A whitewash

Now that the commission tasked to find out who was responsible for killing of journalist Saleem Shahzad has released its detailed final report we can see just how negligent it really was in doing its job. The report is one that the intelligence agencies of the country can be proud of, since it all but exonerates but without providing any convincing reasons for why it has done so. And those reading the report may end up being convinced that Mr Shahzad was killed not by bullets but by the rotten profession of journalism. Among the many travesties in the report is its claim that Mr Shahzad’s killing shows that journalism needs to be reformed and regulated so that inaccurate stories do not end up being published. This is absurd. Whatever problems one may have with the state of journalism in this country, he was killed because he was getting too close to the truth and so was silenced.

We had been promise a commission that was independent but ended up with one that saw its mission as whitewashing the whole affair. What makes this even more galling is that one of the members of the commission was the president of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists, who should have refused to sign off on a report that blasted journalists for reporting secrets and at every turn seemed to want to find reasons why Shahzad could have been killed by someone other than the country’s security and intelligence establishment.

The testimony provided by Mr Shahzad’s family to the commission is also very disturbing. His wife and brother seem to also be deflecting the blame away from the agencies, despite the fact that Mr Shahzad himself felt his life was being threatened by them. On the face of it, this would suggest that his family was being pressurised by the powers-that-be, something that would have been ripe for investigation by the commission had they any access to the agencies beyond a written statement and a perfunctory appearance by a low-level official. It is now up to the prime minister, and the journalist community as a whole, to shun this farce of a report. Saleem Shahzad deserves a real investigation, not this sham which seems to have ended up, as a headline in this newspaper pointed out, doing everything but pointing to those responsible for his death.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 15^th, 2012.