Saluting Ansar Abbasi (Pakistan’s Robert Fisk)
Ansar Abbasi needs no introduction in Pakistan. His body of work is a testament to his status as Pakistan’s most eminent investigative journalist. Indeed military and civil governments alike have both been subjected to his passionate, incisive and investigative journalism for decades. However the present Gillani government bereft of accolades aplenty has the dubious distinction of being blamed for reportedly authoring death threats against Ansar Abbasi.
Shaheen Sehbai the Group Editor of The News open letter to ‘Sunglasses’ Sherry Rehman is an open indictment of the government and notes that Ansar Abbasi has been made the target of death threats owing to his reporting of a secret Musharraf/Fazlur Rehman deal as well as the infamous Farah Dogar marks case.
Supporters of Ansar Abbasi like myself who value his work beyond words fear for his life. This fear was compounded when I read that Rehman Malik had offered him security, I am sure Ansar Abbasi must feel even more unsafe now!
Let it be said that Ansar Abbasi is an honest journalist whose reports bear no fear or favour. His pursuit of the truth is commendable and his investigations have allowed the masses to hold their leaders accountable over many decades. In doing so, Ansar Abbasi has created a niche of his own, a style of his own so different yet so similar to my favourite journalist of all time – Robert Fisk.
In his own unique way Ansar Abbasi is Pakistan’s version of a Robert Fisk though both are one-offs yet so similar too. For Ansar Abbasi like Robert Fisk stands for that old legend often forgotten in today’s 24/7 media circus, the unalderated truth. The words of Robert Fisk about the role of a journalist, seem worthy of quote here as a tribute to Ansar Abbasi:
The Echo Chamber of History by ROBERT FISK
In the Middle East, it sometimes feels that no event in history has a finite end, a crossing point, a moment where we can say; ‘stop – enough – this is where we will break free.’ I think I understand that time-warp. My father was born in the century before last. I was born in the first half of the last century. Here I am, I tell myself in 1980, watching the Soviet army invade Afghanistan, in 1982 cowering in the Iranian frontline opposite Saddam’s legions, in 2003 observing the first American soldiers of the 3rd infantry division cross the great bridge over the Tigris River.
And yet the Battle of the Somme opened just thirty years before I was born. Bill Fisk was in the trenches of France three years after the Armenian Genocide but only 28 years before my birth. I would be born within six years of the Battle of Britain, just over a year after Hitler’s suicide. I saw the planes returning to Britain from Korea and remember my mother telling me in 1956 that I was lucky, that had I been older I would have been a British conscript invading Suez.
If I feel this personally it is because I have witnessed events that, over the years, can only be defined as an arrogance of power. The Iranians used to call the United States the ‘centre of world arrogance’, and I would laugh at this, but I have begun to understand what it means. After the Allied victory of 1918, the end of my father’s war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career – in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad – watching the peoples within these borders burn.
America invaded Iraq not for Saddam Hussein’s mythical weapons of mass destruction – which had long ago been destroyed – but to change the map of the Middle East, much as my father’s generation had done more than eighty years earlier. Even as it took place, Bill Fisk’s war was helping to produce the century’s first genocide – that of a million and a half Armenians – laying the foundations for a second, that of the Jews of Europe.
This book is also about torture and executions. Perhaps our work as journalists does open the door of the occasional cell. Perhaps we do sometimes save a soul from the hangman’s noose.
And over the years there has been a steadily growing deluge of letters – both to myself and to the editor of the Independent – in which readers, more thoughtful and more despairing than ever before, plead to know how they can make their voice heard when democratic governments seem no longer inclined to represent those who elected them.
How, these readers ask, can they prevent a cruel world from poisoning the lives of their children? ‘How can I help them?’ A British woman living in Germany wrote to me after the Independent published a long article of mine about the raped Muslim women of Gacko in Bosnia – women who had received no international medical aid, no psychological help, no kindness two years after their violation.
I suppose, in the end, we journalists try – or should try – to be the first impartial witnesses to history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: ‘we didn’t know – no one told us.’
Amira Hass, the brilliant Israeli journalist on Ha’aretz newspaper whose reports on the occupied Palestinian territories have outshone anything written by known Israeli reporters, discussed this with me more than two years ago. I was insisting that we had a vocation to write the first pages of history but she interrupted me. ‘No, Robert, you’re wrong,’ she said. ‘Our job is to monitor the centres of power.’
And I think, in the end, that is the best definition of journalism I have heard; to challenge authority – all authority – especially so when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die.
But can we perform that task? This book will not provide an answer. My life as a journalist has been a great adventure. It still is. Yet looking through these pages after months of writing, I find they are filled with accounts of pain and injustice and horror, the sins of fathers visited upon their children. They are also about genocide. I used to argue, hopelessly I’m sure, that every reporter should carry a history book in his back pocket.
In 1992, I was in Sarajevo and once, as Serb shells whiffled over my head, I stood upon the very paving stone upon which Gavrilo Princip stood as he fired the fatal shot that sent my father to the trenches of the First World War. And of course the shots were still being fired in Sarajevo in 1992. It was as if history was a gigantic echo chamber. That was the year in which my father died. This is therefore the story of his generation. And of mine.
Published in Daily Times
- WRITTEN UNDER MARTIAL LAW (My thanks to cowards Tariq Pervez. Sabihuddin, Sardar Raza & Co for selling out)
