At the Wana Press Club in South Waziristan in late 2023, a reporter spoke of the need for having a trauma centre for journalists based in what are now the “merged districts” of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province.

I was researching a report on the state of media in the merged districts of the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) and this interview came during what was the last stop in a series of visits to Pakistan’s north-western tribal areas and districts bordering Afghanistan. The journalist said, “The government, both at the provincial and federal level, promised us a trauma centre for the tribal journalists, but nothing came of it.”

It took me back to 2014. That year, the journalism school at the University of Peshawar (UoP) had established one such centre with help from the DW Akadamie, the media development and training centre of the German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle. At the time, the erstwhile Fata areas were still that — a semi-autonomous buffer zone on the border with Afghanistan, governed by the centre and its representatives.

The discriminatory Frontier Crimes Regulations, a legacy of the British era under which the tribal areas were ruled long after Pakistan’s independence, did not allow freedom of speech and assembly, and enforced collective punishment for individual actions. There were no courts or police, no local media and political rights. For more than 70 years of Pakistan’s independence, the people of the region lived without fundamental human rights while citizens in the rest of Pakistan had access to them under the Constitution. The merger of former-Fata areas with KP in 2018 promised to change that.

The trauma centre at the journalism school was built in December 2014, the year and the month that saw the massacre of children at the Army Public School (APS) in Peshawar, a devastating culmination to 14 years of a bloody conflict — the so-called ‘War on Terror’ — that befell the region post 9/11. The APS attack, claimed by the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), was in retaliation to the military operation, Zarb-e-Azb, against the TTP militants active in North Waziristan. The operation, launched in June that year, displaced close to a million people from the tribal agency, including journalists.

Six years earlier, in 2009, another military operation, Rah-e-Rast, against militants in Swat had displaced 2.2 million in the month of May. At the height of militancy in Swat between 2004 to 2009, detentions, displacement and killing of journalists had been common, as was the debilitating psychological trauma of covering a protracted conflict with widespread death and destruction.

The merger of the former tribal agencies into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2018 was meant to usher in a new era of protection and constitutional rights for its citizens after being deprived of them for more than 70 years. But it seems not much has changed for the people of newly merged districts. And the toll on journalists reporting from these frontlines of conflict, caught between pressures from all sides, is the most severe…

To the trauma centre at UoP came journalists suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), both those local to the KP province and others from the neighbouring Fata. A story in Dawn, covering the trauma centre, said this was a region where journalism had become immersed “in the extreme violence and daily threats” of a relentless conflict.

When the trauma centre was launched that December, News Lens, an online news cooperative with which I served as an editor for KP and Balochistan — a province with its own history of a simmering conflict, and where, too, journalists were, are, frequently targeted — did a story to cover its inauguration. In the story, a Peshawar-based journalist, Muhammad Irshad, said that he had “not been able to sleep properly lately”. Irshad said he had been “suffering abnormal sleep patterns due to covering violent incidents day after day”.

A RECURRING NIGHTMARE

Nearly a decade after that inauguration — and five years since the much-hyped merger of former Fata with the rest of KP in 2018 — I turned to a journalist at the Wana Press Club that day and asked a question I knew the answer to only too well, if only because he was not the first person I had spoken to: “Why do you think the journalists in the merged areas need a trauma centre?”

Having had numerous conversations about how the conditions had changed for the media in the wake of the merger, I had little doubt about the legitimacy of the demand for a trauma centre for journalists in the merged areas. By late 2023, the region’s slide back into terrorism was well on its way. It was the year when, according to the East Asia Forum write-up titled ‘Explaining the Resurgence of Terrorist Violence in Pakistan’, the country relived “the scary spectre of 2013” — when terrorist attacks “peaked at nearly four attacks a day, with nearly 2,700 total fatalities.” With a growing incidence of terror attacks after TTP militants were brought back from Afghanistan to “mainstream” them, the spectre of Talibanisation is haunting the region again.

Once again, the border regions of KP are in the news for all the wrong reasons — not that they ever emerged into a peaceful, hopeful place after 9/11. And nowhere is that sense more palpable than in the merged districts, with localised military operations, suicide bombings, targeted killings, extortion by threats and violence, attacks on military and police installations. And the consequent tightening of security and restrictions on civil liberties happening all over again, amidst increasing militarisation of the region.

