Feb 24 2014 By Willem Marx
Rumor and reporting are unavoidably intertwined in Pakistan.
Hamid Mir appeared quietly
satisfied. The normally voluble television anchor for Geo News sat in
an editing booth in Islamabad last February, watching intently through a
series of interviews he had conducted earlier that week. On the
computer screen’s editing window he pressed young children to describe
the sound of Army bombardments, before encouraging brightly dressed
Baloch women to explain how their sons, nephews, or husbands had been
“disappeared.” This occasionally inflammatory reporter (who famously
found an incendiary device attached to the underside of his car) had
just returned from 48 hours in Balochistan, where he had been reporting
on the effects of the ongoing conflict there.
Mir seemed genuinely enthusiastic about this rare
opportunity to counter the “official” and sanctioned narrative about the
insurgency there. But there was also no disguising the relief he felt
that he and his crew had returned unscathed, and a certain exuberant
relish for having done so in spite of innumerable government obstacles.
“Getting access is so difficult,” he acknowledged, as he and his editor
fast-forwarded through the clips. I told him I could sympathize.
As the author of a new book about the region, Balochistan at a Crossroads,
I have spent some rewarding but challenging weeks in the remote deserts
and mountain ranges of Pakistan’s largest province. The vast and
sometimes inhospitable interior remains almost completely off-limits to
foreign journalists and just a handful have reported there extensively
over the past decade. As a consequence, the province’s conflicts and
horrors garner very little international attention: Baloch insurgents
continue to wage a low-intensity war against the Pakistani military and
civilian targets; military intelligence agencies allegedly kidnap young
Baloch activists before dumping their bodies on roadsides; border
authorities by turns combat and connive with cartels smuggling Afghan
heroin; Sunni extremists target Hazara pilgrims in mass bombings; and
Afghan Taliban rest up their war-weary limbs during Quetta’s harsh
winter months.
And while every number of these should warrant further
media scrutiny, amongst these varied narratives I have found that the
Baloch insurgency, a major focus of Balochistan at a Crossroads, is perhaps the storyline that Pakistani authorities want publicized least of all.
My friend and collaborator Marc Wattrelot—a talented
French photojournalist whose emotive black and white images haunt the
pages of our new book—will tell you that writing, editing and
type-setting has proved to be a time consuming and at times exhausting
process for the two of us. But he also likes to joke that these
exertions pale in comparison to the patience and luck required in
successfully reaching and reporting from Balochistan during our visits.
But for the region’s local reporters, such attributes
have hardly proved sufficient when it comes to their long-term survival.
Shahzad Zulfiqar is a veteran Quetta-based journalist and has written
for the Herald, Newsline and The Nation and reported on
Balochistan for Samaa TV, crisscrossing the province from Dalbandin to
Gwadar to Khuzdar and everywhere in between to interview insurgent
commanders repeatedly over the course of two obstinate and brave
decades.
He says that at least 22 journalist colleagues have been
killed in the past four years; local militant groups claimed six of
those murders, and security forces dispatched the remaining 16, family
members of the victims tell him. Local reporters are increasingly caught
between militants with Baloch nationalist aspirations who wish to
control the narrative for their own purposes, and a security apparatus
that wants to starve those same militants of any and all potential
publicity.
During a recent phone call with Zulfiqar, I asked him to
enumerate the expanding threats that loom over the shrinking local
press corps today. “On the top of the list are the intelligence
agencies,” came his immediate answer. “Second is the Frontier Corps, the
paramilitary forces.” Sunni extremist groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi
were a close third, he continued, followed by the Baloch insurgent
groups. “These are all people who don’t spare journalists,” was his
matter-of-fact conclusion.
Zulfiqar was once fired from his job after he recorded
an on-camera interview with an Iranian Baloch militant called Abdulmalik
Rigi—a solicitous but zealous young man I had also met with on a
previous occasion. Rigi was subsequently captured in uncertain
circumstances and executed by Iran’s authorities, but just by talking to
him in person Zulfiqar had exposed himself to official hostility.
Senior security officers in Balochistan were apparently embarrassed
because their Iranian counterparts had chastised them for allowing a
local journalist to interview Rigi, at the time Iran’s most sought after
terrorist. The senior officers immediately redirected their ire and
made their displeasure known to the employers of this veteran reporter
who had simply been doing his job.
