The Institute for War and Peace Reporting is one of those rare phenomena in the development world: an NGO that trains young men and women in post-conflict zones to use journalism to question and critique their emerging societies. Their courage and commitment is clear from the record number of journalists killed last year – 95 – primarily in the areas where IWPR operates.
Today’s guest post is from Jean MacKenzie, Program Director for IWPR in Afghanistan, who writes about the plight of Sayed Parwez Kambaksh, a young journalist sentenced to death for downloading a feminist criticism of the Koran from the internet – and of the religious and cultural bigotry young journalists face in the new, U.S.-backed Afghanistan.
By Jean MacKenzie
Over the past six years, since the Taliban toppled and the international community began its somewhat haphazard campaign to bring Afghanistan into the family of nations, journalism has been one of the country’s most widely touted success stories.
Cynics might say that it could hardly be otherwise, since the profession was beginning from absolute zero. Under the Taliban regime, there was no television, few newspapers, and radio served a heavy diet of Koran and announcements. Music and women’s voices were prohibited.
By any measure, journalism has made great strides since 2001, with an explosion of electronic media. Television, particularly industry leader Tolo TV, shows a lively mixture of news, analysis and satire, along with the more controversial Bollywood fare. Radio blares a mixture of Afghan, Indian and Western music, interspersed with news bulletins, phone-in programs, and instructional radio dramas.
However, the often surprising frankness of political debate conceals a deep and abiding crisis within Afghan journalism: The bedrock values of the society, which include religion, sex, and ethnicity, are sacrosanct. Any attempt to examine or criticize can be catastrophic.
Take Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh, a young journalism student now facing the death penalty for insulting Islam and the Prophet Mohammad.
His alleged crime, which he denies, is to have downloaded an article from the Internet that criticizes, sometimes quite harshly, Islam’s treatment of women. Kambakhsh is charged with adding several paragraphs to the text and circulating it among his classmates.
The case cites testimony from witnesses supporting the court’s contention that Kambakhsh is a danger to his society. This includes a statement from a professor that Kambakhsh asked too many questions during lectures, as well as gossip from classmates that the young man has socialist leanings. Also evidence of moral turpitude was a slightly off-color joke sent from his mobile phone.
For this, he has been condemned to death.
Kambakhsh’s example, while extreme, is far from the only incidence of its type in Afghanistan today. Journalists in this troubled country have to negotiate a minefield of unwritten rules in order to exercise their profession. All too often, one of them sets off an explosion.
Ghaws Zalmai, a journalist who thought to serve his countrymen by producing a vernacular translation of the Koran, has been in jail awaiting trial since December.
Most Afghans learn Koranic verses by rote, in Arabic, with little idea of the meaning. The new version was supposed to give them an opportunity to understand the holy text in their own language. But the translation was a bit too free, prompting the Ulema, or Council of Religious Scholars, to denounce it as a Zionist conspiracy. They are calling for Zalmai’s execution.
Hanif Hamgam, a journalist who often appears on Tolo TV’s political satire program “Alarm Bell,” was forced into temporary exile last year when he appeared in the movie “Kabul Express.” His character utters a line that denigrates the Hazara ethnic minority. Dodging death threats and public outcry, Hamgam fled to India for several months.
The pressure on journalists is growing, as the religious hardliners gain in power and influence. In some ways the society that is emerging would not have been out of place in the Taliban regime.
Kambakhsh must certainly think so. The presiding judge in his case, Abdul Salaam Qazizada, has been heard to remark that, if the case were not attracting so much high-level attention, he would cut off the young man’s head with his own sword. In court he badgers the defendant, not attempting to hide his antagonism.
“Why did you do these things?” the jude thunders into his microphone, all but deafening the observers. “What were your motives?”
The prisoner, pale, head shorn, hands shackled, gathers himself, rises to face the judge, and answers with dignity, “How can I give my motives, since I have done nothing?”
But Qazizada, who sat on the bench under the Taliban, is not swayed. “You are obviously against Islam,” he remarks.
This is no trial, it is an auto da fé.