With journalists at the forefront of living and reporting on the volatile situation, it is the state of the media and journalism in the region that illustrates the immensity of that threat like nothing else. But instead of active and sustained support from media organisations and the authorities, given the situation on the ground, now, as then, local journalists walk the tightrope of a hazardous profession. It is a witches’ brew of hostilities they face, stemming from tribes unhappy with the absence of peace and opportunity, the pro- and anti-state militants active in the region, state institutions, the authorities governing the region and, most of all, journalists’ parent organisations in mainstream media.

Once again, the border regions of KP are in the news for all the wrong reasons. Nowhere is that sense more palpable than in the merged districts, with localised military operations, suicide bombings, targeted killings, extortion, attacks on military and police installations. With journalists at the forefront of living and reporting on the volatile situation, it is the state of the media and journalism in the region that illustrates the immensity of that threat like nothing else.

Tribal journalists insist this “lack of support” from their employer media organisations — a grievance that surfaced in every single interview with journalists — in the face of rampant odds and threats, has directly contributed to their vulnerability in the field, exposing them to harm.

Even though not “hostile” to their workers in the real sense of the word, media organisations’ disregard for the safety of their workers has placed them on the side of “harm”. Just as the race for breaking news and a focus on conflict jeopardised the life and limbs of journalists in the ‘War on Terror’ years, they once again threaten the well-being of journalists during the renewed spike in terrorism-triggered insecurity. And it’s not just the journalists that are at risk, but the very cause of journalism and public interest is imperiled in the region.

Not much has been learnt from the blood-soaked decades of the ‘War on Terror’, whose history is often written in the blood of journalists who died in the line of duty. That war may have morphed in its global context but, for the people — including the journalists in the region — it continues like a recurring nightmare, coming back to haunt the region and its people.

According to the journalist asking for a trauma centre, “Ours is a region amidst another cycle of the ‘War on Terror.’ Bomb blasts and targeted killings have virtually unhinged our minds.”

And then he added something that echoes the predicament of journalists in the region not long ago. He pulled out a strip of sleeping pills from his pocket and, like that journalist in the 2014 News Lens story about the inauguration of the trauma centre at the journalism school, he said, “Sleep has abandoned us.”

LEFT TO THEIR OWN DEVICES

In 2006, when he came to receive us at the Mir Ali market in North Waziristan on a hot summer afternoon, Hayatullah Khan, the journalist from North Waziristan who was slain later that same year, looked more like a gun-toting militant than the friendly tribal journalist I knew.

Both Hayatullah and his brother had around their shoulders that great mower of men in these parts, the AK-47. “Why the gun, Hayatullah?”, I asked him, amazed that he was armed. “The government has told us it can’t provide security to journalists,” he said, adjusting the white cap he always wore on his head. “We are left to our own devices to protect ourselves.”

It was July, an uneasy time, when the memory of several journalists killed in neighbouring South Waziristan was fresh. Usually not the safest of professions anywhere in Pakistan, journalism had turned deadly for reporters who stayed the course in the tribal areas. Others had simply packed up and left for towns in the “settled areas” where they could report on developments in the troubled region from a safe distance.

“Let’s go home,” Hayatullah said, grabbing me by the elbow, pulling us in a hurry out of the little ice cream shop near the bus terminal. It was as if he was fearful of being in a public spot. Quickly, we got into his old but sturdy pick-up truck. His brother got in the back, gun on the ready, vigilantly scanning the landscape, as if expecting a threat to materialise out of the desolation of the dusty plains and villages we were moving through.

As we drove through the market of Mir Ali — one of the three subdivisions of North Waziristan, then, as now, a tense setting for targeted killings, terrorist attacks and military operations — a signboard announced that carrying firearms was prohibited in public places. I asked Hayatullah if his brother went everywhere with him to watch over him. “He has to, I can’t drive and use a gun at the same time, should something go wrong,” he answered.

