Pakistan’s Emergency and the International Media

Pakistan’s political fortunes, or misfortunes rather, have been a mixed bag of virtues and an incessantly vague and utterly useless blame games since the proclamation of emergency by the nation’s military strongman, General Pervez Musharraf. Out of the many different scenarios and analyses that have sprung out, one of them is the drastically different type of international media coverage given to the nation’s political leaders and the movement of lawyers and the civil society (not to forget the deposed judges and the handcuffed media) on the one hand and the military establishment and the newly sprouted ‘loyalist’ judiciary on the other.

Speaking very generally, the international media have held the movement being launched by the civil society that is being spearheaded by Justice (retd) Wajihuddin Ahmed, Imran Khan, Nawaz Sharif, the honourable deposed judges of the Supreme Court and the High Courts and arrested lawyers like barrister Aitzaz Ahsan, Ali Ahmed Kurd and Advocate Munir Malik, in high respect. It is being broadly seen as a national movement being commandeered by Western educated, secular and moderate lawyers, politicians, journalists and deposed judges that widely seeks to reinstate the supremacy of the constitution, restore the supremacy of the law and judiciary, ensure an independent and free media and to promote values of pluralism and democracy in all sections of the society.

The western media has played its role in exposing General Musharraf’s hypocrisy with regards to the clampdown of emergency in the country. Though he blamed the judiciary’s interference into affairs of the executive and the media for sensationalising acts of terror, majority of the people of Pakistan do indeed believe that the major reason for the proclamation of emergency was not the rising acts of terrorism and suicide bombings in the country, but an expected verdict of an eleven member Supreme Court bench headed by the honourable Justice Javed Iqbal that would have declared Musharraf’s candidature for a third term presidency unconstitutional. General Musharraf had the words of his legal advisors and counsels, Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada and Attorney General Malik Qayyum that the verdict was to go against him, 8-3. Therefore in order to save his ‘own skin’, as an article in The Economist would go on to say, General Musharraf decided to proclaim emergency and deal with an activist judiciary and an influential media, with an iron fist.

In an article posted on Newsweek’s website on November 26, journalist Ron Moreau correctly mentions that “nearly every Pakistani believes that Musharraf declared the draconian emergency measures expressly to oust the justices—who were poised to declare his re-election to a second five-year term unconstitutional.” This fact is further validated by the fact that terrorist activities and suicide bombings have further spiked up since the proclamation of emergency, as a major military operation in the erstwhile peaceful Swat valley, purportedly against the militant leader Maulana Fazlullah and his loyalists seems inevitable.

What can be seen in Pakistan is that against all odds and rational norms, General Musharraf has been pretty easy and calm with the terrorists and has vented his anger firmly on the media, the lawyers and civil society activists through massive arrests, news blackouts and ferocious usage of tear gas against civilians. This has cast the general’s image as that of a firm believer in democracy; way too much irrespective of whatever George W. Bush has to say. The Time magazine in its cover story on Pakistan has correctly depicted this fact in its November 19 issue by accepting that “it wasn’t the extremists who bore the brunt of Musharraf’s wrath. Indeed, as even as his regime cracked down on lawyers, journalists and human rights activists, it agreed to a cease fire with a powerful militant leader( Maulana Fazlullah) who had taken 213 soldiers hostage in the lawless north-western region.” The story further went on to quote human rights activist and the head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan Aasma Jehangir, saying that the “arrested are progressive, secular minded people, while the terrorists are offered negotiations.”

One lesson that General Musharraf has never shown to have learnt or implemented is the willingness of the army’s top hierarchy to take casualties. This has been one fundamental issue that has plagued the army ever since the defeat in East Pakistan in 1971. General Zia was quick enough to withdraw his troops from the Siachen glacier and (Pakistan conceded that land to India) when casualties and military expenditures started to spiral upwards during the brief but deadly military skirmish with the much larger and better equipped Indian Army back in 1984. Musharraf found himself at the centre of the storm that sprouted out from the Kargil misadventure. Amidst international pressure spearheaded by the Clinton administration and rising casualties, General Musharraf quickly ordered withdrawal of troops from the Kargil that had been so painstakingly taken up by the Kashmiri freedom fighters and the regular soldiers of the Pakistan army. One lesson that he should have learnt from America’s recent misadventures is that in cases of combating terrorism, conflicts can only be fought and won when the regular army and its top leadership shows the willingness to take up casualties, come what may in order to achieve nationalistic goals and supreme causes like ridding the nation from terrorism. Musharraf has clearly failed in this assessment.

