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It has only been two years into Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s term, and already, censorship is on the rise, journalists and activists have claimed, leaving the country’s heavy-handed security forces unchecked as they intimidate the news media to a degree unseen since the country’s era of army juntas.
According to journalists, the security forces in Pakistan frequently pressure editors to fire or muzzle reporters, while the government starves critical news outlets of advertising funds and refuses to settle previous bills worth millions of dollars.
The abduction of a prominent reporter by state security officers in July and the disappearance of a rights activist in November, has heightened those concerns. In June, Pakistan’s Military Intelligence agency admitted that it had detained the activist and that he is awaiting trial in a secret court on undisclosed charges.
“Disappearances are a tool of terror, used not just to silence the victim but to fill the wider community with fear,” said Omar Waraich, the head of South Asia for Amnesty International.
“In Pakistan, the military’s intelligence apparatus has used disappearances with impunity,” Waraich said, adding: “Civilian politicians look on helplessly, affecting concern and promising to investigate. Unable to uphold the rule of law as Imran Khan vowed to do, their authority erodes.”
On July 21, Matiullah Jan, a reporter, had just dropped off his wife at her job in an upscale neighborhood in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad when several men, some in plain clothes, others in counterterrorism police uniforms, dragged him from his car, bundled him into one of their vehicles and sped away.
Jan, 51, is a vocal critic of Imran Khan’s governing party, the judiciary and the military, which critics accuse of working together to preserve their power and stamp out dissent.
Footage from a security camera clearly shows the police’s involvement in the abduction, working alongside men in civilian clothes that many believe are Pakistani intelligence officers. The footage culminated in a pressure campaign on social media and Jan was released.
Under Pakistani law, state-directed abductions like Jan’s are lawful. The detentions often go unexplained, leaving the families of the victims wondering for months or even years.
While Pakistan has long had a poor track record on press freedom, it has gotten notably worse under Imran Khan’s administration, which has been widely seen as a high-water mark for military influence in the past decade. Pakistan slipped six spots since 2017 — the year before PM Khan took office — to 145th place out of 180 countries in the 2020 world press freedom index compiled by Reporters Without Borders.
In the last five years, 11 journalists have been killed in Pakistan, seven of them since Imran Khan was sworn in as prime minister two years ago. Anchors have frequently seen their newscasts cut off in the middle of broadcasting — a level of censorship not seen since the era of military dictatorships in Pakistan.
Instead of establishing an outright dictatorship, human rights groups say, Pakistan’s generals are effectively imposing their will through their allies in a government that they helped usher into office.
During the 2018 elections, the military was accused of meddling to ensure victory for Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party and to virtually dismantle the party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who had tried to curb the military’s powers.
As those elections drew near, the military accused reporters of being anti-state, an allegation that was condemned by the Committee to Protect Journalists. After a series of articles detailing the military’s political and electoral interference, the security forces disrupted the distribution of Dawn newspaper across the country.
Over the past year, the country’s remaining critical news outlets have been gutted by the combination of a devastated national economy and the sudden elimination of government advertising dollars. Media organizations have laid off dozens of journalists, and the combination of heavy pressure and job insecurity has led many reporters to avoid critical or controversial subjects.
Jan claims that he lost his job as a popular talk show host just months after the election because of his hard-hitting reporting. He now runs his own YouTube channel.
“This is the first time in the 31 years of my career where I’ve seen a structural takeover of the media industry,” said Talat Hussain, a former Geo TV news anchor who has been critical of the military and government.
Hussain said his company fired him under pressure from the military shortly after elections. He has remained unemployed, with newspapers and TV shows refusing to host his work.
“We have dealt with fairly tyrannical regimes that were elected and dealt in repression, but it was episodic,” Hussain said. “This time it is structural and complete and it’s hard to breathe.”
In March, Mir Shakil-ur-Rehman, the owner of the Jang Group, which owns Geo TV and The News newspaper, was detained over accusations of corruption, which Rehman has denied. He has been held for over 100 days without charges, and several bail hearings have been postponed.
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