You could say it was the one bright spot Reporters Without Borders managed to find in 2012, a year that has turned out to be the deadliest for journalists since the press freedom organization released its first global year-end roundup, in 1995. Afghanistan’s pioneering liberal daily, Hasht-e Sobh (8 AM), is still alive.
Sanjar Sohail, the newspaper’s fearless 31-year-old Afghan-Canadian publisher, was in Paris Tuesday to collect the organization’s annual media prize. I spoke with Sohail, who I’m proud to say is a friend, just as he was about to head from his hotel to the prize banquet at the Le Monde auditorium.
“I’m very excited,” he said. “After six or seven years working with Hasht-e-Sobh and 10 years as a journalist, I feel my work is being recognized by people in the field, even outside Afghanistan.”
Sohail deserves all the recognition and honour he can get. In awarding him the 2012 prize, Reporters Without Borders director general Christophe Deloire said Hasht-e Sobh’s vigilance and professionalism prove that “freely-reported quality journalism can develop in the most difficult corners of the planet.”
This is so. But in a reminder of the many grim exceptions that prove the rule, Sohail shared this year’s honours with Mazen Darwish, who won the 2012 Journalist of the Year prize. Darwish couldn’t make it to Paris. Since Feb. 16, when Syrian soldiers arrested him in Damascus, Darwish has been held incommunicado in some secret Baathist prison.
Around the world this year, 88 journalists were killed, six “fixers” were killed, 47 “citizen journalists” were killed, 879 journalists were arrested, 1,993 journalists were threatened or attacked, 38 journalists were kidnapped, 73 journalists were forced to flee their countries, and 144 bloggers were killed.
Syria, where Bashar Assad’s regime has spent the year waging war on the Syrian people, has skewed the figures. Syria, Pakistan and Somalia were the deadliest places for journalists in 2012, and China, Turkey and Iran were the biggest prisons for journalists.
This year was a tough one for Hasht-e Sobh. In just one controversy, in June, Afghanistan’s national council of religious scholars met with President Hamid Karzai to demand that the newspaper be shut down. The mullahs were furious because Hasht-e Sobh had given prominent space to women’s rights activists who were documenting the malign influence of radical madrassas in Northern Afghanistan. The newspaper survived the crisis, but it was nerve-racking.
Odd as it might seem, Afghanistan remains a beacon of press freedom in Central Asia. Between India and the Mediterranean, no country has a freer press. “It is because of the help from all the soldiers that have lost their lives in Afghanistan defending our young democracy,” Sohail told me. “I am very much thankful for their sacrifices in Afghanistan, but now I am very worried that we may lose the progress, our young press, our young democracy. We have many enemies, and it is very important that we don’t lose the attention of the international community.”
Sohail’s key concern these days is American policy incoherence. “The Americans still don’t know their enemy. They have no definition of the enemy,” he said. The result is a delusional enthusiasm that has beset the NATO countries — the idea that some sort of peace deal with the Taliban is just around the corner. “Peace talks will not have a result that will benefit the people of Afghanistan or the people of Canada or the United States,” Sohail said. “The terrorists have an agenda, and it is to keep fighting and keep killing people.”
The NATO troop-withdrawal deadline of 2014 coincides with Afghanistan’s presidential elections. Karzai, constitutionally prohibited from seeking a third term, is re-engineering eligibility rules for candidates in the hopes of securing a successor of his choosing. Unless the international community ensures the elections are free and fair, Afghanistan’s frail democracy will collapse, Sohail warned.
More immediately, Afghanistan’s enemies are already filling the vacuum the NATO powers’ aid agencies are leaving in their hurried retreat. Hasht-e Sobh found itself in the middle of that maelstrom in August, with a front-page investigation that blew the cover of an Iranian scheme to organize a phoney “journalists union” that would pay Afghan reporters to produce anti-democratic propaganda from a variety of Afghan news platforms.
More than 300 journalists lost their jobs in Afghanistan this year. Afghanistan’s biggest news agency, Pajhwok Afghan News, laid off 70 of its 130 journalists. Davood Moradian of the American University in Kabul says the Khomeinist regime in Tehran is quickly filling the empty media space. He reckons that roughly a third of Afghanistan’s media is already funded by the Khomeinists. Iran now runs at least a half-dozen major Afghan television stations, 21 radio stations and dozens of newspapers and magazines.
If you want a picture of the sort of “journalism” that results, just have a look at the way Iran’s English-language propaganda outlet, Press TV, covered the Dec. 14 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. Here’s the Press TV headline: “Israeli Death Squads Involved in Sandy Hook Bloodbath: Intelligence Analyst.”
Sohail divides his time between Kabul and Vancouver, which is now home to his wife Helena and their son, Mahni, 5, and daughter, Haasty, nine months old. Sohail says it’s too soon to say whether his future is in Canada or Afghanistan.
“Canada is a great democracy, and the diversity of the opinions here shows that Canada has so much potential. I love this country because Canada gives me respect as a human being,” he said. “I am thankful for Canada’s continued support for a free press in Afghanistan. But we now have many, many concerns. We may lose the freedom that was bought with the blood of so many Canadian and Afghan soldiers.”
Terry Glavin is an author and journalist whose most recent book is Come From the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan.
The NATO troop-withdrawal deadline of 2014 coincides with Afghanistan’s presidential elections. Karzai, constitutionally prohibited from seeking a third term, is re-engineering eligibility rules for candidates in the hopes of securing a successor of his choosing. Unless the international community ensures the elections are free and fair, Afghanistan’s frail democracy will collapse, Sohail warned.
More immediately, Afghanistan’s enemies are already filling the vacuum the NATO powers’ aid agencies are leaving in their hurried retreat. Hasht-e Sobh found itself in the middle of that maelstrom in August, with a front-page investigation that blew the cover of an Iranian scheme to organize a phoney “journalists union” that would pay Afghan reporters to produce anti-democratic propaganda from a variety of Afghan news platforms.
More than 300 journalists lost their jobs in Afghanistan this year. Afghanistan’s biggest news agency, Pajhwok Afghan News, laid off 70 of its 130 journalists. Davood Moradian of the American University in Kabul says the Khomeinist regime in Tehran is quickly filling the empty media space. He reckons that roughly a third of Afghanistan’s media is already funded by the Khomeinists. Iran now runs at least a half-dozen major Afghan television stations, 21 radio stations and dozens of newspapers and magazines.
If you want a picture of the sort of “journalism” that results, just have a look at the way Iran’s English-language propaganda outlet, Press TV, covered the Dec. 14 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. Here’s the Press TV headline: “Israeli Death Squads Involved in Sandy Hook Bloodbath: Intelligence Analyst.”
Sohail divides his time between Kabul and Vancouver, which is now home to his wife Helena and their son, Mahni, 5, and daughter, Haasty, nine months old. Sohail says it’s too soon to say whether his future is in Canada or Afghanistan.
“Canada is a great democracy, and the diversity of the opinions here shows that Canada has so much potential. I love this country because Canada gives me respect as a human being,” he said. “I am thankful for Canada’s continued support for a free press in Afghanistan. But we now have many, many concerns. We may lose the freedom that was bought with the blood of so many Canadian and Afghan soldiers.”
Terry Glavin is an author and journalist whose most recent book is Come From the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan.
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