoked the thought that those who follow in these footsteps in a true spirit cannot but have a feeling of awe and admiration.

We need to ponder afresh on such basic issues as the elemental one highlighted by Sophocles in Antigone in the conflict between ethical action and state compunctions and power. For Antigone, ethical sentiment consisted in holding fast and unshaken by what she considered to be right.

Then there is the valuable legacy of Greek aesthetics and love of beauty. In our milieu of religious orthodoxy, obscurantism and bigotry, we need to induce a culture of aesthetics to make life here less morose. The inculcation of western classical music would be a step in this direction.

The young French pianist Helene Grimaud mentions the role of music in the movement towards the universal, towards the point of possible reconciliation of opposites. She believes that blind obedience to any ideology is ultimately destructive. Plato has said that if we want to change a society, we need to change its music.

The elemental in human experience is most loftily denoted in Beethoven’s genius. His music has made a tremendous achievement for mankind. The appreciation of Beethoven by us would lead to intellectual and artistic uplift so vitally needed in our society. We often imbibe the western alphabet and mathematics, western medicine, the internet, the English game of cricket and other such influences. Why not also partake of the apogee of German greatness in the music of Beethoven?

The eastern cultures of Japan, China and Korea are increasingly turning to western classical music and thousands of their young students are studying it. This is a sign of strength and vitality. These countries have produced renowned musicians like the Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa, the Chinese cellist Yo Yo Ma, the Japanese pianist Mitsuko Uchida and the Korean conductor Myung-Whun Chung. There is a link between the Confucian outlook of these peoples and their remarkable economic upsurge. Can we distantly hope for such a salutary development here? Xenophobia and obscurantism must be rebuffed. Let us make our society less morose.

Education in Pakistan is in an abysmal situation. Its crisis is in terms of values, methods as well as framework. It reflects the schisms and turbulence in society. The purpose of a good education is not only to impart academic learning but also to inculcate ethics, sound values and the development of emotional well-being.

Ideas which are built on reason and understanding are genuinely radical in seeing what requires to be done. At a higher level, there is a unity of reason, aesthetics and morality. This is one of the valuable legacies of ancient Greek thought to humanity. A good education needs to encompass all three: reason, aesthetics and morality.

There has been extensive debate on the need for progress and on the kind of processes involved in it. The matter is not always considered from the viewpoint of a well thought out philosophic outlook. Nor has it been approached from the viewpoint of the intellectual processes of artistic creation. A number of thinkers have now proposed the idea of increasing gross national happiness in addition to increasing the gross national product.

The important question now is what the way is forward for us. In my view, we should imbibe the Hellenic tradition wholeheartedly. This seems a suitable way out for the redemption of our society.

aminjan@comsats.net.pk