The State of the Media and

Journalism in Balochistan
Remarks by Malik Siraj Akbar, Editor-in-Chief The Baloch
Hal, President, the Balochistan Institute, Washington D.C.
Presented at Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization
(UNPO) Conference in Washington D.C on
May 10, 2016

Good morning ladies and gentleman,

I am absolutely honored to be once again on a panel
with extraordinary human rights defenders and
advocates for social justice such as Bob Dietz, T
Kumar and Mike Hughes.
When my online newspaper, the Baloch Hal, was
blocked in 2010 on the instructions of the
Pakistani military authorities and I was compelled
to apply for political asylum here in the United
States because of threats to my life back in my
native Balochistan, Bob and his organization, the
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), offered me
tremendous support and guidance under their
Journalist Assistance Program. Mike Hughes
introduced me to the Huffington Post. Since then, I
have written almost more than a hundred articles on
Balochistan for the Huffington Post and had it not
been for the introduction Mike made back in 2012,
this Baloch boy would probably not be writing
stories today on Balochistan for the Huffington
Post. I have profound admiration for Mr. T. Kumar
with whom I have had the honor to share several
panels to discuss Balochistan and he has always
been available for interviews and quotes whenever I
reached out to him for my stories, even sometimes
during the weekends.
I would like to deeply thank the Unrepresented
Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO) for

organizing this extremely important event on a

topic that we cannot openly and candidly debate
within Balochistan or Pakistan.
It was exactly ten years ago on this day, May 10th,
2006, when I arrived in Quetta, the capital of
Balochistan, with a new job. A week ago, on the
World Press Freedom Day, I had graduated from the
Asian College of Journalism (ACJ) in the South
Indian city of Chennai. I had earned a postgraduate diploma in print journalism and had been
appointed probably as one of the youngest bureau
chiefs ever of a leading English language newspaper
in the countrys largest province of Balochistan. I
was young, ambitious and, honestly, nave or, more
accurately, stupid. I thought we journalists could
change the world. I had returned to Balochistan at
a time when the conflict between the Baloch
nationalists and the military regime of General
Pervez Musharraf had reached its peak. Two months
later, the seventy-nine year old Baloch leader
Nawab Akbar Bugti was killed on August 26th in an
event that I describe as Balochistans 9/11.
Bugtis killing totally changed Balochistan and
shook the foundations of its relationship with
Islamabad. Secret services began to abduct
political activists, imprison dissenting
politicians, brutally torture detainees and murder
the rest in the official custody. The more
repression Pakistan employed, the more rebellion
increased among the Baloch. For the first time
women and men from the Baloch middle class joined
the separatist movement because they were the
biggest victims of the state-sponsored crackdown.
Selfishly, I saw great stories out of all these
tragedies. I thought there were too many stories
that the rest of the Pakistanis did not know about
and I should report about them. Soon, I began to
realize my limitations as my newspaper drastically
edited, censored or distorted stories on

Balochistan. There was an unwritten agreement

between editors in the nations big cities such as
Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad that they would not
publish certain stories on Balochistan because they
amounted to undermining our national security.
These were clearly stories that highlighted the
security forces involvement in human rights abuse,
misuse of official power and excessive use of force
against the Baloch people.
Newspapers brazenly sided with the official
narrative and distorted the other side of the
story.
For instance, late Nawab Khair Baksh Marri, a
prominent Baloch nationalist leader, had gained a
reputation in 1990s and early 2000 for not ever
speaking to the media. His complete silence had
made him a mythical or a mysterious figure both
among his admirers and critics. Marri used to say
that he never trusted the Pakistan media. He
criticized them for distorting his point of view.
In spite of his reluctance to speak to the media, I
built some sources and reached out to the
mysterious Baloch leader requesting an interview. I
promised that his views would not be distorted this
time. Much to my surprise and absolute delight, the
godfather of the modern Baloch nationalist movement
agreed to be interviewed. I traveled from Quetta to
Karachi on a bus for 20 hours only to conduct the
rare interview with the Baloch leader who had not
spoken to the media for several years.
I wrote a 1500-worded profile of the seasoned
Baloch leader, earnestly hoping that the whole
country would be talking about it. Actually, yes
many people in Pakistan were talking about the
Baloch leaders frontpage interview. But for
totally different reasons. I can live with a pig
but not with a Punjabi, said the frontpage
headline in a story that had been shrunk from 1500