Far worse was to come though, when Zulfiqar helped
arrange an interview for an American newspaper reporter, Carlotta Gall,
and photographer Scott Eells, with an ageing aristocratic figurehead of
the Baloch insurgency, Nawab Akbar Bugti. Gall, who reported for The New York Times
in Pakistan and Afghanistan for many years, said the visit was her
first to Balochistan. “To go on and then obviously see the rebels, that
was extraordinarily difficult and a bit risky,” she recalls now. “And it
was certainly risky for the people who took us in.” Following a
grueling journey into the mountains southeast of Quetta, and some time
spent with Bugti and a small cadre of his tribesmen, her American
newspaper splashed the scoop. “The ISPR and military were furious about
my story about Bugti,” says Gall, who is now the Times’ correspondent for North Africa. “There was a big picture of him on the front page of The New York Times, and the military spokesperson said, ‘you made him into a hero.’ They were furious.”
Zulfiqar, who had acted as the go-between and travel
companion for Gall and Eells on the trip, became the easiest target for
that fury. “When I came back to Quetta they called me, ‘please let’s
have a cup of tea.’” He went to meet a brigadier from Military
Intelligence, who immediately began to shout at him. “‘Forget about
journalism, when you enter my room, you are an anti-state element,’” the
military man apparently scolded him. “‘Why have you taken these
bastards? How many dollars did you receive from these Americans?’” This
was his last warning, Zulfiqar was told in no uncertain terms: “‘Next
time you will bear the consequences.’” The higher-ups had allegedly
instructed the brigadier, “‘make him understand, or if not, perish
him.’”
Zulfiqar kept his head down for a while, and refrained
from asking difficult questions of security leaders at Quetta press
conferences. “I stayed silent,” he admits.
International journalists readily accept how dangerous
it is for locals like Zulfiqar who help them in Balochistan; Gall told
me that at least one other person who helped her on a story in the
region was subsequently forced to flee the country. An interpreter Marc
and I both worked with, and to whom our book is dedicated, passed away
very suddenly a couple of years ago. Recently some of his friends
contacted me to say that his family members now suspect that security
agents, angered by his political activities, may have poisoned him.
Courtesy of Marc Wattrelot
Like many such allegations leveled in Balochistan, it is
hard to separate fact from fiction. However, I am more certain about
the fate of another young Baloch translator, who hails from the Iranian
side of the border; in 2007, he helped me interpret my interview with
the militant commander Rigi. After Iranian and Pakistan authorities
sought to arrest him for this daylong assignment with me, he has
subsequently sought and won political asylum from the UNHCR, and we are
together working to find him a new home inside a safe European nation.
Other more high-profile journalists have been forced to
flee Balochistan, including Ayub Tareen of the BBC, who in 2012 told
Reporters Without Borders he had faced death threats from a militant
separatist group for reporting on their movement in what they alleged to
be a partisan manner. And Malik Siraj Akbar, the star Baloch reporter
of his generation who now lives in D.C. after winning political asylum
in the United States, wrote that his decision to leave Balochistan was
in part driven by the deaths of a dozen journalist friends over the
course of a single year.
The departure of journalists from Balochistan—or worse,
their targeted killing—can have a chilling effect on their peers who
remain. And the result, as Ahmed Rashid has pointed out, is
“self-censorship” as a form of self-preservation. But such violent
infringements on press freedom rarely warrant attention outside the
region unless a foreign journalist is involved. The New York Times’
Gall became an unwilling poster child for this phenomenon, after
Pakistani government agents famously punched her in the face at her
Quetta hotel in 2006, before confiscating her reporting notes and a
laptop.
“I think Balochistan has been very important to the
Pakistan military, to run their operations there, to be able to control
the Baloch tribes, to be able to do as they please,” posits Gall.
“That’s why diplomats can’t travel there, that’s why journalists get
hassled there. And I think my treatment was designed to deter others.
Ultimately other journalists got scared, who see what happened.” Gall
says her profile of Bugti’s struggle against Musharraf’s military state
was the first time she truly antagonized Pakistan’s security forces. A
subsequent trip to Waziristan and an attempt to report on Afghan Taliban
presence in Quetta only angered the authorities further, and ultimately
all this led to her physical assault. “From then on I had great
difficulties with visas,” she told me on the eve of a recent reporting
trip to Libya. “I think I was blacklisted.”
