In Pakistan, where killers of journalists have been getting away with murder for decades, an international coalition of rights watchdogs, reporters, and legal and forensic experts has been set up to investigate cold cases, with the aim of bringing belated justice to the victims and their families. This team for journalists’ safety has been working from headquarters in Karachi since October 2023. It not only wants to end the impunity surrounding the killing of news people, it also hopes to reinforce professional parameters for defining who is, and who isn’t, a journalist.

By pursuing prosecutions for attacks on journalists and helping to establish a code of qualification for practitioners of the craft, the coalition could also reap the added benefit of nudging Pakistan’s government towards respecting the constitutional guarantee of media freedom that’s essential for the survival of democracy in the still young but increasingly fragile nation.

It’s a tall order, but not quite yet an impossible one. Pakistan is teetering on the edge of social, political and economic failure. Its 240million people are governed by a corrupt ruling class, who largely owe their position and wealth to the military. A cabal of feudal families have juggled power with the army since Pakistan was formed as a Muslim state in 1947.

What’s euphemistically referred to as “the establishment” has a low tolerance for dissent, but sometimes this thin-skinned tetchiness can be manipulated to temper its excesses, especially when they make news outside the country. The independent journalist Asad Ali Toor is a case in point. Mercilessly pursued by the army’s spy wing, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, in recent years, for bold reporting on military interference in politics and the judiciary, he was hounded out of jobs in mainstream television. Early this year, he was imprisoned without charge, apparently for criticising a Supreme Court judge’s ruling on an election-related issue, yet was released when his treatment caught the attention of international media.

The list of the not-so-lucky, however, is far too long. It includes the activist Sabeen Mahmood, who was shot dead in Karachi, in April 2015, as she drove home from a panel discussion she had organised on Balochistan, a troubled province where thousands of people are “disappeared” for speaking out about state and military abuses. And Hamid Mir, a television journalist who survived multiple gunshot wounds a year earlier, after speaking publicly on the same issue. He still speaks on sensitive issues, cloaked in the protection of his position as host of a popular nightly news show. But he lives with the real possibility that, next time, his assailants will finish the job.

Many believe these attacks were the work of an “establishment” intent on ensuring silence on its brutal and isolationary policies towards resource-rich Balochistan. And as those at the very top of the power pyramid set an example of impunity, so they are followed right down to the smallest towns and rural areas, where local politicians and police can be a power unto themselves.

The “establishment” grip on the Pakistani mind is tight, and its wrath, as Toor wrote in the last issue of the BJR, can be severe and ruthless against those who cross invisible “red lines” of acceptable discourse. For the Pakistani journalists involved in the murder investigative coalition, the priority is not so much to hold the state to account and force a reckoning, let alone a retreat from strict controls on media. That might be too much to expect for the time being. What they have identified as their most urgent task is to probe and, hopefully, solve the murders – though, in many cases, the whodunnit is hardly a mystery – and send a message to would-be killers that they are not, after all, above the law.

The journalist Hussain Dada, a writer and editor with Dawn newspaper, is an investigator with the yet-to-be-named coalition. He said it grew from an investigation, two years ago, into the 2007 murder of Zubair Ahmed Mujahid, a journalist for the daily Jang newspaper, in Mirpur Khas, a small town in Sindh known for its mangoes.

“We found several layers of negligence in the investigation, likely because Mujahid’s reporting was critical of the local police, who initially investigated the murder,” Dada told BJR. “We presented our findings, at a people’s tribunal in The Hague as well as with stakeholders locally, and held consultative sessions on the issue of impunity. This investigative coalition was borne out of those discussions.

“We have since on-boarded investigative, medico-legal, digital and criminal law experts on our roster, with their expert input to supplement findings of our field investigations. With such a ‘parallel’ investigation, we hope to bring more focus on such murder cases, while using our coalition partners – ranging from civil society organisations to bar councils, local and international press freedom entities, press clubs and journalistic unions, legal aid and rights organisations, and diplomatic missions – to apply pressure on authorities to ensure due process is followed,” Dada said.

He said that a number of “high-profile journalists” had also been drafted in “to ensure that any murder, when it takes place, remains part of the national discourse to ensure the case is adequately investigated”. Dealing with some of the housekeeping problems of Pakistani journalism, which could improve professionalism and reduce reporters’ vulnerability, might be an added bonus that could have long-term benefits for individual journalists and, more broadly, journalism in Pakistan.

Lukewarm state response to eight murders of journalists

Pakistan’s media landscape is crowded and complicated. The military-controlled state dictates much of what can and cannot be reported. Many media outlets are owned by billionaires keen to find favour with the “establishment” to further their own financial or political interests. Censorship and self-censorship are intrinsic to mainstream media outlets in

Pakistan, and survival, personal and professional, is what motivates many working journalists. Some, like Toor, have been forced out of the mainstream on to alternatives such as YouTube, where, to the chagrin of the “establishment”, many are thriving as they slake a thirst for untainted information.

Still, it’s not difficult to understand why the sector generally remains so slavish – shockingly, eight journalists were killed in the first half of this year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, more than in any full year of Pakistan’s existence. Journalists have protested, marched in the streets, demanded justice and protection. Politicians have simpered regret and condolences. Some arrests have been made.