Three years ago another journalist, Ali Mohaqeq Nasab, faced a similar charge. Editor of a magazine called Huquq-e-Zan (Women’s Rights), he was arrested after publishing a treatise asking, among other things, why in court the testimony of two women is needed to counter that of one man, and why a woman is entitled to only half the inheritance of her male relatives.
Nasab spent three months on jail, while debate raged and the mullahs called for him to be killed. But in the end, he was released, after apologizing for any harm his articles had caused.
Kambakhsh’s more extreme predicament is not a hopeful sign. He has already been in jail for eight months, with no end in sight. In spite of high-level international pressure, the case remains stalled. Condoleezza Rice has intervened on Kambakhsh’s behalf, as has British Foreign Secretary David Miliband. The Afghan president, Hamed Karzai, has promised that ‘justice will be done,” but the case is stalled and Kambakhsh remains under threat.
This suggests that the backlash has begun against the forces that have brought so much in the way of modernization and democratization to a country where “modernization” signifies licentiousness and an erosion of traditional values, while “democratization” is all too often associated with foreign soldiers, bombs, and violence.
For the past several months, the major television networks have been engaged in a running battle with the Ministry of Information and Culture over Indian soap operas.
Afghans have gone wild for the long-running, intricately plotted dramas, with millions of viewers tuning in every evening for the latest installment.
But the Ulema, as well as parliament and the Ministry, find the sight of Indian women with bare midriffs and uncovered faces just too detrimental to the nation’s moral fiber. Men and women kiss on screen, and one of the central characters in the most popular show had a child out of wedlock without being stoned to death.
The television stations have been ordered to stop the broadcasts. Some have complied, but a few holdouts, like Tolo TV, have defied the ban in the name of free speech, with perhaps a dose of commercialism intertwined. The soap operas bring in a large share of television advertising revenue. To date, Tolo is operating without restriction, although there have recently been rumors that a compromise is in the offing.
The standoff over the soaps points to a deep divide in Afghan society – the conservative mullahs insist on preserving the old order, while Afghans, especially the young, want a link with the outside world. Journalists have provided that link, and are needed in Afghanistan as never before. In a country where literacy rates hover at around 30 percent, where electricity is scarce and mountains block radio signals, information is a precious commodity.
But as the situation in Afghanistan deteriorates, the pressure on journalists builds. If truth is, indeed, the first casualty of war, then reporters are on the front line. In the past year four journalists have been murdered, most recently BBC reporter Abdul Samad Rohani, whose battered body was unceremoniously dumped in a cemetery in Helmand province in early June. Rohani, seen as a model of journalistic integrity, was working on a story involving opium smuggling right before he was killed, according to colleagues. Many reporters have been driven into hiding or have abandoned the profession altogether.
At least with the Taliban all was clear: everything was forbidden. Forget criticizing the Prophet – you could not even fly a kite or play chess without running afoul of the whip-wielding religious police. But now the society is in flux, and no one knows where the limits are. Drug traffickers operate with impunity, but a man is put on public trial for stealing a bag of flour. A prominent warlord who brutally assaulted a former associate escaped punishment, while a girl who refuses to marry her father’s choice can be imprisoned for years.
There are few people in Kabul, and certainly none in the United States, who mourn the passing of the repressive Taliban regime. However, we have to be aware that what is emerging may not be all that much better. The face of the new Afghanistan may well be topped by a black turban.
Jean MacKenzie is the programme director for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting in Afghanistan.
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Comments (16)
thishowiseeit:
---We- USA & Allies- are in Afganistan to prevent terrorists from expanding they training camps.---
God Bless, germans and ISAF are there only to rebuild this country..
---We all know that only little has been accomplished, but that's better than nothing.---
to bad you are not a part of ISAF.
---Islam is often an pretense for the local tribal heads to be in control of the population--
yepp. agree here..
---and in control of the drug trade.---
nope. for this one they dont need islam. (islam drugs taboo) it works fine with simple emloyment.
July 1, 2008 5:54 AM | Report Offensive Comment
Posted on July 1, 2008 05:54
As long as people are inspired by Islam these cases will continue to occur plus daily homicidal bombings of civilians
June 30, 2008 5:02 PM | Report Offensive Comment
Posted on June 30, 2008 17:02
We- USA & Allies- are in Afganistan to prevent terrorists from expanding they training camps. We all know that only little has been accomplished, but that's better than nothing. Islam is often an pretense for the local tribal heads to be in control of the population and in control of the drug trade.
