Midnight knocks

The attempt to discredit the British media by an official news agency was an indication of what was to follow. Since then, journalists have been detained,harassed, and threatened for having granted interviews to a BBC television crew, in Pakistan to produce a programme for their Correspondent series on high-level corruption in Pakistan8217;s government.

The team had been given permission by the government itself for the filming, and has also interviewed various senior political leaders, both from the government and the opposition.

On May 2, Mehmood Ahmed Khan M.A.K. Lodhi, who heads the investigations bureau of the Lahore edition of the English-language daily The News was picked up by the Intelligence Bureau IB, and harassed and interrogated for two days about his involvement with the BBC team. He was released on May 4, following the intervention of Punjab Law Minister Raja Basharat, after journalists covering the Punjab Assembly boycotted the May 4 session in protest. 8220;All I did was to guide the BBC people to some contacts for their programmes,8221; says a bemused Lodhi, adding, 8220;Even if I had actually worked with the team or granted them an interview,which I didn8217;t, that would have been well within my rights.8221;

A columnist who did grant an interview was Hussain Haqqani, also an opposition leader. On the night of May 4, he was offloaded from a flight to Dubai and told that his name was on the exit control list. 8220;I was not given copy of the official orders, nor could the lowly officials at the airport explain the reasons for this extraordinary decision,8221; he wrote in his column for popular Lahore-based weekly The Friday Times May 7-13. Writing that the decision to offload him came 8220;at the heels of the government being visibly incensed8221; at the yet-to-be-aired BBC documentary, he said: 8220;If the BBC can be thus vilified, I am sure there will be much to malign me with. The British journalists will, however, return home. I, on the other hand, will remain within the government8217;s reach. I am on the exit control list today. I wonder what other lists I will be placed on tomorrow.8221;

Prophetic words. The next day, just after sending in his column, he waspicked up in Rawalpindi city along with his brother Hassan Haqqani, a colonel in Pakistan8217;s army, by the Federal Investigation Agency FIA. Col. Haqqani was taken in a separate car, and released the same day after his captors realised he was an army officer. He is believed to have been tortured and interrogated for several hours before being released. Hussain Haqqani is still incommunicado.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists CPJ has sent a strongly worded fax regarding pressures on Pakistani journalists to Nawaz Sharif. It says that senior government officials have privately confided to several of CPJ8217;s sources that Haqqani was detained for questioning related to his interviews with a BBC team. 8220;Officials have also indicated that there are plans to charge Haqqani with sedition and high treason, using columns published in the English-language weekly newspaper Friday Times and the Urdu-language daily Jang as evidence of his subversive tendencies.8221;Another journalist being publiclypilloried by the official media as a traitor8217; is Najam Sethi, chief editor of The Friday Times, who also gave an interview to the BBC team. At a press conference in Lahore on May 6, he gave details of threats and harassment he has received since, before a packed hall of about a hundred journalists and human rights activists. A senior government official told him that his open criticism of the Sharif government is viewed by as part of his attempts to 8220;destabilise the country, overthrow Sharif and install a national government8221;, said Sethi, amused at being considered so powerful. The efforts to publicly discredit him started on May 4 with a morning transmission programme on state-controlled television during a discussion on accountability 8212; the buzzword these days in Pakistan 8212; and how journalists should also be held accountable, 8220;especially when people like Najam Sethi go to India and talk against Pakistan8221; 8212; a reference to his recent lecture in Delhi at the invitation of the Indo-Pakistan FriendshipSociety headed by former Indian prime minister I.K. Gujral.

The allegation of unpatriotic behaviour was repeated the next day in the same programme, and the next morning, a 8220;distorted and false news item about my lecture in India was published by two Lahore newspapers, The Nation and Nawa-e-Waqt, without bothering to ask for my version although I know the editors personally.8221;

Asked about his previous relations with Sharif, he explained that in 1994, Sharif, then in the opposition, had come unannounced to his residence and 8220;asked forgiveness for the excesses committed when he was Prime Minister. I told him that his coming to my house was enough and all was forgiven. When he was elected this time, he asked me to join his team as a Senator and advisor; I refused. Now they want to arrest me on charges of being a traitor,8221; said Sethi. He said that if anything happened to him, his family, or his staff, the government of Pakistan would be directly responsible.Ejaz Haider, news editor for the Friday Times,has also been threatened. On May 4 he received a warning to 8220;Put up bullet-proof windows on your car.8221; 8220;I was expecting something,8221; says Haider, a defence studies expert outspoken in his criticism of Pakistan8217;s nuclear policy who has recently returned after giving a series of talks in the USA. 8220;I8217;m just surprised it came so late.8221;