However, this time round, it is so that for the first time since 1971, that the Army has been involved in operations that should have been dealt and resolved politically, with military operations being the last resort. The Army’s inability to take up casualties, coupled with the degradation of the morale and confidence of the troops as a result of being tipped off against its own people, has been the largest and single most important factor that has emboldened the terrorists. During the Red Mosque stand off in Islamabad earlier this year, an operation was repeatedly shrugged off as leading authorities also shied away from tough diplomacy. The relatively casual attitude shown by the administration at that time did not only fester a wound that should have been easily closed down at the right time of the first diagnoses, goes on to speak volumes about the kind of thinking that prevails within the administration regarding the fight against terrorism. Just like Generals Ayub and Zia demonstrated the threat to American interests in South and Central Asia from the growing sways of Soviet style Communism, to derive maximum aid and benefits from the US, General Musharraf has used his trump card of terrorism to the same advantage and coincidentally, at the cost of the larger and more vital national interests. A vast majority of Pakistanis today are unwilling to believe and accept that the way General Musharraf and the army is dealing with the threat of terrorism is best in the nation’s larger interest. General Musharraf’s moves, unlike those of his predecessors, have not gone unchallenged.

Surprisingly enough, many journalists, editors and columnists who have written about Pakistan’s ‘emergency plus’ in international newspapers and magazines, have demonstrated the many similarities of this situation, with the emergency of the lat 1970s, as was proclaimed by the country’s third military president, General Zia.

Many Indian columnists, in their opinion-editorials have argued that as compared to General Zia, Musharraf has been considerably more powerful and more resourceful. Former Indian diplomat MK Bhadrakumar, in his opinion piece entitled ‘will the US pressure tactics work?’, in the Asia Times (reproduced by the Pakistani newspaper Daily Times on November 18), argued that as General Zia was a pariah back in 1979, General Musharraf at the time of the proclamation of emergency 2007, Musharraf was a front-line partner in the global fight against terror. Another major difference between the two emergencies was that Zia at that time, clamped down his authority in order to weed out the political opposition that he could possibly get from Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, an elected prime minister who was later hanged on the orders of Zia, through a very pliant judiciary. That is why Bhutto’s hanging is referred to pretty often as a ‘judicial murder.’ Against this, Musharraf’s emergency had actually allowed individual politicians to return from exile in the back drop of ‘deals’ and the politically blasphemous National Reconciliation Ordinance.

Bhadrakumar also went on to compare John Negroponte’s recent visit to Pakistan, to the visit that was embarked upon by President Carter’s Secretary of State Warren Christopher and his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzeziniski, in 1979. In both cases, it has been pointed out that American pressure and diplomatic efforts had been bound to fail due to a strikingly similar range of factors. Firstly, just as the Carter Administration had turned into a failed lame duck since the onset of the Iranian Revolution, Bush has suffered the same credibility crisis as a result of the Iraq misadventures and therefore, like General Zia, General Musharraf, keeping in focus the larger and long term interests of the institution to which he belongs, the Army, is forced to go slowly, and think beyond the outgoing administration that finally leaves office in January 2009.

However, one other fact that needs to be highlighted is that unlike General Zia, Musharraf is no more the only strong man at home. Unlike Zia, he faces a huge and strong movement at home from the secular and moderate civil society. The movement is seemingly growing in strength as its demands for press freedom, reinstatement of the pre-November 3 judiciary, among others are becoming more clear and louder each passing day. Considering this fact, it would not be entirely incorrect to assume that the civil society’s uprise since March 9, the day President Musharraf fired the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice and filed a reference against his alleged acts of corruption, has shaken the very foundations of the current unconstitutional and rubber stamp set-up that has been desperately cobbled together by General Musharraf himself. Against all this, in 1979, the nation had yet to fully recover from the confidence shattering defeat of the Armed forces in East Pakistan in 1971 and also from the politically tense situation during the 1977 elections and therefore the masses did not dare come out to the streets to protest. Therefore controlling law and order situation was pretty much easier at that time, than in 2007. Also, as there was just one state owned television channel at that time and only a handful of newspapers that were heavily censored, ideological domination and proliferation of solely state friendly messages through the media was not only easy, but indeed was the order of the day! The state owned media in Pakistan at that time, was nothing more than a practical example of Katz and Lazersfeld’s hypodermic syringe model. The media landscape now is pretty much different in an era of Information Technology, nanotechnology and globalisation.