June 28, 2008 10:39 PM | Report Offensive Comment
Posted on June 28, 2008 22:39
How exactly did the Muslims protect the world from the Dark Ages? The remnants of the Greco-Roman World survived in the Eastern Roman Empire and were not only holding the Germanic Barbarians from making any further gains but had actually begun to push them back in parts of the Western Mediterranean. Those that the Byzantines hadn't reconquered were being influenced and civilized by Byzantine influence.
But then the uneducated Muslim Hordes swept out of Arabia and weakened the forces of Constantinople so that they could no longer turn their attention to Europe but instead had to focus themselves on the Arab onslaught. And it was not some Muslim love of knowledge that protected it. It was the thousands upon thousands of Hellenistic Byzantines conquered by the Arabs who calmed down their more barbaric tendencies and civilized them. With the prophet dead, the focal point of the Muslim world left Arabia & moved to the capital of the Caliphate in Damascus, a Greco-Roman city.
The muslims conquered cities full of learned citizens, teachers and schools. These sources of knowledge from the Byzantines survived simply because there were not enough Arabs to dilute it.
Take for example the medical text of Ibn'Sina, known in the West as Avicenna. It was just a repackaging of knowledge of Galen (a Roman) with some of Avicenna's personal philosophical musings.
The Muslims didn't preserve civilization during a European Dark Ages. The Arab invastion of the Eastern Roman Empire stopped the Byzantine process of reconquering and civilizing of the Germanic Barbarians and actually CAUSED Europe to fall.
Were it not for the Arabs, Europe would have arisen again far more quickly and we might have entered the industrial revolution hundreds of years before it actually happened.
The only thing the Arabs managed to so was to save Greco-Roman knowledge from themselves.
June 28, 2008 7:20 PM | Report Offensive Comment
Posted on June 28, 2008 19:20
Once they're retired next January, Condi and George W should relocate together to Kabul and advise the Afgoon "Government" on these matters. In fact, if they took early retirement now, they could get cracking right away.
June 28, 2008 7:10 PM | Report Offensive Comment
Posted on June 28, 2008 19:10
It's so easy to citizen. Afghanistan we a very peaceful country before US dumped billion dollars of weapons and shipped Arab Jadhis and pumped the ISI, the Paki secret service with billion more. Then it left all of it there.. Islam is a peaceful religion. There is a severe lack of education because of 30 plus years of war at Afghanistan. Don't be so fast to judge these people. Also, the Islamic civilization gave so much to the world when the West was still at dark ages. Colonialism and fictions borders is the cause of so many of the problems there today.
June 28, 2008 6:28 PM | Report Offensive Comment
Posted on June 28, 2008 18:28
If the U.S. hadn’t had a head start on the secular front, it would today probably look a whole lot like Afghanistan.
We have any number of fanatically religious groups who have for years been trying to gain increasing influence in government with the intent of realigning societies mores and judicial oversight. The only difference here and there is that in Afghanistan the secular end of government is the faction that’s trying to gain control.
As with most any controversial program that thrives, you want to take a look at whom it is that benefits to find out what causes it to perpetuate.
The answer to that is found in that old saw, “it’s a man’s world”. The Muslim religion redefines that concept, even with all of the restrictions that effect men as well.
Guys in the Muslim world have it dicked (if you’ll pardon the pun), even at the lowest echelon, at least relative to women.
And, you know, it’s a sad fact of life here, there, and everywhere, that there are a lot of people who, when they find themselves in a world of hurt, feel better about their lot when they feel that in spite of it all, they still have it all over someone else.
June 28, 2008 3:41 PM | Report Offensive Comment
Posted on June 28, 2008 15:41
In the history of Christianity we have seen examples of deviance that shocks the senses, including those of us who love Christ. This article brings to my mind a hope that there must be Muslims whose senses are shocked when they read of the Islamic version of the Inquisition, the Islamic version of the Salem witch hunts, the Islamic version of the Catholic Protestant crimes against their own humanity. This report should serve to remind all of us of the grotesque collapse of the mind when people are raised on a steady diet of religious rantings. There comes a moment in a man's mind, and a country's thought process, where there is no thought process...just a Klan like obedience to verses, here, ostensibly spoken by Mohammad and given false credibility by being included in the text of the Holy Qur'an. How quickly the arrogance and stupidity of man renders God a henchman. How easily such Muslims insult Allah.