The first and often greatest obstacle for any foreign
reporter wishing to report inside Balochistan is simply getting your
hands on a journalist visa. Then to travel outside major cities, you
will also require a “No Objection Certificate” as an accompaniment to
the visa in your passport. This piece of faxed paper signed by various
government entities, all of which state that they have “no objection” to
your travel plans, is from my experience far more important than a
passport when visiting many of the more troubled districts of the
province. And consequently it remains the primary means by which foreign
journalists who visit Pakistan are prevented from traveling easily
outside Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad. The ostensible reason for such
restrictive measures is to safeguard overseas visitors, but in the view
of most foreign journalists I have spoken with, the often Kafka-esque
process for obtaining an N.O.C. is also important as a tool for
discouraging the kind of enterprise reporting that might well uncover
some unwelcome truths.
Horror stories about Pakistani visa bureaucracy abound
among the foreign press corps, but my own nadir came in the autumn of
2008, as I tried to obtain a journalist visa and N.O.C. that would allow
me to travel once more to Quetta. It involved dozens of early morning
and frustrating phone calls from London to low-level mandarins in
Islamabad, who repeatedly made promises that they just as often broke.
The unspoken reality, it turned out, was that access to the region is
not something the hacks from the External Publicity Wing could actually
grant me. My visit would require signoffs from Pakistan’s intelligence
agencies, including the ISI and MI. Fully three months later, after
interventions from several senior politicians, my request was granted.
But for some reporters who cannot abide such a wait, the solution is
simply to skip the process altogether.
“I wasn’t traveling there on a journalist visa,”
explained Karlos Zurutusa, a Basque journalist who wrote several
dispatches from Baloch areas inside both Pakistan and Iran. “I was
traveling on a visitor visa. The Pakistan Embassy in Madrid told me it
was very dangerous, I should fly to Islamabad, I should by no means
travel to Quetta.” But by claiming to be a history teacher interested in
ancient routes to India, he made it into Pakistan’s Balochistan
province from Iran. Zurutusa concedes that this approach carried other
risks with it. “The people who were helping me were horribly scared I
was putting them in danger.” He recently wrote a piece for Al Jazeera’s
website, inspired by his own experiences, that described Balochistan as a
“black hole for media.” Adrenaline was a major reporting tool when he
visited Baloch insurgent camps, he told me, but that could only last so
long. “I think I got to understand how dangerous it was once I was
outside.”
Declan Walsh and Nick Schmidle are two other reporters
who know all about being on the outside and looking back into Pakistan.
The Irishman Walsh, who is a successor to Gall at The New York Times, and the American Schmidle, who wrote a widely-read dispatch from Quetta for the Times and is now on the staff of the New Yorker, were
both forced to depart Pakistan involuntarily. And while the two were
not removed from Pakistan specifically for their reporting in
Balochistan, their departure certainly reduced by two the number of
Pakistan-based foreign reporters who were willing or able to report from
the troubled province. Other American reporters previously based in
Islamabad have told me that they were loathe to initiate undercover
trips into Balochistan, for fear of prompting their own expulsion from
Pakistan—which in turn would create headaches for their employers. “I
would say that yes, that is a worry,” says Gall, “but you should never
not do a story because you’re worried about your visa or your residency
being revoked.”
But if you do make it into the province, and encounter a
degree of freedom of movement, extracting verifiable facts and
obtaining accurate answers from the authorities oftentimes resembles a
dystopian exercise in onion-peeling. Rumor and reporting are unavoidably
intertwined elsewhere in Pakistan of course; the byproducts of
clamoring, competing and overtly political narratives. But Balochistan
too often suffers from quite the opposite—a dearth of public
information, unreliable sources, a lack of context and official
secretiveness.
“I don’t know if I would dare to do it again now,”
Zurutusa told me from the Basque country in northern Spain. “I wouldn’t
dare to step foot in Pakistan again.”
I have sometimes expressed a similar sentiment to friends and family
after trips to Balochistan, in which police officers have attempted to
smash my camera, or intelligence agents have physically detained and
interrogated me at the airport departure gate. But I’ll be back again
this weekend to talk about the conflicts still ravaging Balochistan. And
I am hopeful that no government agencies will try to stop me telling
the truth about what I’ve seen and heard, and learned.http://newsweekpakistan.com/between-fact-and-fiction/
From our March 1 & 8, 2014, issue.
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