Pakistan's Taliban tweaks media coverage

By Ashfaq Yusufzai

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (IPS/GIN) — The Pakistani government has frozen the bank accounts of Taliban factions in the North-West Frontier Province but has been unable to diminish the factions' presence in the media. Taliban representatives regularly call up the mainly Urdu-language media for free publicity. After the freeze was ordered Aug. 25, Tehrik-i-Taliban of Pakistan spokesman Mohammad Omar telephoned journalists to say the government's decision would not harm their interests, but rather strengthen them. "We don't have any bank accounts. We have everything, but no account," he said from an undisclosed location.
Attorney Asma Jahangir,  chair of the fiercely independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, says the media plays into the Taliban's hands. "The Taliban, who are wiping out civil society's members in target killings, are drawing strength from media coverage," she said. The media should highlight the human rights violations committed by the Taliban, she said. "What is deplorable is the government's silence over the genocide at the hands of Taliban," she declared, adding that the Taliban have free access to the media, but the government seems to show no urgency to rein them in.
Ashraf Ali, an independent researcher on the Taliban in Peshawar University, echoed Jahangir's views. "The media is blatantly promoting the Taliban," he said. "The leader of the [Tehrik-i-Taliban] is based in South Waziristan agency. All districts of the North-West Frontier Province and tribal areas the [Tehrik-i-Taliban] have spokespersons who are available to each and every journalist."
Even state-run PTV is unquestioningly giving prime-time news space to Taliban representatives. For Pakistan's interior minister, the bigger concern is that Taliban members publicly acknowledge their role in suicide attacks that target civilians.
Early this year, the federal government refused to back peace talks between the Taliban in the Swat Valley and the provincial government of the North-West Frontier Province. However, the ruling Awami National Party-led government could not negotiate lasting peace, and violence has escalated in most parts of the North-West Frontier Province and Federally Administered Tribal Areas since June.
The Anti-terrorism Act 1997, Section 11(W), is very clear about the role of the media in these matters. Subsection (1) says: "A person commits an offense if he prints, publishes, or disseminates any material, whether by audio or video-cassettes or by written, photographic, electronic, digital, wall-chalking or any other method which incites religious, sectarian or ethnic hatred or gives projection to any person convicted for a terrorist act, or any person or organization concerned in terrorism or proscribed organization or an organization placed under observation."
The law says any person guilty of an offense under sub-section (1) shall be liable, on conviction, for a maximum of six months in prison and a fine. But no one in the media has bothered with the law in the insatiable hunger for news about "terrorism," which sells well in the national and international media. Not only do ambitious journalists risk their lives to interview heads of proscribed organizations; some have gone a step further and become mouthpieces for them.
Reporters in the lawless Federally Administered Tribal Areas walk a thin line. Some have been killed in suspicious circumstances, while others have fled for safety. The militants dub journalists as "wajibul qatl" (liable to death). In other words, if reporters publish anything against the militants' wishes, they are likely to die.
Media observers who did not want to be identified believe the media has lost all sense of impartiality, publicizing whatever a proscribed organization says. In most accounts of the violence and military operations, Islamic fighters are valorized. Is the thriving Urdu-language press now the  mouthpiece of the outlawed Taliban?