June 28, 2008 3:32 PM | Report Offensive Comment
Posted on June 28, 2008 15:32
Regarding the post by "Stars and Stripes", it's humbling to see that Afghanistan does not hold a monopoly on backwards, primitive and ignorant thinking. Obviously this country is rife with gullible fools who will believe any random email they receive filled with unattributed, unsupported statements. Sad. I wonder if Stars and Stripes went to a Klan Madrassa instead of a secular American public school?
June 28, 2008 3:04 PM | Report Offensive Comment
Posted on June 28, 2008 15:04
There's a Muslim running for President? Who, McCain? I don't think so..
June 28, 2008 2:44 PM | Report Offensive Comment
Posted on June 28, 2008 14:44
Hey Stars and Swipes, what muslim would that be? I'm not aware of one. Obama had a muslim father who named him and left him and his mother when he was 2 years old. He was raised a Christian!
By the way, I believe Hussein means handsome in arabic, and not fanatic or murderer. I guess his father thought his little boy was attractive.
If one's name determines what they are in life I guess Tiger Woods is a large cat by your stupid way of thinking.....
June 28, 2008 1:59 PM | Report Offensive Comment
Posted on June 28, 2008 13:59
An excellent article that illustrates the terrible injustice of the conservative Mullahs, who are most certainly, still in 2008, living in the Dark Ages. These Mullahs will soon live only in history books. The new generation, which has been recently exposed to freedom of expression and thought, will not be silenced.
Thanks to reporting like this by Jean MacKenzie and organizations like IWPR (Amnesty International is also working on this same issue) the Dark Age thinking of officials around the world is coming to an end.
June 28, 2008 12:31 PM | Report Offensive Comment
Posted on June 28, 2008 12:31
From the article it looks that the situation has hardly improved from what it was when the Taleban was ruling. Why in the first place US and Nato send troops to Afghanistan. Was it to liberate Afghanistan from Taleban rule or to catch Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders. Neither has been achieved after spending billions and loosing many lives. A good part of the country is practically under Taleban and the other part is under a set of Mullas who are little better than Taleban. The president seems to be absolutely ineffective. Otherwise how the situation could be in such a sorry state of affairs.
June 28, 2008 12:12 PM | Report Offensive Comment
Posted on June 28, 2008 12:12
I am truly sadden to read this. Why are there ex-Taliban judges still presiding over court cases in Afghanistan? They should be in prison themselves for their brutality.
This is unreal. Is the democracy President Bush believes in?
Why did we even bother then to go into Afghanistan?
June 28, 2008 11:59 AM | Report Offensive Comment
Posted on June 28, 2008 11:59
McKenzie says:
"Drug traffickers operate with impunity, but a man is put on public trial for stealing a bag of flour. A prominent warlord who brutally assaulted a former associate escaped punishment, while a girl who refuses to marry her father’s choice can be imprisoned for years."
This is an issue of prioritization; Muslims are simply confused . This all goes back to the contradictions in their scriptures. As an example, their idolized prophet rapes a nine years old girl and that is allowable, yet a couple committing adultery are to be stoned to death , or whipped 80 lashes each or the woman stoned and the man exiled for a year. You have as a Muslim jurist all those different scenarios from which to choose. The final verdict depends solely on the “judge‘s” inclination. The judge is anyone who claims knowledge of the teachings of the Quran.
June 28, 2008 11:20 AM | Report Offensive Comment
Posted on June 28, 2008 11:20
Thank you for (belatedly) running this account of the Kambakhsh case. British media have been hammering on it for months. But in the U.S., where the pretense that Afghanistan is an emerging, flowering democracy is nearly sacrosanct -- almost nothing. Afghanistan is not the only country where journalism takes a back seat to cultural and political mores.
June 28, 2008 11:00 AM | Report Offensive Comment
Posted on June 28, 2008 11:00