Pioneering TV show exposes Pakistan’s dark secrets
Viewers flood widely watched program with evidence of bribery and corruption
By Sonya Fatah
KARACHI- It’s 10 o’clock on Friday night in Pakistan, a prime-time television spot when viewers often settle down to watch a popular series. Instead, the camera takes them to Darra Adam Khel, Pakistan’s notorious gun market in the lawless tribal belt to meet a series of gun sellers advertising their wares: Kalakovs, Kalashnikovs and pistols.
“Will you transport the guns to Karachi?” a voice on the other side of the camera inquires. Everything will be arranged, he is told. When the buyer and seller reach an agreement, a rupee note will be torn in half. One half will be given to the buyer and the other half to the driver-cum-delivery man. Along the way, inspectors and policemen, appropriately bribed, will give a green signal ferrying the vehicle, and the arms inside it, past checkpoints.
The scene shifts. Viewers are taken to Baluchistan. Two men, their faces masked by turbans, with only their eyes exposed, sit before a mat laden with powders and devices. The men carefully explain the ingredients and directions for a homemade bomb.
“The primer comes from Afghanistan. It’s ignited by a remote,” one of the men says. “There are of course two or three other things but we can’t tell you or show you because otherwise everyone would make a bomb and no one would come to us, would they?”
Fiction? Not at all. Those were scenes that played across the screen of a recent episode of Gum Naam, or Anonymous, a weekly investigative show on GEO News, Pakistan’s most watched private television channel.
Since the show launched in January, the station has received thousands of e-mails, letters and reels of footage documenting-citizen-journalism style-bribery, corruption and illegal activities across the country.
“It’s very bold,” says Adnan Rehmat, director of Internews Pakistan, a branch of Internews, an international media watchdog. “I think it’s very good in a country like Pakistan where such information is very hard to come by.”
Gum Naam first aired on Jan. 12.
In that show, an anonymous reporter documented the extent of bribery within the judicial system. A jail doctor handed out fake medical notes so those accused could buy their freedom on medical grounds. A court clerk took a bribe in the amount of 200,000 rupees ($3,800) from a man charged with illegal possession of alcohol; the next day, the man was freed. The week after that show aired, the directors of GEO TV, and the producers and directors of the show were hit with a lawsuit.
That didn’t subdue spirits at GEO TV. Even if they ended up without Gum Naam, the show’s producer and director felt they had done a service for broadcast journalism in Pakistan. “We have set a precedent. Other channels will hopefully be able to air such shows now.”
In the end, the court ordered the station only to issue an apology. “Ironically, the day we apologized, the chief justice was sacked, so we were quite happy to make the apology,” says an executive at GEO TV.
Producers at GEO are aware of the serious and dangerous nature of Gum Naam exposés. The show’s host, Haider Jinnah, explains this to viewers throughout the show.
“Every Pakistani is afraid under the current circumstances, of bombs and bomb threats,” he said during the bomb-making episode. “We who saw all of this were very saddened that this is happening in Pakistan. We cannot show you everything for obvious reasons.”
The slap on the wrist from the judiciary has had little impact on the show. The focus of the program has changed a bit. In the first episode, it targeted one judge and showed the faces of the people it caught red-handed. Now its focus is broader-to reveal the irregularities within an issue rather than target an individual, and the faces are blurred beyond recognition to protect the identities of those who are on camera, unknowingly.
“Our aim is now to expose an issue, not an individual,” Mr. Gilani says. “More important than exposing Hajji Gul Ahmed’s arms store is exposing the trade in illegal arms from Darra to Karachi.”
The program continues to expose corruption within state and private institutions. A recent show dealt with how the national airline, Pakistan International Airlines, was banned from landing in several European airports because of aged aircraft and weak maintenance.
The program took viewers into the grimy interiors of one airplane, exposing leaking roofs, cockroaches running amuck and a captain telling passengers that if they weren’t happy with the state of the cabin, they could get off the plane. PIA’s chairman, Tariq Kirmani, was fired several days later.
In one Gum Naam episode, the issue was the marrying off of underage girls. A qazi, or priest, takes 8,000 rupees (about $150) to doctor the age of a 13-year-old girl and push it up to 16, the legal age for marriage in Pakistan. As the qazi haggles over an appropriate bribe fee with the undercover reporter, the camera pans to his hands. His voice is heard as he reaches his final price just as his fingers turn the prayer beads on the tasbeeh, or Muslim rosary in his hand.
“These are the things we see around us all the time, but we don’t do anything about them,” Mr. Gilani says.
Source: The Globe and Mail
Date:4/22/2007
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