CPJ.Pakistan.Roots.of.Impunity

SAYS ONE JOURNALIST: ‘NO ONE IS BIG ENOUGH TO NOT BE KNOCKED
OFF. UNTIL SOMEONE IS HELD ACCOUNTABLE, IT WON’T STOP. ’
of The News and a well-known TV personality, told me
that a sitting minister whom he would not name offered
him 30 million rupees (about US$300,000) to stop bashing
the government. “Then they started threatening me,
telling me I was driving very fast and when you drive
fast accidents happen. I started seeing white Corollas
in my neighborhood,” he said, referring to the signature
intelligence agency-issued cars. “I had an intelligence
friend put my phone on surveillance. … A senator close
to the president started getting friendly with me, inviting
me to places outside the city. I said it doesn’t make
sense—the road is not safe.” His intelligence source relayed
that there were discussions to “fix” Malick, which
would mean killing him. “In the meantime, civilian
intelligence were making themselves visible chasing my
car, my wife’s car. My kids were studying in Lahore, and
there was suspicious stuff going on. Friendly civilians in
government told me, ‘Get out and get out now.’”
Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman, chief executive of the Jang
Group, arranged to have Malick flown to Dubai. “But it’s
a funny government,” said Malick, recalling a conversation
with the former interior minister, Rehman Malik. “He
called and said, ‘I’m sending four frontier constables to you.’
And I said, ‘Just call off the people you launched on me.’”
The traditional harassment of journalists by government
institutions has evolved into something more personal,
Malick said. “What’s happening is the line between
the state and individuals has been smashed. Only on the
army side is it institutional harassment—MI [Military
Intelligence] or ISI institutional reaction. On the civilian
side, it’s state functionaries using state resources and
their clout to threaten you. It’s like a mafia state. Your
only recourse is court, and courts are defiant. The media
is way more powerful.” And, therefore, more dangerous.
Even before the May 2011 murder of Asia
Times Online reporter Saleem Shahzad—a
landmark killing widely believed to be the
work of ISI agents—it was apparent that
investigative journalism in Pakistan had become a
game of Russian roulette. Journalists are squeezed on
every side, threatened by the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba,
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the ISI, the MQM, Zardari loyalists,
and a host of other state and non-state militants.
Yet in the decade since Musharraf released the state’s
grip on broadcast media, journalism in Pakistan has
never been more vibrant. Today there are some 90
TV stations and more than 100 radio stations. “The
days when papers were scared of taking on the army
as an institution are gone,” said Malick. “But we can’t
take a stand against individuals because we have no
institutional support. No one is big enough to not be
knocked off. Until someone is held accountable for
killing a journalist, it won’t stop.”
Wali Khan Babar’s murder provoked outrage at the
Karachi Press Club. Journalists for a time banded together,
demanding government action. But once a case
goes to court, the family is usually the one left to pursue
it. As the journalist Najam Sethi explained, police have
no forensic expertise and are under no internal pressure
to pursue such cases. “If Zardari hadn’t pursued Benazir
Bhutto’s case with the full force of a federal investigation
agency and if Musharraf hadn’t been named as the accused,
it would not have made it to the court stage,” he
said. To date, the journalists union has not taken it upon
itself to be the plaintiff in court on behalf of a fellow
journalist. Babar’s brother is still pursuing the case in
court and has testified before the judge.
I asked the journalists at the Karachi Press Club
about the Babar investigation. They smiled and shifted
in their chairs. “Everyone points a finger at the MQM,
but the prosecutors and judges are also under threat,”
said one. “Ten lawyers were killed in the last two
months following sectarian killings. And actually the
judge and prosecutor are under threat, and the previous
prosecutors fled to the U.S.”
I eventually tracked down those two prosecutors in
Texas, where they were keeping such a low profile that
they barely had access to the Internet. They fled Karachi
in December 2011 and flew to Houston, where they had
friends. Ten days after their arrival, a Pakistani attorney
who worked for the “agencies” turned up in Houston
inquiring about them. The prosecutors panicked, convinced
the lawyer was after them, and called a distant
friend in a small town. “We said, ‘Please, for the sake of
God, take us in. We can’t trust anyone,’ ” Muhammad
Khan Buriro, one of the prosecutors, told me.
The prosecutors had worked very closely with the
press in Karachi. This was, after all, the new civilianled
Pakistan and there was faith in the idea of transparency.
Their experience in Karachi explains much of
how justice works in Pakistan, and what must be done
to chip away at impunity. Here is their story.
Born and raised in Sindh in the 1980s, Buriro and
fellow prosecutor Mobashir Mirza joined the PPP student
wing at university during the turbulent anti-Zia
days and never left the party. In 2007, under Musharraf,
they traveled with ousted Chief Justice Iftikhar
Muhammad Chaudhry as the lawyers’ movement to
restore him swept across the country. When the PPP
ROOTS OF IMPUNITY 13