In Pre election
Pakistan a Military Crackdown Is the Real Issue
By Douglas Schorzman June
6, 2018
Just a
month and a half away from national elections, Pakistan’s powerful military
establishment has mounted a fearsome campaign against its critics in the news
media, on social networks, and in mainstream political movements.
It is
all adding up: journalists abducted or threatened, major news outlets blocked,
sympathetic views toward the civilian governing party, the Pakistan Muslim
League-Nawaz, censored or punished.
Interviews
with journalists and political analysts in recent days have been dominated by
concerns that a military campaign of intimidation and crackdown on dissent is
intensifying ahead of the vote — and nearly unanimously, none dared discuss it
on the record.
The latest alarm came with the abduction of a
newspaper columnist and prominent critic of the military, Gul Bukhari, by armed
men late Tuesday in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore. Ms. Bukhari was being
driven to appear on a late-night talk show on Waqt News when the car was
stopped in a military cantonment in the city. She was hauled off and the driver
was beaten, the station said.
Ms.
Bukhari has frequently crossed two of the military’s recent red lines on social
media — criticizing the army for its pressure on the PML-N, as the governing
party is known, and expressing support for a growing Pashtun human rights
movement known as P.T.M.
Just a
day before, the army’s chief spokesman, Maj. Gen. Asif Ghafoor, called a news
conference to declare that social media users who rebuked the military were
engaged in “anti-state activities” and were being monitored by the army’s spy
agency.
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He
then posted pictures of some of the country’s most prominent journalists,
suggesting they were part of a social media conspiracy against the military, in
a move condemned by the Committee to Protect Journalists as “tantamount to
putting a giant target on their backs.”
Ms. Bukhari’s supporters see her abduction and
General Ghafoor’s threats as related, and some directly accused the military of
being responsible. She was dropped off near her home roughly four hours after
her abduction, and was unwilling to talk about who was behind it, asking for
privacy in a statement released on Twitter.
Military
officials would not comment on the record about Ms. Bukhari’s abduction or
about General Ghafoor’s news conference.
The
two events have further chilled the political environment in Pakistan’s already
beleaguered democracy.
“There
is a palpable climate of fear about what can be said about whom, how, and where
— not just on mainstream media but also on social media,” said Adil Najam, the
Dean of Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University. “This is not
healthy for the state of democracy in general, but especially not right before
an election.”
Even
when journalists do talk about the military, it is usually in code, referring
to the “authorities” or the “powers that be” rather than directly naming the
security establishment that has so asserted its dominance over civilian
institutions.
One of
the few Pakistani journalists who has repeatedly and directly condemned the
military for its crackdown, Taha Siddiqui, can do so because he has fled the
country. He narrowly escaped an
abduction attempt in February.
On
Wednesday, Mr. Siddiqui said Ms. Bukhari’s abduction was another frightening
statement.
“They want to send a message to the rest of
Pakistanis and the world that they can do whatever they want, whenever they
want, to dissenters,” he said in an email interview.
“This
is no long about just about intimidating me, Gul or other such dissenters and
military critics. This is about sending a message to everyone: Stop speaking
against the Pakistan Army,” he added.
In
recent weeks, Pakistan’s biggest English-language newspaper, Dawn, was accused
of ethical violations by the country’s press regulatory panel and soon after
found its circulation blocked in vast portions of southern Pakistan. The
paper’s offense was to publish an interview with the ousted
former prime minister and leader of PML-N, Nawaz Sharif, in which he
criticized the military.
In interviews in Lahore, newspaper sellers and
shopkeepers said that military and intelligence officers had instructed them,
sometimes politely but other times with force, to stop stocking Dawn.
The
actions are similar to those used against Pakistan’s biggest cable news
network, Geo TV, which cable providers
in military cantonment areas started blocking in March. In the
following weeks, more than three-quarters of the network’s cable providers
around the country dropped or blocked them.
The
pattern there, too, is familiar: Military officers and their supporters
criticized Geo as being sympathetic to PML-N, citing its coverage of the
judiciary’s ouster of Mr. Sharif on corruption charges last summer. The
coverage was attacked for suggesting that the court had been doing the
military’s bidding.
The punishing pressure now applied to Dawn and
to other news outlets that challenge the military is more insidious than the outright
censorship of times past, says Dawn’s editor, Zaffar Abbas.
“This
is somehow far more suffocating than martial law,” he said in a recent
interview with The New York Times. “This time, the facade of democracy is
there. With the threat of economic retaliation, we see Pakistani media suffer
the worst kind of censorship: self-censorship.”
He was
alluding to how the country’s dozens of media channels and newspapers have been frightened into
falling in line on what the military defines as “no-go” issues, such
as giving Mr. Sharif and his party coverage, or reporting on the Pashtun rights
movement.
This
is high political season in Pakistan. The military’s pressure on civilian
institutions comes just as the country’s political parties are exerting maximal
effort to win seats in Parliament.
In any
normal political environment, PML-N would be going into the campaigning as a
favorite. It is still the dominant party in the Pakistani heartland, Punjab,
and even after the corruption accusations at the heart of Mr. Sharif’s ouster,
it has devoted followers.
But
now the country is awaiting a court ruling that could see Mr. Sharif
imprisoned. That decision is expected in the weeks before the elections,
scheduled for July 25.
And
over everything is the question: Can an election in which the leading party and
journalists who cover it are perceived to be under threat — from a military
establishment that has overthrown governments several times — really be seen as
free?
“They want to control the narrative,” said Mr.
Abbas, the Dawn editor. “And to a large extent, they are succeeding.”
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