Considering these and many other facts and issue that cannot be discussed here due to limitations of space, it would be logical to accept MJ. Akber’s conclusion, that “Ronald Reagan needed Zia more than Zia needed Reagan. Musharraf needs Bush more than Bush needs Musharraf.” This is all the more so also because of the situation in Afghanistan then and now. Then, Reagan needed Zia as a proxy who was indirectly commandeering America’s war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, using their equipment, ammunition and money. Against that, Musharraf jurisdiction of action is by far more restricted and limited, most reasons of which are beyond the scope of this write up.

The new curbs on the media have barred the media from giving live coverage of rallies and suicide bomb blasts. The media is also not supposed to air messages of ‘terrorists.’ Like the judiciary, the media should not bring actions of the executive into questioning. Many of the live television talk shows and hosts whom the government thought to be hostile to the official line of propaganda, have either been silenced through the use of force, or the media owners have been asked to do away with their shows and fire the hosts or else they would face heavy fines and other penalties including television blackouts and imprisonments. ARY television, AAJ television and Dawn News TV are among some of the big media channels that have obliged to follow the government’s newly issued draconian ‘code of conduct’ and have subsequently banned the shows of various popular anchors like Kashif Abbasi of ARY and Syed Talat Hussein of AAJ TV.

It has so far been only Geo TV that has taken a principled stand against the government’s onslaught against the media, even at the cost of around $13.33 million, the alleged financial loss that the network has so far incurred due to its inability to broadcast the ongoing India-Pakistan cricket series, for which it had the sole broadcasting rights in Pakistan. Even the network’s entertainment, youth and sports channels still remain suspended.

The story with newspapers has however been totally different. Although the media curbs have been there for newspapers and other print media as well, but the press, to which many Pakistanis have reverted back to in order to get the news and views, has so far defied these bans and newspapers like The Nation, The News and Dawn, Pakistan’s largest selling English language daily, have been very critical of the government from the outset of the proclamation of emergency. However, considering the low levels of literacy in Pakistan, their impact still remains limited and therefore the administration is not as much concerned about the way print journalism has been functioning over the last few weeks.

In an interview during CNN’s programme International Correspondents on Nov 25, Dawn’s London correspondent, M. Ziauddin said that “most of the dictators in the country in Pakistan have tolerated English print journalism, because they knew that most of the people don't read English newspapers. And that gives them a kind of window to show to the world, look, we're so liberal on the media.” He indeed raised an interesting issue. It is true that the Musharraf government has indeed used the existence of the nation’s vibrant English language media in order to validate his claims of giving the media liberty during his tenure over the last eight years. Realities are however different. Many senior Pakistani journalists and heads of various media bodies in the country are of the opinion that the government has not given the media anything that they had not struggled hard for day in and day out.

General Musharraf has however failed to learn his lessons of media management over the years. He still does not understand that by laying curbs on the traditional media, news and essential realities regarding the government’s malfunctioning and corruption cannot be hidden. This is the age of citizen journalism, it is the age of the Internet and mobile technologies.

The international media’s principled stand against the imposition of emergency must be taken with a pinch of salt. What I mean to say here is that the Western news media must be credited for ensuring that protests and demonstrations against the military rule are kept in the real limelight, but however once again, like the case of Iraq, some analyses and interpretations continue to remain flawed as the scope of debate and discussion continues to remain restricted. This has led to the concealment of many essential and hidden realities.

What the masses out there have not been able to understand is the dangerous silence of the western media when it comes to uncovering the hands of the hidden institutions and the vast anti-Musharraf lobby in the west. What the western media has failed to analyse is that America, is only using Pakistan to fulfill its global aims of controlling oil and gas in the Central Asian Republics. America, like always is currently using the Musharraf regime to its ultimate benefits in South and Central Asia. The British were the ones who taught the Americans a very important lesson, that in order to pacify the Middle East in its favour, the Americans must solidly seal the gates, or the two openings of the Middle East. One being Saudi Arabia and Turkey and the other being Pakistan. Over the years, the Americans have had a considerable impact on the policy-making procedures in Pakistan. The current situation is not different. It must not come as a surprise that both, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto are only back home because of the nods from Washington. It must also not be forgotten that in the expulsion of Nawaz Sharif to Saudi Arabia, back in the year 2000, former US President Bill Clinton had a lead role to play.

