Combating militant ideologies: State organs asked to put their acts together

Media asked to avoid promoting militant ideologies.

ISLAMABAD:

The state has to “put its act together” if it wants to counter militant ideologies and create a peaceful society, speakers at a seminar said on Friday.

“It is a big challenge to tackle the prevailing environment of religious extremism,” Tariq Khosa, former inspector-general of the Balochistan police, said describing it as a “mindset” and “a product of faulty policies.”

The seminar, titled “Creating an environment that counteracts militant ideologies and radicalism in Pakistan”, was organised by the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS) in collaboration with the Norwegian Peace-building Resource Centre (NOREF).



Khosa, who was chairing the session on Pakistani media’s role in thwarting appeal for militant ideologies, said the state is weak, with lack of institutions and lack of rule of law.

“(Tackling the militancy) is a hearts and minds struggle within Pakistani society,” he remarked. “We have to decide whether we want Jinnah’s Pakistan or Zia’s decadence.”

A national cohesive society should develop a narrative to tackle religious extremism, he said.



Earlier, Prof Hasan Askari Rizvi, a defence analyst, said Pakistan’s civil-military relationship has changed more into interdependence, adding that it is an irreversible process.

“The civil-military relationship in Pakistan will never go back to the original model of military intervention,” he said.

Major-General (retd) Athar Abbas, a former director general of Inter-Services Public Relations, concurred with Rizvi. He said pressure groups such as the judiciary, media and civil society would keep the civil-military balance in check.



Abbas also said the military should not shy away from admitting faults it committed in the past. He said the military “must admit its role in politics, its own orientation and its role in launching jihadis.”

But he maintained that the military has tried to balance the civil-military relationships following a realisation that the military cannot survive as “an island of prosperity surrounded by poverty.”

“To put the entire responsibility on the military and absolve state organs of responsibility would not be just or fair,” he said. “The military cannot substitute for the absence of good governance in the provinces.”

One of the participants, however, challenged Abbas’s statement by saying that historically, with its control on resources and its share of the federal budget, the military has not allowed good governance to flourish in the country.

Saleem Safi, a TV anchor, said media are indeed being used to promote militancy and extremism. He said there were three main reasons for the media’s failure to play a progressive role in conflict reporting: cultural issues, the media’s internal dynamics and contradictions in the state’s official policy line.

Safi said the cultural practice of giving derogatory labels, such as “Taliban” and “liberal fascists” to people with opposing ideological positions prevents journalists from reporting freely, out of the fear that their reporting would misconstrued as opinion.

Safi predicted negotiations with the Taliban will not happen and will definitely not succeed.

He said broadcast media houses are caught in a ratings race and journalists are not provided adequate safety in extremely difficult situations. Safi also said the confusion in state’s policy line sometimes also confuses journalistic discourse.

Shahzada Zulfiqar, a journalist from Quetta, indirectly cancelled Safi’s last point by saying that it is not the journalist’s duty to promote someone’s agenda or policy line. Rather, journalists should provide facts to the people, he said.

But with the help of anecdotal evidence, he said there were grave dangers to the journalists working in Balochistan, both from extremists and the military, where 26 journalists have died in the line of work and several had to leave the province.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 12^th, 2013.