I asked, “But that means staying with you all the time. Doesn’t he study or work?” “He does,” Hayatullah explained matter-of-factly, “but someone has to take care of us. If it is not me, it has to be him. That’s the way it is.”

Now in late 2023, I was pulled out of a roadside tea-stall in Tank, even before I had time to bite into a piece of cake. What was it that my hosts saw, by way of a threat, that I couldn’t? Later, I observed and learnt that the government had provided armed police guards to journalists for security. As we drove from Tank to Wana to meet journalists at the press club there, the journalist who took me there had an AK47 placed by the driver’s seat.

“The conditions are far from safe here. To be a journalist here is nerve-racking,” he said when I asked the question I had of Hayatullah Khan years ago — why carry a gun? “In March this year [2023], there was an [alleged] drone attack in the south, and a militant commander there called me to say that two children of his family were killed in the attack. He wanted me to carry the story on my channel. I couldn’t. Nobody [in the mainstream media] is willing to carry news from the militants. When I refused, he threatened me, saying we, the journalists, were paid minions of the state.”

His heightened threat perception — by no means exclusive to him, but common to the entire journalism community in the tribal regions — is also borne out by a written statement issued by the TTP in August 2023.

It warned journalists in the Khyber and Waziristan districts to desist from being “lackeys” of the police and the military. It said militants killed in the conflict should be honoured with the title shaheed [martyrs]. In September, warned the letter, the TTP would be targeting journalists in the two districts.

While there were no attacks on journalists, and some journalists say the announcement was fake — not issued by the TTP — it caused alarm and panic among journalists of the merged districts. Come 2024, and already seven reporters have been killed in the country, including Khalil Jibran in the Khyber district and Kamran Dawar in North Waziristan.

GUNS AND ANTI-ANXIETY PILLS

Over the years, a continuation of the precarious conditions in which tribal journalists live and work raises the uncomfortable question: if 2006 was when the government wanted journalists to take measures for their own safety, and 2014 was when journalists were losing sleep for want of peace, what has changed for the media and journalists in the tribal regions in 2024?

Five years after the former-Fata was merged into the rest of Pakistan, with legal and constitutional guarantees spelled out under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan, it seems not much has.

“It is up to us to care for our safety and well-being,” said the journalist, as we left the plains of Tank, the district neighbouring South Waziristan, and entered a mountainous terrain on our way to Wana. “We work in a region where always one or the other party [to the conflict] is unhappy with us. We tread with care, but we also have to take measures to protect ourselves.”

It was when I asked him how the conditions around him affected his psychological well-being that I learnt it wasn’t just the “gun” he kept for safety, but he also took “pills” to sleep. “You cannot report here as you do in Lahore or Islamabad,” he said. “It’s a state of constant mental torture and anxiety. Once I took Lexotanil. Now I am on Citanew [both anti-anxiety, anti-depression drugs] and Rizek [for anxiety-related gastro-intestinal reflux].”

Guns and addictive anxiety pills — one could be forgiven for having an unsettling deja vu. The troubles that journalists and journalism — indeed the hapless, long-suffering people living in the tribal region — have historically faced in the region are far from over. And with it, a lingering question mark hangs over prospects for peace and progress, and participatory, transparent development, as promised under the merger.

As a journalist in Bajaur put it: “Asleep or awake, ours is an anxious existence.”

THE HAUNTED PRESS

It’s no surprise that the Miranshah Press Club (MPC) looks haunted by its own emptiness. Most journalists from North Waziristan district have been displaced, left fearing for their lives, while others feel safer working from home. The gate is opened not by a journalist but a police guard.

Like with most press clubs, it is common for protestors to hold dharnas [sit-ins] in front of the press club in Miranshah, the district headquarters of North Waziristan. Other sit-ins happen on the roadside between Mir Ali and Miranshah — tribesmen gathering to protest a lack of services, the military’s takeover of a school or madrassah and, more frequently now, to demand peace or the dead bodies of kin killed in security operations. They expect local journalists to take their voice to the media.

In 2023, when a Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) sit-in in front of the MPC demanded that its arrested activists be released, one of the journalists got a call from the administration that the press club was “facilitating the dharna, giving food to PTM activists and allowing them to use the press club toilets.”