Talking about the situation, he said, 8220;In my talk at the Middle East Institute about state-society relations in Pakistan, I mentioned the press and how it had institutionalised itself, with the caveat, however, that it was still under pressure not only from non-state actors but also from irresponsible governments that have the tendency to declare themselves synonymous with the state.8221;

8220;This comes in handy both to the governments as well as non-state actors because the country is claimed to have been begotten in the name of some ideology 8212; theodology is more like it 8212; it is an ideology tempered with the fire of theology.8221;

Given that, coupled with the 8220;PrimeMinister8217;s low IQ and 8220;the kind of power he has amassed and the ritualistic piety that he believes in, and we have a monster to contend with.8221;

Haider caustically reminds Information Minister Mushahid Hussain, a former journalist himself, of the old saying that you can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it. 8220;So don8217;t even attempt it.8221;

But Hussain, in a statement on World Press Freedom Day, asserted confidently that his government was 8216;media friendly8217;.

After all, incidents like a journalist8217;s car being pushed out of his house into the street and being set on fire in the middle of the night is not something that will necessarily be seen as a threat to the free press. But when the incident takes place, as it did on the morning of May 5, with Imtiaz Alam, current affairs editor for The News in Lahore, who has been receiving threatening phone calls for some time for his dissenting columns, the government8217;s protestations are hard to believe.

8220;I wish they8217;d burnt the old car,8221; says Alam,scratching his beard and trying to salvage some humour from the situation, thinking of the charred remains of his brand-new, un-insured Suzuki Khyber.

Like Haider, Alam too had been expecting some 8220;action8221;. 8220;Maybe they held off because of the conference,8221; he says, referring to the ground-breaking Pakistan-India Parliamentarians Conference that he organised recently, in which the government also participated. He has recently been particularly vocal about the accountability process directed by Sen. Saifur Rehman.Peshwar-based publisher of the English language daily The Frontier Post and Urdu-language Maidan, Rehmat Shah Afridi was arrested last month for the possession of charas and is currently in Lahore8217;s Camp Jail where he is not being allowed visitors. But journalists believe that the charges against Mr Afridi are fabricated.

He has for some time been under pressure from the authorities, for his publications8217; reports over the last few months on corruption in the ANF Anti Narcotics Force andgovernment. A source close to Afridi confided that since November 8217;98 the pressure had been mounting and he had been repeatedly summoned by the Ehtesab Accountability Bureau and 8220;told to implicate Asif Zardari and other big names like Aftab Sherpao in drug cases8221;. It has been learnt Afridi was intercepted at a Lahore hotel by armed men in plainclothes with silenced revolvers, and according to a source, 8220;tied and blindfolded and told to cooperate in implicating Sharif8217;s political opponents.8221;

8220;He was tortured with electric currents and made to talk into the telephone and ask for a consignment. He thought that he was about to be killed.8221; Afridi was later taken to the ANF office and 8220;told that his voice was on tape settling a heroin deal, and he could get out of it by implicating Zardari, Sherpao etc. in it.8221; Like Sethi, and earlier, Mir Shakilur Rehman of the Jang Group of newspapers which clashed with the government a couple of months ago, Afridi too was publicly denounced on the state-ownedtelevision, and reports printed in sections of the press. 8220;He was remanded to 14 days custody, but never interrogated about the charas. Instead, he says, he was continuously asked to cooperate about implicating Zardari etc. in drug cases,8221; says Afridi8217;s lawyer, who feared that Maidan may be forced to close down.

Meanwhile, in the southern province of Sindh, journalists in remote rural areas continue to be threatened for reports that reflect unfavourably on the police. Dharki-based journalist Sikandar Bhutto told a recent meeting of human rights activists in Lahore about the arrest and torture of a journalist Abu Awais, who has been left deaf in the process. Awais, the correspondent of Sindhi-language daily Koshish, had reported the kidnapping of 13 men on the night of Jan 1, 1999, and consistently followed the story until Jan 18.

However, the police refused to file a report saying that no such kidnapping had taken place. The complaint was only admitted after pressure from human rights activists. On Jan24, the bodies of two of the kidnapped men were found with ransom notes and the story was picked up by other newspapers. The remaining men were freed after a ransom of Rs 700,000.

The area police filed a false case of sodomy against Awais, who was arrested and tortured. After a great deal of pressure from local journalists, the case was dropped on the orders of a Judicial Magistrate on March 10, 8220;on the ground that no evidence whatsoever has been collected against the accused8217;.

This piece was written a day before Najam Sethi was picked up from his residence at night