ISLAMABAD: A gathering of media practitioners and legal experts was told on Thursday that there was no law in Pakistan that guaranteed the safety of journalists, and that the state – rather than protecting journalists – actually creates an enabling environment where media personnel can be targeted for doing their jobs.

An official from the Ministry of Law, Justice and Human Rights also raised many eyebrows on Thursday when he said that journalists were “among the most vulnerable groups in society”.

Speaking during a discussion on impunity for those who perpetrated violence against journalists, the law ministry’s Khashishur Rehman said, “If something happens to them, it impacts the society as a whole.”

These claims were made at ‘Supporting Safety of Journalists in Pakistan’, a consultation held to assess the journalist safety indicators developed by Unesco. The event was attended by journalists, media practitioners, academics, legal experts and UN representatives.

The indicators are meant to pinpoint matters that impact the safety of journalists and map the features that help assess the extent to which journalists are able to carry out their work safely.

Wali Babar’s brother makes impassioned appeal to end impunity against the press
Mr Rehman also admitted that the issue of impunity stems from “the erosion of the criminal justice system”.

He also said Pakistan was one of the most over-legislated countries in the world.

Discussing the legal aspects of the impunity with which journalists can be silenced, lawyer and columnist Saroop Ijaz pointed out that actions such as banning YouTube and outlawing online criticism of the government created an environment that encouraged extremist views regarding the media and freedom of expression.

“When the state tells people to ‘shut up’, it sets a precedent that it is OK to force someone into silence,” he said, referring to the murder of Saleem Shahzad. He said that only national security states ‘measured’ how patriotic a journalist was.

He said that all protections and legal cover for journalists would be for naught if they were not allowed to cover what they wanted to. “Journalists aren’t responsible to any notion of national security, but the truth. Everything else is a corollary.”

He concluded by saying that journalist safety could not be divorced from the state of free expression in any country, adding that in Pakistan, both were under threat.

Talking about protection mechanisms for local journalists, Guy Berger – Unesco’s Director for Freedom of Expression and Media Development – said, “You can’t import or export journalist safety; there are no UN peacekeepers in blue helmets who will come and protect you. Local actors must take the lead in this regard.”

Wali Babar

Most of the speakers highlighted that in Pakistan, only two cases of journalists who were murdered had reached any conclusion so far: the murders of Daniel Pearl and Wali Khan Babar.

The most moving talk of the day came from Murtaza Babar, brother of the slain Geo TV reporter, who made an impassioned plea for journalists to look after their own. “For God’s sake, take notice. Enough journalists have died. Hanging the culprits won’t bring my brother back, but it will benefit journalists working in dangerous environments,” he said.

Speaking about the hardships that he and Wali Babar’s family had to endure after his murder, Murtaza Babar said that “three courts, four judges and eight public prosecutors later”, his brother’s murderers still eluded justice.

“At least seven people – including informants, police officers and their relatives – were killed because they were connected to Wali Babar’s case,” Murtaza recounted. “No lawyer was prepared to take up our case, and one who did was also killed.” He claimed that no one from Wali Babar’s organisation or the various journalist bodies had inquired after the family while all these killings were taking place.

“There have been three attempts on my life, but I’ve not gone public with this information, for fear of scaring off the few people who are helping us,” he said.

Murtaza also suggested that journalist bodies help strengthen the investigative capacity of law enforcement agencies, since that was the weakest link in the system.

Dawn

The post-modernist dictatorship over media scholarship 1980s onwards has banalised journalistic narratives. While important issues – for instance debate over media imperialism – have been trivialised, trifles have been assigned centrality in the media discourses.

In recent years and months, we have seen the consequences of this banality. Kerfuffle over an anti-Islam US video last year or protests in neighbouring India over Kamal Haasan’s Vishwarupam are only recent manifestations. Such incidents show that the debates one thought were long settled keep haunting us. For instance, it was thought that violation of privacy, conformity, hate speech, incitement to violence, etc, did not constitute ‘free expression’.

Long ago, German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg aptly set the standard: “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the ones who think differently.”

Also, as Finnish media scholar Kaarle Nordenstreng points out, freedom of expression “is not an end product to be protected as such, but a means to ensure other more general objectives, such as peace and democracy.” (For facts, this article relies heavily on Nordenstreng.)

One may object that democracy and peace are as vague and ill-defined concepts as hate speech and privacy or incitement to violence. In the first place, this is not the case; when democracy arrives in Afghanistan or Iraq aboard F-16s, it is absolute violence, regardless of what CNN or Fox want us to believe.

Second, free expression implies an absolute freedom to question beliefs but also an absolute protection and right for the believers to practice and preach their beliefs. Third, power relations must be taken into account in every debate over free expression. Freedom of press or media does not imply the freedom of media proprietors.

A media system should be democratic. By democracy one does not imply the right to pick one channel out of one hundred channels airing same reactionary ideas. It implies that vast majorities have the right to express themselves. It will require different ownership patterns, radically new media practices, and a media discourse that upholds free expression as its cardinal principle instead of ‘free flow of information’.

Herbert Schiller, an American Marxist media scholar, was pointing out as early as the 1960s that “free flow of information” was part and parcel of US Cold War politics. One of the American architects of the Cold War, John Foster Dulles, secretary of state in the Eisenhower administration, was not upholding the right to free expression when he stated: “If I were to be granted one point in foreign policy and no other, I would make it the free flow of information.”

For Dulles, the “free flow doctrine” (uncritically taught even at Punjab University’s Department of Mass Communication, otherwise a bastion of Islamism), was a construct. A construct, to quote Nodenstreng, “made up of political and ideological elements derived mainly from United States…geopolitical interests.”

However, conformist and disciplined scholars were harnessed to provide this construct with a scholarly aura. These media commissars unscrupulously invoked John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) as sources of the ‘free flow doctrine’ in which there must be a ‘free marketplace of ideas’.

The first use of the phrase ‘free marketplace of ideas’ can be traced to the pages of The New York Times. Ironically, the only time the phrase appears on the pages of the NYT was in the American Communist Party platform for the 1948 election: “We communists seek only the opportunity to compete fairly in a free marketplace of ideas.”

For the US, the ‘free flow doctrine’ implies total submission to the US media system and practices. Unfortunately, in this commercial model, there is no space for free expression.

The writer is a freelance contributor.

Email: mfsulehria@hotmail.com

Source: The News