According to the journalist, “I said if the administration does not want the dharna, it could always stop protesters at Sidgai [the main security check post at the entrance to the district] but, once people turn up at the press club, it becomes the media’s responsibility to listen to their grievances.” He says the authorities accused him of working against the state.

Within the decades of violence that have crippled life in the region, it is not hard to know where to place North Waziristan. It has always been coded “red”, as the alert signs remind one at the heavily guarded entry gates and military establishments. The region today continues to seeth with danger and discontent.

Even though one does get to see in mainstream media frequent news about soldiers and militants dying in security operations, a visit to the district reveals that people’s protests against the government and the district administration are just as common. Alternatively, one can also witness and ascertain this from social media platforms, in independent posts from the community, which makes citizen journalism a risky undertaking — as the death of Dawar in North Waziristan in May 2024 illustrates.

The rise of the PTM coincided with the merger of the former-Fata in 2018, when the social movement, with leadership from former-Fata, took to the streets to protest the state’s violation of human rights in the border regions.

The government’s stiff response, and its no-holds-barred policy, of arresting PTM activists and denying it mainstream media coverage is well-established. What is less debated is that, at a time when the media and freedom of expression in the region should have transformed for the better — after the much-hyped constitutional merger, allowing equal rights to the tribal people in the wake of seven decades of a constitutional limbo — it has instead slid back into alarming chaos.

WALKING a RAZOR’S EDGE

Five years on, the policy of snuffing dissent and controlling information, amidst a renewed wave of terror attacks, bombings and targeted killings — with the region remaining as its chief theatre — continues to shape the conditions undermining media freedoms in the merged tribal areas of erstwhile Fata.

Journalists are caught precariously between the forces out to quash freedom of expression and their duty to uphold it. In a region where journalists themselves are tribesmen, they also run the risk of being labelled “a traitor to the tribal cause” if they do not give voice to tribal dissent in the face of decades of militancy and attendant militarisation.

The region has been, and remains today, a dangerous and volatile zone, where journalists walk the razor’s edge, a plight brought home by the fact that a record seven journalists have already been killed in the country in the first six months of 2024. The deaths of journalists such as Dawar and Khalil suggest an alarming spike in the trend, and many others fear a similar fate as they continue to work under conditions of threats and harassment. Consider the recent case of Gohar Wazir, the displaced tribal journalist who used to report from Bannu, the district adjacent to his native North Waziristan.

Kidnapped in April 2023 and physically tortured, Wazir now lives in fear and anonymity, with no job and little support from his media organisation. He was released after promising his abductors that he would not criticise the authorities. No one knows of his whereabouts, as he lives in hiding, away from his children and family, facing threats and fearing attacks on his life.

This wasn’t the first time he was targeted for his work. In 2019, he was also briefly detained for covering a PTM meeting. In a career spanning 15 years, Wazir has covered public protests, militancy, military operations and displacement in the troubled tribal region. “I was repeatedly told to stop covering protests, where the issue of dismantling pro-government militant groups is always a major demand,” Wazir told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in May 2023. “They can kill me at any time.”

This struggle to give voice to dissent against systematic suppression could be seen as a barometer for freedom of expression — more so because, as a woman journalist from South Waziristan puts it, the PTM demands are also what the people want — an immediate end to insecurity, targeted killing, kidnapping, extortion, the free movement of militants in the region, etc.

Authorities in the tribal areas invoke the exigencies of an emergency situation, arguing in support of curbs on freedom of expression. They claim emergency measures are required to fight militancy — desperate times calling for stringent, desperate measures, even at the cost of civil liberties, they argue.

But it is precisely this state of emergency, where local voices and sentiments are silenced, and little is known and debated in the rest of the country about the actual conditions, that emphasises the need for hearing and heeding independent voices. Their expression or suppression become important indicators of freedom of expression — even more so given the grave, persistent threats to the lives and livelihoods of common people caught up in an unceasing conflict for decades.

The writer is a journalist based in Peshawar. His research report, ‘Newstribes of the Northwest’, was published by Freedom Network in June 2024. X: @aayzee

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 4th, 2024.