Reporters who criticize the authorities or denounce human rights violations are routinely attacked.
by Marco Respinti
On April 24, Abdul Wahid Raisani, sub-editor of the Daily Azadi in Quetta, Pakistan, was quietly going home, when he was stopped by robbers who asked him to surrender his motorcycle. When Raisani started discussing with them, he was shot in the chest. He died shortly thereafter.
Armed gangs of robbers do roam the streets of several cities in Pakistan, but the pattern is suspicious. Earlier the same week, Absar Alam, a nationally well-known reporter and former chairman of the Pakistan Electronic Media Authority (PEMRA) was shot in Islamabad. Alam is a well-known human rights advocate and critic of the government. Although still hospitalized, he survived to tell the media that he does not believe he was attacked by common robbers.
The motorcycle scheme had occurred earlier, on April 10, in the Karak district of Khyber Pakhtunkwa. Journalist Waseem Alam, co-editor of the newspaper Sada-e-lawaghir was stopped by thugs who asked for his motorcycle, then shot dead.
Although the local police insists that these incidents have no political meaning, it is strange that common robbers are specifically interested in motorcycles belonging to independent journalists—and in fact are more interested in killing them than in getting the motorcycles.
In 2020, ten journalists were killed in similar incidents, and more were arrested on trumped-on charges, tortured, harassed by the police and various private militias, according to the Council of Pakistan Newspaper Editors’ (CPNE) Media Freedom Report 2020.
The targeted journalists represent a wide spectrum of political and religious opinions. Yet, what we are witnessing in Pakistan is a persistent trend. Human rights and democracy cannot be protected when independent media are routinely intimidated.
Marco Respinti is an Italian professional journalist, member of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), author, translator, and lecturer. He has contributed and contributes to several journals and magazines both in print and online, both in Italy and abroad. Author of books and chapter in books, he has translated and/or edited works by, among others, Edmund Burke, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Russell Kirk, J.R.R. Tolkien, Régine Pernoud and Gustave Thibon. A Senior fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal (a non-partisan, non-profit U.S. educational organization based in Mecosta, Michigan), he is also a founding member as well as a member of the Advisory Council of the Center for European Renewal (a non-profit, non-partisan pan-European educational organization based in The Hague, The Netherlands). A member of the Advisory Council of the European Federation for Freedom of Belief, in December 2022, the Universal Peace Federation bestowed on him, among others, the title of Ambassador of Peace. From February 2018 to December 2022, he has been the Editor-in-Chief of International Family News. He serves as Director-in-Charge of the academic publication The Journal of CESNUR and Bitter Winter: A Magazine on Religious Liberty and Human Rights.
