[Reader-list] Ranjit Hoskote on Death Sentence to Journalist in Afghanistan

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear All,

Here is another text on the freedom of expression issue, by Ranjit  
Hoskote, on a very sad situation in Afghanistan, where the US Backed  
government of Hamid Karzai continues to operate in a matter not  
altogether different (with regard to freedom of expression and  
conscience) from the Taliban days.

I thought that this would be of interest to many on this list.

best

Shuddha
---------------
Dear Friends,

I enclose an OpEd article that I have just written for the Hindustan  
Times. A longer version of this piece, incorporating a view for  
Central European readers by Ilija Trojanow, will appear in the  
Süddeutsche Zeitung tomorrow. Please feel free to share this article  
with friends and colleagues, as the life of Sayid Pervez Kambaksh now  
depends on the intensity of the international opinion we can build up.

Friends in the EU countries and in the US could consider getting in  
touch with your elected representatives or with organisations   
committed to the defence of human rights and cultural freedoms --  
especially in those countries that have troops posted in Afghanistan,  
or are involved in reconstruction and infrastructure projects there.

In solidarity,

Ranjit
----------


(Hindustan Times: OpEd Page, Friday: 15 February 2008)



Liberally dispensing death

A journalist faces the gallows

RANJIT HOSKOTE



Half a decade after the overthrow of the Taliban, young Afghans can  
still risk their lives by pressing the copy-paste buttons on their  
PCs. As you read this, a 23-year-old journalist sits in prison in the  
northern city of Mazhar-e-Sharif, sentenced to death by a religious  
council. His crime? He downloaded an article on Islam and its views  
on women from the internet, and distributed it among fellow students  
with a view to promoting discussion.


Sayid Pervez Kambaksh, a Balkh University student who also reports  
for a local daily, Jehan-e-Nau, was charged with indulging in 'anti- 
Islamic activities' and arrested on October 27 last year. In blatant  
defiance of Constitutional provisions, he was not produced before a  
court but turned over to the Shura-e-Ulema, the high council of  
religious scholars, which tried him on January 22, diagnosed him  
guilty of apostasy and recommended hanging as the cure.


Although the Shura-e-Ulema confines itself to interpreting the  
religious Shari'a law and does not enjoy judicial authority, its  
ruling has been endorsed by the Afghan Senate. And President Hamid  
Karzai, promoted by his US sponsors as the poster boy of a war- 
ravaged country liberated from theocratic barbarism, has indicated  
that he may not overturn the decision.


International outrage at these kangaroo-court proceedings has grown  
steadily during the last few weeks. Civil society networks have  
appealed to world leaders to act. The Independent and the Guardian  
have petitioned the British government to reason with President  
Karzai. It has been pointed out that Kambaksh was not permitted  
access to legal defence, during a trial held in camera. It has been  
argued that the judgement makes a mockery of Afghanistan's  
Constitution, which asserts that "freedom of expression shall be  
inviolable. Every Afghan shall have the right to express thoughts  
through speech, writing, illustrations as well as other means in  
accordance with the provisions of this Constitution."


The Kambaksh case has been read as a classic illustration of the  
Islamic clergy's intolerance of the freedom of expression, its  
apparent inability to cope with a plurality of views. At one level,  
this is true. Having renounced the philosophical spirit of ijtihad,  
critical re-interpretation, which once animated and profoundly  
enriched Islamic thought, many (though not all) Muslim jurists now  
take up conservative, even regressive positions.


The Member of Parliament who moved the Senate's condemnation of  
Kambaksh was none other than Sibghatullah Mojadedi, an Islamic  
scholar and President Karzai's spiritual guide. Mojadedi briefly  
served as his country's President during the early 1990s, heading the  
US-backed Mujahideen government that morphed into the Northern  
Alliance after Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's forces put it to flight. Between  
them, the academic Mojadedi and the former oil company consultant and  
CIA trainee Karzai present a suave, reasonable face to the world.  
Trace their connections within the patchwork of Mujahideen factions,  
and they emerge in their true colours: as front-men for the rapacious  
oligarchy of clerics, warlords, turncoats and thugs that dominates  
post-Taliban Afghanistan.


