"Pakistani journalist gets US asylum after threats from home; Colleagues were turning up dead" November 25, 2011|By Pamela Constable, Washington Post
WASHINGTON - Siraj Ahmed Malik, an ambitious young Pakistani journalist, was enjoying a stint last fall on a fellowship at Arizona State University when he started getting chilling messages from home.
One after another, his friends and colleagues were disappearing, he learned, and their bodies were turning up with bullet holes and burn marks. A doctor’s son from his hometown was arrested and vanished. A fellow reporter was kidnapped, and his corpse was found near a river. A student leader was detained, and his bullet-riddled body dumped on a highway. A writer whose stories Malik had edited was shot and killed.
“These were kids I had played cricket with, people I had interviewed, younger reporters I had taught,’’ Malik, 28, said in an interview in Arlington, Va., where he now lives. The final straw came in early June, when one of his mentors, a poet and scholar, was gunned down in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, Malik’s native province.
On Aug. 19, Malik applied for political asylum in the United States. In his petition, he said that his work as a journalist and ethnic activist in Baluchistan, where he had exposed military abuses, made him likely to be arrested, tortured, abducted, and “ultimately killed by the government’’ if he returned.
See: Pakistan's Death Squads
Recently, his petition was granted. It was a highly unusual decision by US immigration officials, given Pakistan’s status: a strategic partner in Washington’s war against Islamic terrorism; a longtime recipient of US aid; and a democracy with an elected civilian government and vibrant national news media.
“I never wanted to leave my country, but I don’t want to become a martyr, either,’’ said Malik, a soft-spoken but steely man who spends his days hunched over a laptop at coffee shops, checking with sources back home to update his online newspaper, whose name means “Baluch Truth.’’
“What’s going on in Baluchistan is like the dirty war in Argentina,’’ he said. “I need to be telling the story, but I can’t afford to become the story.’’
Baluchistan is the Wild West of Pakistan - a remote desert province, larger than France, that is home to a mix of radical Islamic groups, rival ethnic and refugee gangs, rebellious armed tribes, and security agencies that have long been reported to kidnap, torture, and kill dissidents with impunity.
Yet this ongoing violence and skulduggery receives scant international attention. Foreign journalists are banned from visiting the region alone, and headlines about Pakistan are dominated by the high-stakes border conflict in which American drones and Pakistani troops are battling the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
As a result, a handful of local journalists such as Malik have been left to investigate and report the news without big-city patrons or visiting foreign delegations to give them cover.
Malik’s case for protection was bolstered by reports from human rights groups and letters from university officials in Arizona, who called him “nothing short of brave.’’ In a July report, Human Rights Watch described a “practice of enforced disappearances’’ of Baluch leaders and intellectuals, often by security agencies, and listed 45 abductions or killings since 2009.
Activists including Malik assert that more than 5,000 Baluch have vanished in the past decade, but the issue has never been seriously addressed, while the government has both co-opted and persecuted Baluch tribal chiefs. In 2007, Pakistan’s military president fired the head of the Supreme Court, who sought to investigate the disappearances. In 2008, a civilian government took office and an investigative commission was established, but little action has been taken.
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Related:
"Pakistan to debate democracy plan" by Karin Brulliard | Washington Post, January 14, 201
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - In a separate development yesterday, a commission that spent six months investigating last year’s slaying of a Pakistani journalist, Syed Saleem Shahzad, said it had failed to identify the killer.
Human rights organizations, Pakistani journalists, and some US officials have accused Pakistan’s spy agencies of killing Shahzad, who had feared that he would be killed by intelligence operatives angered by his reporting on militant groups and their links to the military.
Like ties to "Al-CIA-Duh?"
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Also see: CIA-Duh Journalist Killed in Pakistan
Shahzad's Service
Pivot on Pakistan