Most of those journalists were working at the grassroots level, for non-mainstream media, and most of the murders are believed to have been work-related. Among them were Khalil Jibran and Nasrullah Gadani, both veteran reporters who worked to uncover corruption in their local areas, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh provinces respectively. They were shot dead in what were clearly targeted attacks within a couple of weeks of each other, in May and June.

These eight murders brought to 66 the tally of news people to die in Pakistan since 1992. The Pakistani media watchdog, Freedom Network, has reported that 53 journalists were killed because of their work in the decade to 2022 – with murder convictions in only two cases, both of which were overturned. The killings are aside from the intimidation, harassment, threats, kidnappings and other violence that journalists routinely face in the course of their work. Not unsurprisingly, many capitulate. A former investigative journalist said he gave it up after his mother began receiving threatening phone calls while he was looking into the encroachment of developers on to public cemeteries. When she asked him why he was doing it, he had no answer that made her understand that the story was worth the risk.

Determining the motives behind murders is complicated by the fact that not all people calling themselves journalists are bona fide news reporters; it’s not unusual, especially outside the main cities, for people to use questionable credentials to pursue personal vendettas, which can get them killed. In a country where the law is unevenly applied at the best of times, professional credentials can be as easy to get as a toy in a Cornflakes packet, and deployed with about as much discretion.

There is little regulation of who calls themselves a journalist, by the authorities, professional bodies such as press clubs, or even the media companies, which often sell ID cards to people without checking qualifications, said Dada. Writing recently in Dawn, Dada said this is especially true in small cities and towns, where a major media outlet might want ears and eyes, but is unwilling to offer decent payment, if any, to a stringer who carries their ID card. Many have other jobs or run businesses and use the cover of journalism to enhance their position.

“In such an environment, it is unlikely for journalism to be an idealistic pursuit of truth,” Dada wrote. “Instead, journalists often act as power brokers, resolving local disputes, such as issues over land or personal enmity”, and use their dubious journalistic platforms to pursue specific agendas. Blurring ethical and legal lines “also makes journalists a target”, he said.

This murky practice has an impact on the entire sector, potentially tainting the integrity of all journalists and enabling the police and judiciary to excuse their own failings in investigating and prosecuting attacks and killings of journalists. They can wash their hands of a murder investigation by dismissing the victim as a phoney who used fake credentials to spread rumours and lies, and so brought retribution on themselves.

This attitude has also led to a hierarchy of professional snobbery, in which journalists who work on blogs or vlogs, or write for websites or social media – rather than the big city newspapers and TV channels – are dismissed as “activists” or derided as “YouTubers”. Their murders also are often not properly investigated. This snobbery, however, further undermines the attempts by some journalists to use new media to pursue investigative work and expose the corruption that Big Media will not. And that is especially true at the grass roots, where politics, business and the judiciary can be closely, and corruptly, entwined.

Looking in vain for help from employers

Unfortunately, journalists cannot rely on the support of their employers when, as often happens, subjects of their reporting file what are called first information reports, or FIRs, with police, that they have to answer in court. A recent Freedom Network report on media in Sindh, Journalism in the Shadow of Violence, cited the example of Akhlaq Jokhio, who in 2013 set up a community newspaper in Naushahro Feroze, a town of around 40,000. Before the paper was banned in 2021, Jokhio was “booked in more than 50 criminal and civil cases”, including for murder.

“The motive for influential petitioners entangling journalists in legal cases is not legal victory but just to exhaust them mentally and physically” and, of course, financially, the report said. After being targeted by the “establishment”, Asad Ali Toor was forced to travel from his home in Islamabad to attend court in cities across the country to answer charges that were then dismissed for lack of evidence.

The Freedom Network report notes that while media companies rarely support their journalists when their reporting lands them in legal trouble, state actors, including the governments of former prime minister Imran Khan and incumbent Shehbaz Sharif, deploy the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016 “against those journalists who were critical of their policies”.

Dragging out investigations into the killings of journalists also exhausts and demoralises families, whose loss is often compounded by further intimidation from power brokers suspected of ordering, or even carrying out, the hit. Worn down, fearful, desperate to move on, and, more likely than not, broke, some families will accept a compensation payment – or blood money – in lieu of pursuing a prosecution through the courts.

Dada said that Pakistan’s controversial blood money laws, the Qisas and Diyat Ordinancies, allow the accused, suspect or even convicted murderer to effectively buy absolution with a payment to victims’ heirs.

“In most cases of journalist murder, powerful entities or individuals are involved. Even if they aren’t the material authors of that murder, in the sense that they don’t pull the trigger, they are the intellectual authors,” Dada said. “And once these powerful entities fear persecution or conviction, they resort to blood money payment.”

But these law-flouting payments are unpopular, he said, citing the example of Aziz Memon, whose body was found floating in an irrigation channel in Naushahro Feroze in February 2020, “with marks on his neck suggesting he was garrotted, though the initial police report said he had died of natural causes”, Dada said. Payment of blood money to Memon’s family “led to a hue and cry, resulting in arrests and a guilty plea, and a conviction by the trial court”.

Change in Pakistan, in the grip of a military-political establishment fighting for its survival, can be glacially slow. Dada believes that by engaging with existing statutory bodies, such as journalist safety commissions, and inking agreements with police and relevant ministries, such as Home and Interior, the coalition can shadow investigations to ensure that, at the very least, they “adhere to basic standards and due process is followed”.