Individu Spotlight

Individu-spotlight is a monthly monitor on political affairs printed on the 17th of every month by individualland.com. Individualland would welcome reproduction & dissemination of the contents of this report after proper acknowledgment.

Covering the tribal areas: challenges and impediments

The month of May, in it’s scorching heat , also reminds us of the heat and the odds that the media experiences in Pakistan. The Press Freedom Day falling on May 3rd is an opportunity for some to pay lip service to media freedom. For Individualland , this is an opportunity to tell the story of the story teller and focus on journalists working in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. We are grateful to noted journalist and analyst Mr. Rahimullah Yusufzai for penning this. As always, feedback will be most welcome.

Din Muhammad didn’t work for any big media organization and was almost unknown outside his native South Waziristan. The Urdu-language newspaper Inkishaf for which he reported has limited circulation and little or no impact on politics of the area. Still he was made to pay dearly for defying one group of militants in Wana. Four of his family members including his father, brother, uncle and cousin were killed in apparent retribution for his work. He was lucky to survive the attack on his house and stay alive during the fierce factional fighting in the Wana area.

However, Din Muhammad may have to follow in the footsteps of other journalists who realized they risked their lives by continuing to work out of Wana, headquarters of the troubled South Waziristan tribal region. Barring a few, the 30 odd journalists who reported from Wana and other parts of South Waziristan have shifted to Tank, Dera Ismail Khan, Peshawar and even Islamabad to avoid harm.

It wasn’t only Din Muhammad’s work as journalist that angered the militants. He earned their ire when he facilitated a group of visiting journalists from Peshawar, Dera Ismail Khan and Tank to come to Wana on March 25 and meet leaders of a breakaway faction of militants who had pledged to evict foreign fighters linked to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) from their area. The foreign militants and their tribal supporters in Wana were outraged because Din Mohammad’s actions enabled the rival group to publicize its version of events in the media.

Despite losing four members of his family and constantly at risk from the militants, Din Mohammad has continued to live and work in Wana, where control has shifted hands from Uzbek militants and their local allies to an alliance of government-backed tribal fighters led by one Maulvi Nazeer. The new masters of Wana are friendly and grateful to him for helping to organize their media campaign. In order to survive, journalists have to make such compromises not only with the heavily-armed militants but also the government and its different arms, including the ubiquitous military intelligence agencies. Even then most of the journalists found the going tough and decided to move to safer places. Believing in the maxim that discretion was the better part of valour, they moved out of South Waziristan and are now reporting the dramatic events taking place in their native towns and villages from the relative safety of urban centres such as Tank and Dera Ismail Khan.

The Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are geographically part of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) but are governed by the Islamabad-based federal government through a Governor operating out of Peshawar. They are seven tribal agencies or regions – Khyber, Orakzai, Kurram, North Waziristan, South Waziristan, Mohmand and Bajaur -, and six Frontier Regions. All tribal agencies except Orakzai share Pakistan’s long and porous border with Afghanistan. The total area of FATA is 27,220 square kilometers. The terrain is forbidding, varying from parched locales to snowcapped mountains. According to the 1998 census, FATA’s population was 3.138 million, a figure contested by the tribal people who claim their numbers are much higher. The tribal areas have suffered from government neglect and are presently the most under-developed in Pakistan with 60 per cent of the population living below the poverty line compared to 40 per cent nationwide and only 17 per cent of the people being literate. As the Pashtun tribes inhabiting the tribal areas put up strong resistance against the British Raj prior to Pakistan’s independence in 1947, the colonial rulers deliberately kept it under-developed. The Pakistan government made little effort to change FATA’s administrative system and its freedom-loving people were allowed to retain their autonomy. As the Pakistani courts and police had no jurisdiction in FATA, the tribal areas came to be known as “Ilaqa Ghair” or “Yaghistan,” meaning a place outside the purview of law. Sections of the Western media have been describing FATA as a lawless territory and terms such as “Cowboy Country” and “Bin Ladenistan” were used to name it.

It is in such tough circumstances that journalists have to work in FATA. They are subjected to constant pressure both by the government and the militants. Threats and intimidation is common. All parties to the conflict in Waziristan insist that their dead are martyrs. The media is under pressure to refer to dead soldiers as “martyrs” and the militants are “terrorists” and “miscreants.” Never mind if the government and the military eventually sign peace agreements with the same “terrorists” and army generals sometimes refer to militants’ commander Baitullah Mahsud as “soldier of peace” and then start condemning him as “terrorist.”

