Pakistan’s intelligence monster

Pakistan’s intelligence monster —Khalid Hasan

While there has been an explosion of television and radio stations in a country with an already well-established print tradition, a pattern of brutal attacks is silencing those journalists who pursue stories that make the government uncomfortable

The roughing up of New York Times reporter Carlotta Gall by intelligence hoods in her Quetta hotel room on 19 December and the despicable treatment given her photographer has brought shame to Pakistan. I have been speaking to the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York as to what response their protest to the interior minister Aftab Sherpao has received. As of Friday 12 January, CPJ had heard nothing and was not expecting to hear anything either. That sums up the gangsterland that parts of Pakistan have become.

The intelligence establishment in Pakistan is now a government within a government, a dread entity that has gone rogue, that recognises no law, respects no rules, is bound by no code of conduct and brings the people of Pakistan, in whose name it acts, nothing but disgrace. In the last sixty years there has been only one attempt to look into the state of the intelligence establishment in Pakistan and to see how it could be reformed. Strangely enough, this exercise was ordered by Gen. Yahya Khan, though nothing came of it. Both that committee and the government that had appointed it were overtaken by the cataclysmic events that reached their blood-soaked climax with the breakup of Pakistan in December 1971.

For the last six and a half years, Pakistan has been under a military government and under military governments, not only intelligence agencies but all public servants are known to throw accountability to the winds. Military governments are by their very nature unaccountable since they dance around the commands of a single individual. The question is where will reform start and how? So corrupted and power-drunk have, what the Urdu press calls ‘sensitive institutions’, become that they will have to be dismantled as they exist and rebuilt in accordance with law and a code of conduct.

Carlotta Gall is the daughter of Sandy Gall, a British television reporter who was in and out of Pakistan during the Afghan war and though he is now retired, there are many in Pakistan who know him as a friend. What happened to her is shameful in the extreme. CPJ told me that her great concern is not for herself but for Akhtar Soomro, the Pakistani photographer, who was handled with great brutality and who remains in fear of the hoodlums who beat him up and dealt with him as if he were a common criminal. In a letter Ms Gall sent out to Aftab Sherpao and some others, including CPJ, she detailed her ordeal in dispassionate language.

She wrote, “At 9.43 pm (on 19 December), I was speaking on the telephone when men broke open the door of my room and four men entered the room and began to seize my belongings. One snatched my handbag and when I tried to take it back, a second man punched me twice in the side of the face and head with his fist. I fell backwards onto a coffee table smashing the crockery. I have heavy bruising on my arms, on my temple and my cheekbone and swelling on my left eye and a sprained knee. The men searched my belongings, took my three notebooks, my laptop, my satellite telephone, two cell phones (although they gave one back when it rang) and several other papers and items. They were extremely aggressive and abusive. The leader, who spoke English, refused to show any ID, said I was in Quetta without permission (she wasn’t), that I had visited Pashtunabad, a part of the town, which he said was not permitted, and that I had been interviewing the Taliban.”

They also told her that Akhtar Soomro was a Pakistani and they could do to him what they wished. In other countries, being a citizen has advantages: in Pakistan it seems to be becoming a liability.

Tariq Azim is emerging as the government’s ‘damage control guy’ because by midnight that day, he had managed to have Ms Gall’s belongings returned and her colleague released and his equipment restored to him. While on the one hand, the government has made no statement, those who roughed up the two journalists were obviously government agents, otherwise how would Tariq Azim have managed to get done what he got done?

CPJ’s Asia programme director Bob Dietz told me that the attack on Ms Gall and her colleague is typical of what has been happening increasingly to Pakistani journalists. Virtually all the incidents have gone unexplained and apparently un-investigated by the government. This week, he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Many Pakistani journalists are intimidated and reluctant to speak publicly about their attackers. But the few incidents that have been made public follow a similar pattern.”

Dietz cited several cases that should make us hang our heads in shame. There is

Mehruddin Mari, a Sindhi journalist who was held illegally for four months with the government saying it knew nothing about it. The killing of Hayatullah Khan in NWFP remains unexplained, but everyone knows who his killers were. He was the eighth journalist to be killed in Pakistan since the murder of WSJ reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002.

When a CPJ delegation visited Pakistan last year, government officials promised to make public all information they had on CPJ’s lengthy list of unexplained cases. “Now, almost six months later, they still have no explanations,” Dietz wrote. He added, “Talk to officials in Pervez Musharraf’s government and you will hear how the media are freer now than they have ever been. And while there has been an explosion of television and radio stations in a country with an already well-established print tradition, a pattern of brutal attacks is silencing those journalists who pursue stories that make the government uncomfortable. Today, many Pakistani journalists fear their government’s intelligence agencies more than any Islamic militant.”

I should close this with the reminder that you are reading this in a newspaper whose editor Najam Sethi was abducted from his home, beaten up, kept in solitary confinement and physically and psychologically traumatised, though not by this government, but it could well have been this as that government. The fact is that as long as the intelligence establishment in Pakistan is not dismantled and rebuilt, what happened to Najam Sethi and Hayatullah and Mehruddin will happen again and again and again.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent. His e-mail is khasan2@cox.net