What Musharraf has failed to understand that at this moment in time, when the scare of depleting energy resources has made the Americans invade two Muslim countries which are rich in oil, gas and other energy generating energy resources like coal—all in the name of fighting global terrorism and extremism. General Musharraf might have conveniently played into American hands, all throughout these last eight years. Americans are still very much for the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline. If media reports are anything to go by, then it must be added here that there have been reports saying that as a reward for snubbing the gas pipeline project with Iran, America has offered this TAP project and another oil/gas pipeline project to Pakistan that involves Kuwait and Qatar. America has long sought a complete control over the natural resources in the Middle East. Musharraf’s compromise on national security and real national interests has not been an issue that the Western media has taken up because the corporate media, barring a few exceptions has been eager to toe the official lines of the White House and Pentagon and has not been critical enough of General Musharraf, at any other time in the last eight years, than in the last one month or so. That purely is so because if political instability in Pakistan last for too long American interests in the region, including the military campaign in Afghanistan could start facing serious setbacks.

Another factor that the Western media has generally failed to highlight is the role being played by various lobbies and institutions in fuelling the current anti-Musharraf movement in Pakistan. The pro-India and pro-Israel lobbies in the US have it in their interests to fuel violence in Pakistan, as it is only then that their claims of the ‘Islamic bomb’ or ‘nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hand’ would be lent an ear to. Those who think that political tensions in Pakistan would have an adverse impact on India today, are wrong. What these commentators do not understand is that on the account of being a much larger country in size and economy, India can grasp the shocks without any jitters in the economy, obviously until and unless the Pakistan Army does not try to take advantage of the political situation and embark upon a wild and mindless adventure like Kargil or Operation Gibraltar. So, as India is out of the equation and still relatively secure, it can be said that those pro-Zionist western lobbies which have opposed Pakistan’s nuclear programme from day one, stand most to gain by these political unrests, provided that they are short-lived. By portraying Pakistan as an unstable and untrustworthy partner in the War on Terror, these lobbies can effectively get sanctions levelled against Pakistan, just like the Pressler Amendment of the 1990s. The Western media never covers the activities of these powerful groups. Against to what may be seen in front, there are hidden hands involved, which have been using the lawyers’s movement in our country for their own professional and political gains.

Those bar associations that have given in strong condemnation to the post-emergency situation that has evolved in the country. Where these bar association have taken a strong notice of the lawyers’ manhandling in the country and the house arrests of the honourable Supreme Court Justices, there it may be recalled that the US Supreme Court is indeed the administration’s lapdog. The US judiciary validated Bush’s presidency and electoral win in November 2000, when by all accounts and recounts, AL-Gore was the clear winner in Florida. The American judiciary’s freedom was recently clipped and purged when the US Congress passed the Military-Commissions Act of 2006, that was also signed by President Bush. The Act conveniently now disables the Supreme Court and other civilian courts across the USA to take suo moto notices of cases of Human Rights abuse that come up as a result of illegal detentions and torture that have been going on around the world endlessly, all at the convenience of the Bush Administration and the powerful Jewish lobbies in the US. Handpicked magistrates and judges would now oversee such cases in newly constituted military tribunals that have so far been shielded from public view and notice, by none other than America’s corporate owned media.

These Courts in the US cannot operate freely within their own jurisdiction. Their own freedoms have been eloquently and conveniently abused by President Bush and his many predecessors whose unconstitutional acts have not been investigated and scrutinised by the judiciary in the USA, despite of receiving widespread coverage and condemnation from around the world. How can lawyers and judges who present themselves in these brainwashed and inflexible courts speak for an indigenous lawyers’ movement in another part of the world? Pakistan’s judiciary has in fact done what judges and lawyers in many other parts of the world have not been able to do in recent history.

Our judges and lawyers, those of whom are leading the protests against General(R) Pervez Musharraf, have had the courage to say ‘no’ to absolute authority, which in the words of the illegally fired Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammed Chaudry, ‘corrupts absolutely’. These stark realities, where on the one hand have yet to be dawned upon Musharraf, have also been missing from stories and media coverage regarding Pakistan in the West.

