As a follow-up to our earlier post on the beating of NY Times reporter Carlotta Gall in Pakistan, we've asked Bob Dietz, Asia Program Coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, to tell us more about the incident and the growing threat to journalists who work in Pakistan. The threat is worst for Pakistani members of the press, but I'd expected the beating of an American - allegedly by police officers - to have generated much greater Western coverage than it has; so far, not even the Times has reported the incident (Links to reports in The Hindu, as well as on NDTV and Pakistan's Daily Times). UPDATE: ABC News report from December 26.
Bob, how’s Carlotta doing?
She seems fine. She was a bit stiff when I spoke with her a day or two after the incident. She’s a very experienced and resilient reporter, and she’s been in many tough spots before. She was rightfully much more worried about Akhtar Soomro, her photographer. He apparently wasn’t harmed, but has returned to his family and gone quiet. She feels there is much more of a threat to Pakistani journalists like him, who really are vulnerable to the predations of attackers like those that went at him and Carlotta in Quetta. Carlotta has her government and the U.S. to back her up. Akhtar only has his government, which might well be the perpetrator in this situation.
What have you learned about the beating over the last few days?
Not much more than was already known. Carlotta laid it out pretty clearly.
How would you characterize the official response to the beating, and the investigation?
It’s been the typical obfuscation that we are accustomed to seeing from the government. The interior or information ministries react with promises of dealing with the incident, but then it eventually disappears. Pakistan is very adept at that. We’ve counted nine deaths of journalists since the American Danny Pearl was killed in 2002 in Pakistan. We use that as a starting point because his death was pretty rigorously investigated, and people brought to trial as a result of that investigation. Since then, only Hayatullah Khan’s death in the middle of this year has apparently been investigated to any level of competency, but until now the government has refused to release the findings of High Court Justice Mohammed Reza Khan, who conducted the investigation. Basically, the government is indicating that when it is pressured it can conduct an investigation, but in general it feels it need not act as Pakistani journalists are killed or abducted or threatened.
I haven’t seen any coverage of this incident in the Western press. What do you think explains that?
I would have liked to seen more, but look at it in this context: This was a non-fatal attack on two journalists—a national and a foreigner—in a country where such things are commonplace, particularly for Pakistani nationals, under a government that is desperately trying to stifle the reporting of deepening internal contradictions that have global significance. The Musharaff government is straddling a position of placating the West with anti-Taliban and anti-al Qaeda rhetoric while dealing with the contradiction that such groups are not seen as that great of a threat domestically and are actually useful to the government.
The story, for now, isn’t the journalists covering Pakistan. The news story with international repercussions is Pakistan’s situation: Its stability, the shelf-life of the military government, what would replace it, whether it will have to resort to increasingly authoritarian tactics to hold on to power. Carlotta and Akhtar were apparently covering Taliban activity in Quetta, a place where the government denies there is such activity or at least doesn’t want the vast extent of such activity made known. Unable to control the media message, the government’s policy seems to be to attack the media messengers. But so far, at least, the situation isn’t analogous to Iraq where part of the story is that journalists are paying an incredibly high price to cover the story. But to assault a Western journalist is another indicator of just how quickly things are getting worse in Pakistan. And a very harsh message has been delivered to other Pakistanis who would help outside reporters cover the country.
Is there a coordinated effort to intimidate journalists in Pakistan?
Coordinated? I think it is ad hoc. And we have to be careful—we don’t know who has carried out these attacks. Most journalists in Pakistan are convinced that it’s usually the government. Journalists in FATA told me they fear retribution from the government more than the militants they are covering. And while Carlotta said her attackers verbally identified themselves as government agents, they offered no identification or other proof. Worse, the people who have emerged from confrontations like this, or disappearances or abductions, don’t publicly identify by name who took them. I shudder to think what sort of threats they have received before they were released about identifying names or agencies, if indeed they were taken by the authorities as their colleagues say.
What kind of outside pressure would you like to see exerted on the authorities in Pakistan?
The Committee to Protect Journalists and media and human rights organizations certainly have Pakistan on our radar and in our sights on these issues. And in Carlotta’s case, so does the State Department, I believe. But I was in Pakistan in July to meet with government officials about the threat to journalists. We had a press conference the day before we left, and we were rightly asked by a Pakistani journalist if our three-person delegation, having just gotten fairly high-level to the government, was now going to go home to write more alerts from the safety of New York. I said that we can do our bit—and we have kept up the pressure and met with Pakistani officials here in the U.S., and yes, we have continued to issue alerts and updates—but in the end this is a Pakistani problem. If you’re from Pakistan and want your government to treat journalists better, you had better make yourself heard. This situation is not getting better. It’s getting worse.
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