by MOHHAMED HANIF
Hamid Mir was shot on Saturday while being driven through Karachi. SOURCE/T. MUGHAL/EPA
For years, Pakistan has been one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists. From feudal landlords to Taliban fighters, sectarian groups to separatists, all have killed journalists. The question one needs to ask is: does the ISI, a national body often referred to as “a sensitive institution”, occasionally kill journalists? As any trained journalist would tell you, we need two sources before we can tell you a story. Here are two stories, with multiple sources and two different endings.
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A friend of a friend’s contact, a colonel in the ISI, confirmed that our reporter was indeed with the ISI. This colonel must have been a really sensitive type because he assured us that he didn’t have anything to do with the kidnapping; it was another cell within the ISI, and our reporter would be released soon. We were relieved and thrilled that the ISI had reassured us that it had our man. We asked, almost in gratitude, if there was anything we could do to expedite the release of our colleague. “Make a lot of noise,” we were told by the sensitive colonel through a friend of a friend. “Make as much noise as you can.” We did make as much noise as we could while still remaining within the BBC’s editorial guidelines. In those days it usually meant overworking the fax machine and petitioning everyone – president, prime minister, chief of army, journalist unions, Amnesty International – basically everyone with a title and a fax contact.
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I wasn’t an editor any more. I didn’t know Saleem Shehzad so I didn’t make any noise. Out of curiosity I called up about half a dozen journalists in Islamabad. Every single one of them was sure that Shehzad had been kidnapped by the ISI. But a very senior journalist cautioned me that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. “The ISI does pick up journalists from time to time but they don’t kill them.” A few weeks after Saleem Shehzad’s murder I attended a journalists’ protest in Islamabad where we all made a lot of noise. Hamid Mir was noisier than the others. In between the banner-waving I asked various journalists what might have happened. “Well, Saleem had just had this operation and they didn’t know it. They were just doing what they do. They didn’t mean to kill him.”
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