words to only 120 words. That clearly depicted the

Baloch leader as violent and racist. In what
context had he made those remarks? Nobody knew
simply because my editor in Lahore had decided to
trade professionalism with dishonesty and
distortion. My editor had intentionally excluded
and censored most important parts of a very sober
and intelligent conversation with the Baloch leader
and he had only published selective parts of it out
of context in order to antagonize the military and
the masses elsewhere in Pakistan against a veteran
nationalist leader who actually had made several
valid arguments and the people of Pakistan deserved
to know his perspective.
This kind of selective, biased and distorted
journalism has been the new normal in Balochistan
for many years now. The Balochs are angry and
frustrated that their point of view is never
published in the mainstream newspapers or aired on
news channels and whenever it is, it is distorted
and heavily influenced by the official propaganda.
Every newspaper published in Balochistan depends on
official advertisements for its survival. There is
no way newspapers can report objectively when their
economic interests are directly tied to the
government. Private news organizations do not
bother to invest in Balochistan. It is more likely
to see a Pakistani journalist on a foreign
reporting assignment in Washington and London than
reporting from Balochistan.
In 2009, I decided to challenge this trend and
launched the Baloch Hal, Balochistans first online
English language newspaper. While in the past,
mainstream Pakistani newspapers published an
editorial on Balochistan probably once or twice a
month; the Baloch Hal totally changed the local
media landscape by editorializing Balochistan every
single day. We provided a unique window to the rest
of the world about the conflict in Balochistan. I

think our biggest contribution was producing a new

generation of English writing Baloch journalists
and writers, both males and females. On receiving
articles and news stories from these young writers,
we at the Baloch Hal used to edit, track changes
and mail the articles back to the writers. This
made the Baloch Hal an online newspaper as well as
a virtual journalism school. In November 2010, ten
days before our first launching anniversary, the
Baloch Hal was officially blocked in Pakistan. A
chronic dearth of financial resources has tried
again and again to strangulate the Baloch Hal. But
I believe it has matured as an idea rather than a
mere news organization. And, ideas are not only
difficult but also impossible to kill. Therefore, I
would like to seek your support in keeping the
Baloch Hal alive in whatever way you can help.
Meanwhile, journalists in Balochistan are
sandwiched in an absolutely ugly violent battle
between the Pakistani army and the Baloch
nationalists. Both sides not only try to influence
reporters but also consider it totally okay to kill
a journalist by either accusing them of being a spy
for the Baloch nationalists or an agent of the
government intelligence agencies.
It is extremely painful to recall how our
journalist friends have been killed one after the
other by different parties in the conflict.
Shockingly, the murderers do not deny killing these
reporters. It is only that they insist that we
should instead focus on the why part of it. We
are repeatedly asked, Okay, your journalist friend
was killed. But do you know why he was killed? Why
werent the other reporters killed? There surely is
a reason: He was to be blamed. These are the
absurd questions journalists in Balochistan have to
grapple with everyday. In Balochistan, it is always
the victims fault.

Pakistan has shut down doors to Balochistan for the

international media. Foreign journalists are denied
entry to the province under the pretext of security
threats. Even non-Baloch Pakistani journalists who
have endeavored to go to Balochistan and report on
the conflict have been targeted. Television
journalists Hamid Mir, one of Pakistans most
influential news personalities, very narrowly
escaped an assassination attempt in April 2014.
According to one estimate 40 reporters have been
killed in Balochistan in the line of duty in the
past decade. Many national and international
organizations still do not fully recognize these
slain reporters because they were not full-time
journalists or had other sources of employment. But
there is no doubt that it was journalism and
reporting that caused their death.
The conflict in Balochistan has internally and
externally displaced a generation of Balochistans
finest journalists. On the run to save their lives,
many have abandoned the profession. Local press
clubs have voluntarily shut down. Today you will
meet exiled Baloch journalists in the least
expected places on earth, including in Nepal,
Afghanistan, Iran and even in South Africa.
By targeting journalists, curtailing press freedom
and intimidating reporters, players in the
Balochistan conflict are further complicating the
situation. Assaults on the media are neither an act
of patriotism nor a helpful tool for the
underrepresented peoples of the world. All parties
must refrain from embroiling journalists in their
fight. Reporters are only messengers in this bloody
conflict and shooting these messengers is like
shooting ones own foot. The more journalists are
killed in Balochistan, the more the truth will
disappear. This is in fact everyones loss.

Thank you