Frequently, access for the media to the scene of action in FATA is blocked. Places where military operations are conducted are turned into “no-go” areas for journalists without any formal announcement. Mediapersons were kept out of Bajaur Agency on two occasions in 2006 when a US pilotless plane attacked Damadola village with Hellfire missiles in January ostensibly to destroy a suspected al-Qaeda hideout and then in October when the Pakistan Army claimed responsibility for a missile strike against a religious seminary in which 80 young students and their teachers were killed. Journalists were turned back at entry-points to Bajaur but some of them secretly reached there and were able to report, record and film the death and destruction caused by the two missile attacks. Foreign journalists require special permits from the government to enter the tribal areas. They are not given permission to visit troublespots such as South Waziristan, North Waziristan and Bajaur. Occasionally, the military’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) arranges day-time guided tours for them but all such trips to Waziristan and Bajaur are designed to provide only one side of the picture to the international media.

Government ministers and other functionaries often say that there is no ban on Pakistani journalists visiting the tribal areas but in the same breath they warn that they could do so at their own risk. In fact, reporters feel more threatened from intelligence agencies than the militants. The militants, on the other hand, don’t trust tribal journalists based in FATA and often accuse them of being in the pay of the government. They sometimes bypass the tribal reporters and directly contact journalists in Peshawar and Islamabad to pass on information and their version of events in FATA. To protect tribal reporters, who are vulnerable to threats and pressure from both the government officials and militants, journalists in Peshawar publish sensitive stories about FATA with Peshawar datelines without mentioning the name of the tribal reporter and his sources of information.

The demand for footage linked to the war on terror for use by Western and other international televisions channels has led to emergence of a new breed of tribal reporters wielding digital cameras and making good money. A number of young and educated tribesmen have entered journalism and some have shown promise. However, the assassination of four tribal journalists during the last two years has caused a scare among their surviving colleagues in South Waziristan and North Waziristan and affected their work. Allah Noor Wazir and Amir Nawab Khan, both holding degrees in journalism from Gomal University in Dera Ismail Khan, were killed on February 7, 2005 in an ambush near Wana after returning from Srarogha town where they had covered the peace agreement ceremony between the government and Baitullah Mahsud, a commander of tribal militants and, according to President General Pervez Musharraf, now a legitimate target for the military for aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan in violation of the accord. Nasir Afridi, a correspondent in the gun-manufacturing town of Darra Adamkhel, was accidentally shot dead on December 4, 2005 when two rival parties exchanged fire in the main bazaar. He died with his boots on because he was on his way to the Press Club to pursue his journalistic work.

The case of Hayatullah, a tribal reporter based in Mir Ali in North Waziristan, attracted attention worldwide and he was posthumously awarded international awards for courage in journalism. He was abducted on December 5, 2005 and his bullet-riddled body was found seven months later. His family insisted the country’s intelligence agencies got him abducted even though there were reports that the US military or Uzbek militants could have a hand in his disappearance and subsequent death. Hayatullah’s family argued that pictures taken by him showing parts of the Hellfire missile fired by a pilotless, US Predator plane to kill an alleged al-Qaeda operative Hamza Rabia, in his village near Mir Ali belied the government claim that Rabia and others with him were killed while making bombs in the house during the night. In their view, the pictures appeared worldwide and embarrassed the government, which has been rather unconvincingly claiming that US military authorities are not allowed to launch attacks in Pakistani territory.

At least two tribal reporters received injuries during attempts on their life. Shakir Ehsan has become disabled when he was hit by bullets in the same attack in which his two colleagues Allah Noor Wazir and Amir Nawab Wazir were shot dead. Mujib-ur-Rehman Wazir was lucky to survive an assassination attempt in Wana on May 14, 2005. He is still active in journalism but has left South Waziristan and shifted to Dera Ismail Khan.

The situation in FATA in general and in the two Waziristans in particular is still uncertain and unsettled. A new element was introduced in the politics of South Waziristan following the uprising of government-backed local tribes against foreign militants, particularly the Uzbekistanis who were provided refuge and sanctuaries after their eviction from neighboring Afghanistan in the wake of the fall of Taliban regime in December 2001. This would likely have a spillover effect and a similar armed campaign to evict the Uzbek militants could take place next in North Waziristan. Then there are reports of presence of al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked Arabs, Afghans and other foreigners in both South Waziristan and North Waziristan.

The US media and government and political figures in most Western capitals are convinced that Osama bin Laden, his deputy Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri and other top al-Qaeda members are hiding in Waziristan. All this is enough to keep Waziristan, Bajaur and other tribal areas in the limelight in the world media. That would mean greater reliance on tribal reporters who have access to FATA and possess courage to do an honest professional job. The government, militants and others having a stake in the tribal areas would want to present one-sided view of the situation there. But with better skills and protection provided to them by their employers, tribal reporters and their counterparts in Peshawar and rest of Pakistan are capable of performing their duty in a professional way.

This piece was penned exclusively for Individualland by the well known Peshawar, Pakistan based journalist and political analyst, Mr.Rahimullah Yusufzai.