This brings us to the deeper reality of the Kambaksh case, which is  
masked by the too-easily-convincing narrative of religious  
intolerance. It is the reality of a puppet regime's rampant  
corruption, violent misrule, and disdain for public scrutiny. The key  
actors in this sordid tale are politicians who have got their hands  
on vast redevelopment funds flowing in from the West. Also, officials  
who regard torture, rape and extortion as legitimate instruments of  
governance. And above all, chieftains who control Parliament and the  
poppy harvest with equal facility, creaming the profits from a  
flourishing narcotics trade that is vaster than the government's  
annual budget and accounts for more than half of Afghanistan's total  
income.


Kambaksh is paying the price for his brother, Sayid Yaqub Ibrahimi's  
outspoken criticism of this situation. Ibrahimi, a leading  
investigative journalist who works with the Institute of War and  
Peace Reporting, has consistently exposed government corruption and  
human rights abuses in northern Afghanistan. In recent months, he has  
been subjected to escalating harassment by the National Directorate  
of Security (NDS). His computer has been ransacked. He has been asked  
to reveal the sources for some of his stories. Even as Kambaksh was  
being arrested, Ibrahimi's office was sealed and his home searched by  
the NDS. Reports suggest that Hafizullah Khaliqyar, deputy attorney  
of Balkh province, threatened local journalists with arrest if they  
voiced any protest at these perversions of the rule of law.


The Sayid brothers are not the first Afghan journalists to have  
fallen foul of the establishment. While Karzai has repeatedly  
congratulated himself on international platforms for having ensured  
media freedom, his record is impressively shabby. In June 2003, for  
instance, he was all approval when Afghanistan's chief justice  
ordered the closure of the Kabul newspaper Aftab (The Sun) and the  
arrest of its chief editor Sayeed Mir Hussein Mahdavi and deputy  
editor Ali Reza Payam Sistany. This, at a time when Afghanistan was  
caught up in a momentous public debate over the shape of its new  
Constitution. Mahdavi and Sistany had committed the unforgivable sin  
of publishing articles questioning the role of religion in politics  
and the clergy's methods of interpreting religious texts. The chief  
justice, Fazl Hadi Shinwari, was an ally of the ultra-Right Kabul  
politician Abdul-Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf; he stuck the same deadly label  
on the Aftab editors that Kambaksh now carries, "charged with  
insulting Islam".


True, the Karzai government has promulgated a 'media law' that allows  
for independent newspapers, radio stations and television channels,  
and guarantees their freedom. However, one of its provisions insists  
that no one may publish anything that affronts Islam, while leaving  
the terms of affront vague and capacious. The commission set up to  
handle infringements of the media law was chaired by the minister for  
information and culture, skewing its decisions in favour of the  
state; under criticism, the government proposed the token inclusion  
of a few representatives of civil society groups.


In a recent article, Waheed Warasta, executive director of the  
Afghanistan PEN Centre, deplores the Karzai government's discreet  
withdrawal of support for media freedom. "Proof of this can be found  
in the Press Guidelines paper that was distributed to the free media  
runners last year," writes Warasta. The document forbids criticism of  
the US-led coalition, coverage of Taliban suicide attacks, and the  
publication of any news that could lower public morale. "This letter  
was distributed by the Afghan intelligence to the media … The  
spokesman of the President later claimed that he did not know that  
the intelligence had issued such a letter."


Was Karzai playing along with the intelligence service? Or is there a  
deep state within the state, over which he has little control? In  
either case, he has betrayed the hope that he would lead Afghanistan  
out of decades of ecclesiastical terror and endemic violence, and  
towards a liberal order. He first betrayed it during the Loya Jirga  
or grand council of June 2002, when Afghanistan's warlords and  
clerics made it clear that they would not return to their barracks  
and seminaries, threatening women delegates and insulting civil  
society activists. With the Kambaksh case, Karzai has fallen lower  
still. Will he condone the most appalling contraventions of natural  
justice and democratic procedure, if it helps him retain his shaky  
grip over what is essentially a narco-polity?



*

Ranjit Hoskote is a poet and cultural theorist. He is also general  
secretary of the PEN All-India Centre, a platform committed to the  
defence of intellectual and cultural freedoms.