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Extreme Censorship

Jun 03, 2011 Editorial

In “The Limits to Tolerance”, the writer and playwright George Bernard Shaw observed mordantly that, “Assassination is the most extreme form of censorship.” A week ago, the Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad became the latest victim of this form of censorship. There were indications that he had been tortured and killed by Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI). A week before he had exposed the connections between al-Qaeda and the ISI, and more importantly, those between al-Qaeda and the Pakistan navy.
By “outing” the links between terrorists and the highest levels of Pakistani intelligence and navy, Shahzad had obviously rubbed some very high officials the wrong way. Late last year, he had been grilled by the ISI after he revealed that Pakistan had released the supreme commander of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, so that he could play a pivotal role in backchannel talks through the Pakistani army with Washington. Saleem refused to reveal his sources or write a retraction. A week before his assassination his new book was released: Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond Bin Laden and 9/11.
It would appear that ultimately the powers that be saw him as incorruptible; a person who couldn’t be bought or swayed to espouse what he knew not to be correct. In other words he was a principled journalist, working in Pakistan where last year, forty-four other journalists had been killed. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Committee to Protect Journalists and Democracy Now have protested the killing, but US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to the heart of the matter: “His work reporting on terrorism and intelligence issues in Pakistan brought to light the troubles extremism poses to Pakistan’s stability.”
But Shahzad’s murder should be a wake-up call to journalists and indeed every citizen of countries such as ours where the very highest official of the land regularly questions the bona fides of journalists to do their job. And this, we must remind such leaders, is to deliver the news as the journalists find it, to the citizens of the country. There may be some who may assert that such assassinations cannot happen here. Well, one Father Darke of the Catholic Standard was assassinated here in 1979.
And it can happen here again, as it has in spades in Pakistan, because of the same dynamics. When the leaders of the country define those that expose inconvenient truths as “anti-nationalist”, then sooner or later there will be members of the country’s security apparatus (as in Pakistan) or even private partisans that will take action against such journalists.
There have already been several credible claims that some journalists, defined as thorns in the sides of officialdom, have been selected for “special” treatment.
There will be others who may point to our fundamental rights entrenched in our constitution and even to the Freedom of Information Bill that is promised to be introduced in parliament in two weeks. Well, we have some information for them.
The constitution of Pakistan states in its preamble: “Therein shall be guaranteed fundamental rights, including equality of status, of opportunity and before law, social, economic and political justice, and freedom of thought, expression, belief, faith, worship and association, subject to law and public morality.” Pakistan was also the first country in South Asia to frame a law on freedom of information, when it promulgated the Freedom of Information Ordinance in 1997. Of what comfort are those guarantees to the wife and children of Shahzad?
The truth of the matter is that until those leaders that stride the corridors of power accept that they have been placed there by the people; that those people have an inalienable right to be informed, and that this is the function of journalism in the maintenance of democracy, the latter will always be under threat. And suffer even the most extreme form of censorship.
We wish our leaders could declare from the rooftops: “We may not agree with what some journalists say, but we will defend with our lives their right to say it.”

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