FIVE years after the merger of former Fata with KP, the threats to freedom of expression, journalists and journalism, which were prevalent during the ‘war on terror’ years, persist. Ongoing terrorist attacks in the region have impeded the progress promised by the much-vaunted merger. Journalists, tasked with reporting on the region’s unending challenges and instability, have themselves become casualties of a fraught environment. Be it the state, society, government policies, or tribal attitudes towards the media and journalism, all continue to be shaped by a security outlook. Militancy and the attendant securitisation have fostered an oppressive order marked by threats, suspicion and paranoia, undermining opportunities for peace, dialogue and development. Defined and discussed in the idiom of security and combat, the region has remained trapped in an insular, combative and conservative tribal mould that the merger promised to break free from.

This insecurity has become something of a chronic affliction. To illustrate the point, one only has to consider the threats to journalists in former Fata in the wake of 9/11, which continue decades later. From witnessing an alarming number of attacks and casualties among journalists back then, the region today remains a dangerous and volatile zone where journalists navigate a precarious profession. The recent tragic deaths of journalists Hayat Dawar and Khalil Jibran underscore this risk. Far from receiving the necessary support from the state and media organisations that journalists reporting in a fraught theatre should, they are left to their own devices when it comes to navigating hostilities from state institutions, militants, governing authorities in the tribal districts, and tribes caught between tradition and half-hearted attempts at modernisation and mainstreaming. To quote a tribal journalist: “If there is no safety, there cannot be journalism but controlled information that serves the parties to a conflict more than the people caught in it.”

Displaced, threatened or made immobile by insecurity, accessing information has become tough for journalists. Consequently, information, especially security-related, is monopolised by the security establishment and district authorities. Facts are hard to confirm independently, as journalists can travel neither safely nor freely to the site of a military operation. Little has changed since 2001, when troubles claimed the region; if anything, the culture of secrecy, of monitoring and intelligence-gathering as a source of information, has become more entrenched. And, as the control over the media to propagate state narratives about the region has become more pervasive, so has an environment marked by a lack of transparency, accountability, and, indeed, impunity.

Displaced, threatened or made immobile by insecurity, accessing information has become tough for journalists in former Fata.

This has widened the long-standing gap between the citizens and the state within the tribal districts’ political and governance system. A free media could have facilitated a much-needed dialogue between both, especially in the wake of people protesting against chronic insecurity and the talk of renewed military operations, and helped build trust through a free exchange of views. Instead, the dominant trend is to hush up independent voices, allowing only news about the conflict and insecurity to trickle through. Now, as then, the post-merger communication regime only aims to strengthen the official narratives through strategic communication — as opposed to amplifying and strengthening citizen voices through an independent media.

On the one hand, freedom of information and journalism remains threatened, and on the other, mainstream media is managed within the framework of strategic communication to achieve visibility for government narratives, as well as buy-in for lopsided reform processes and securitisation from local and national audiences. Such an insular agenda may be helpful to the ‘development project’ of a difficult region, as the authorities see it, but being ‘strategic’ means it lacks transparency and accountability. It hampers the inclusion of local voices in the debate around development priorities — especially women’s — and decision-making. While consultations do happen by way of public hearings, they can hardly be equivalent to, or a substitute for, independent local journalism enabling free expression and political participation — fundamental rights that are at a premium in the tribal districts.

Moreover, the lack of support from parent media organisations in a region traumatised by militancy and military operations has contributed greatly to the vulnerability of journalists, exposing them to harm. Not just them, but the very cause of journalism and public interest in the region. Tribal journalists grumble that mainstream media has little interest in highlighting the problems people face in the merged districts, just concentrating on conflict and other security issues.

This focus on conflict is a double-edged sword. It undermines journalism because local communities see journalists as neglectful of the issues plaguing the region, and it makes mainstream media and its audiences in the rest of Pakistan receive and perceive the merged districts only through a security lens. The development that the merger promised, progress or the lack thereof, does not come through in the media discourse. As news about the conflict crowds out everything else, the debate about the region and its people’s predicament of suffering — due to militancy and a lack of development post-merger — remains out of media and public discourse. The preponderance of conflict-related news has strengthened the political economy of war, from which unaccountable and powerful interests benefit at the cost of progress of the region and its people.

A lost opportunity, the merger could have been a model demonstrating how the aspirations of a people and resolve on the part of the state and authorities could usher in a new era to end the trials of a region and its people. Instead, the failure to ensure freedom of expression and information in the tribal districts keeps state and society embroiled in a mutually corrosive relationship, allowing undemocratic power centres and anti-state entities to deepen their roots — essentially, a perpetuation of the old repressive paradigm, only under a different name.

The writer is a Peshawar-based journalist. His research report, Newstribes of the Northwest, for Freedom Network was published in June 2024.

Published in Dawn, July 20th, 2024