Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [137]
As to the media’s future role in politics, there are two key issues: mass mobilization, and the righting of wrongs. On the first, television is indeed likely to play an important part in encouraging various kinds of protest and stirring up support for movements against the alleged crimes of unpopular and dictatorial regimes. However, if the past is anything to go by, this may just as well be against civilian as military regimes.
On the exposure of wrongs, the media have indeed played an increased role. When it comes to justice for wrongs, the media’s ability is naturally limited to its capacity to embarrass, since punishment is a matter for the government, the police and the courts. Thus, I heard of a case in northern Sindh where three young ‘feudals’ had raped a nurse in a local clinic. On the insistence of her colleagues, the police arrested the youths concerned. Of course, I was told by a local journalist,
Their political relatives got them released again very quickly, and they will never go to jail for what they did. But in the meantime the media had filmed them handcuffed in the police station. So at least their families were embarrassed, and maybe that meant they gave them a damned good beating when they got home.
On the other hand, despite extensive media coverage, the criminals in the monstrous case of the rape of Mukhtar Mai and persecution of her family, and the burial of girls alive in Balochistan (described in Chapter 9), have not been brought to justice years after the event, because of the political power of those responsible.
The use of the media to embarrass politicians could also become a weapon of political misinformation and attack between different parties, factions and individuals. This has always been the case on a small scale but the new force of television vastly increases the possibilities. The media as weapon (though, in this case, of legitimate self-defence) was brought home to me by a Christian journalist friend in one of the rougher parts of Pakistan. He had got into a parking dispute with the followers of a notoriously ruthless local chieftain. I asked him whether this wasn’t dangerous, especially given the way in which Christians in the area had been persecuted. No, he replied, because the Sardar and his men knew that he was a journalist and a friend of the other leading journalists of the area. ‘We journalists stick together and defend each other. So if they did anything to me, stories about all the bad things he and his family have done would be all over television, the papers and radio.’
It is still too early to say whether the new media form a really important new force, or whether they will only be a new element of the old scene, and will essentially be ingested by the traditional system – as has happened to so many forces before them. At the very least, though, the media are encouraging a wider range of people to think and talk about public issues than has been the case in the past – which is presumably a good thing, depending on what they think and say.
THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY (PPP)
As you drive towards the Sindhi town of Larkana from the north, a shining white lump appears on the flat face of the plain and gradually grows to enormous dimensions. It is the mausoleum of the local Bhutto family of landowners and tribal chieftains, who in recent decades have made an impact considerably beyond their ancestral territory. Reflecting this impact, the mausoleum is a squatter but possibly even bigger version of the Taj Mahal in gleaming white marble. It is built over the site of the ancient Bhutto family graveyard, and was started under the first government of Benazir Bhutto after 1988 as a monument to her executed father. Now she rests there herself.
The mausoleum is arranged on two levels. When it is finished, the upper one,