Over the last two years or so, more importantly over the past few months, what the Western media has failed to truly report is the fact that General Musharraf has often resorted to use brute force in the country for two major reasons. Firstly, he has used it to keep the terror issue burning so that he can show to the world that in case they decide to do away with him, the extremists would take over and that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons would fall into the wrong laps, like a bunch of juicy and ripe mangoes and oranges. This is the message that he tried to radiate out of the Red Mosque issue, a wound that he festered for around 6 months, before finally acting. Secondly, General Musharraf has resorted to the use of brute force to deal with political issues. This has been seen quite frequently over the last twelve months. The machinery of the law-enforcement agencies have been used against an increasingly secular media, lawyers, politicians and even the Chief Justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudry who was manhandled by the police on March 13. Brute force was used in Karachi on the 12th of May when then government in Sindh, was desperate to prevent the then suspended Chief Justice from addressing a session of the Sindh High Court Bar Association, SHCBA. The CJ and his team of legal advisors were sent packing back to Islamabad from the Karachi airport only. Brute force was again used on September 29 when lawyers were peacefully protesting along the Constitution Avenue in Islamabad. That day, papers for the Presidential election of General(R) Musharraf were to be scrutinised and passed by the handpicked and state sponsored puppets in the Election Commission of Pakistan, which is headed by Justice (retd) Qazi Mohammed Farooq. In a vain attempt to silence and brutally disperse the assembled lawyers and journalists the police, allegedly on the orders from the top, reigned in it with its full stock of tear gas, pistols, guns and batons to beat up the unarmed civilians in what the retired head of the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA), Munir A Malik called a ‘fascist assault’ while talking to Dawn News, Pakistan’s first private English language television station.

Like President Bush, General(R) Musharraf has failed to understand that problems, which are of legal and political nature, cannot be solved through brute force. Just like Iraq, Waziristan, Balochistan, the judicial crisis, including the General’s questionable eligibility for a third term as head of state, all were problems of political and legal nature and should have been solved politically, and in the courts and on the media. Resort to brute force has only made problems, which were already pretty delicate and controversial, more troublesome. The Army has been put in greater trouble along Swat and Waziristan. The vibes of dissent and rebellion against waging a war on civilians, can now be heard clearly. It is in this context that the proclamation of emergency shall be seen. Though Musharraf’s short term goals have been achieved, but he would learn sooner, rather than later that this was not the legitimate, legal and political way of dealing with an influential media and an activist Supreme Court.

All the aforementioned issues have been widely discussed in the Western media, but it is so that in case of the American media, the facts have been twisted and so incorrectly presented that the consumers of the mainstream corporate media in the US would still be pretty much ill informed and ignorant about the realities on the ground. This is coupled by the fact that as most American journalists and media personalities do not have a firm knowledge of Pakistan’s culture, traditions, politics, etc. their analyses do end up being flawed in the end. This allegation was widely levelled against the Newsweek magazine when it mentioned Pakistan as the most dangerous country in the world. A read through of Newsweek’s coverage of Pakistan in recent times, largely implies that ‘senior’ journalists including the magazine’s editor of the international section, Fareed Zakaria, have only a partial knowledge about Pakistan. The magazine has generally ignored the underlying realities of the Red Mosque standoff and does not present a neutral picture of Pakistan’s struggle for democracy. Consider the following questions. How many of the Western journalists really covering Pakistan really know about what constitutionalism, pluralism, secularism and democracy the Quaid-E-Azam really stood up for? How much do they know about the people’s movement that was spearheaded by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and the Pakistan People’s Party in the 1970s? The answer, not many.


Thus conclusively, it can be said that the Western media’s partial knowledge about Pakistan, coupled with the interests and objectives of the establishment and strong Jewish and Christian evangelical lobbies and the US media’s corporate owners, has often led to shabby and highly blasphemous, inflammable and ignorant journalism when it comes to reporting about Pakistan and the Islamic World and their issues. This leads to bad reporting which in turn ensures that the consumers of mainstream media coverage in the US, largely remain ignorant and shielded off from the essential realities, knowledge of which is their fundamental right, even under the United States’ Constitution’s Freedom of Information Act. No wonder, CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour called reporters of the FOX NEWS channel, the ‘foot soldiers’ of the Bush administration.