Day: April 6, 2023

It is a flight he will never forget. Flanked by two Pakistani intelligence officials, Syed Fawad Ali Shah was forced onto a passenger jet headed from Malaysia to Islamabad.

Having fled Pakistan more than a decade earlier, the journalist says he dreaded what awaited him when he landed.

“When they bring me inside the airplane, then I’m thinking that today’s my last day, that they will kill me,” Shah said.

In his first interview with a news outlet since being forcibly returned to Pakistan last August, Shah told VOA about his experiences.

Shah detailed his abduction from Malaysia, the five months he spent in what he described as various “black sites” in Pakistan where agents interrogated and tortured him before he was freed on bail, and about the long legal fight still ahead.

As an exiled journalist, Shah was alert to possible threats. So when cars suddenly pulled up next to him at a gas station in Kuala Lumpur on August 23, he says he immediately knew the men had come for him.

“I ran away, and then they followed,” Shah told VOA, recalling how in his haste he fell and injured himself, before the men caught him.

Shah was driven to an immigration center in Putrajaya, a city some 37 kilometers south of Kuala Lumpur. There, he said, “They told me the Pakistani intelligence agencies demand us to give you back to Pakistan.”

Two days later, Shah found himself being boarded onto a Pakistan International Airlines flight.

He was conscious for the trip, but the journalist said he was injected with an unknown substance that prevented him from moving or speaking during the flight.

He had fled to Malaysia in 2011. Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders says he had been kidnapped and tortured for a few months prior to that for his critical coverage of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. Pakistan had been trying to repatriate him since then. Now, it appeared, they had succeeded.

The Malaysian government in January said it deported Shah at Pakistan’s request, saying Islamabad had claimed Shah was a police officer wanted for disciplinary proceedings. Shah said he never worked for the police.

Neither Pakistan’s nor Malaysia’s Washington embassy replied to VOA’s emails requesting comment.

When asked about Shah’s case, Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch told VOA, “I would like to say that this case is before the courts, and I would not like to pass judgment on any statement made by Mr. Shah or anybody else, including the media. The courts will hear the evidence and justice will be done in this case.”

Interrogations, beatings

The first month was the hardest, Shah said. That’s when the interrogations and torture were the worst. His captors wanted the names of sources Shah had inside the Inter-Services Intelligence agency. When he refused, he said, “They beat me, and they gave me electric shocks.”

About one month into the detention, the intensity of interrogations waned. From that point, Shah said, he mainly was subjected to sleep deprivation and being forced to stand for long periods — still bad, he said, but more bearable than the electric shocks and beatings.

While Shah was secretly detained, his wife, Syeda, tried to get answers as to her husband’s whereabouts.

She had last spoken with him by phone on August 22, then heard nothing until January when the Malaysian government announced he had been deported months earlier.

Pakistani officials told her that Shah was not in Pakistan, she said.

In February, Shah resurfaced in the main prison in the city of Rawalpindi. A month later, his legal team secured his bail.

Now they are working on having the charges against him thrown out in a process known as “quashment,” said Imaan Mazari-Hazir, one of his Islamabad-based lawyers.

The charges include defamation, intimidation of officials, and posting “false, frivolous and fake information” online. His lawyers say the charges are groundless.

But having a convincing case isn’t enough, according to Mazari-Hazir. “We have a very strong case, but the problem in Pakistan isn’t just how strong is your case,” she said. “It depends on judges.

“The legal process in Pakistan is used as punishment,” she added. “Even where you know that you’re not going to secure a conviction, the idea is process as punishment.”

Barriers keep Shah in Pakistan

The legal fight is one of several barriers blocking Shah from leaving the country.

Authorities have blocked him from renewing his passport for 10 years and he is barred from traveling outside Pakistan. A Pakistani Federal Investigation Agency document on the case, viewed by VOA, cited Shah’s involvement in “undesirable activities.”

The 10-year ban was shocking to Nate Schenkkan, who researches transnational repression at Freedom House. “If you haven’t been convicted, then what’s that on the basis of?” Schenkkan said. “It is arbitrary and disproportionate.”

Preventing Shah from being able to acquire a new passport is an example of mobility controls, where officials leverage power over government-issued documents to control their citizens.

A 2021 report by Freedom House found at least 21 countries use mobility controls as a form of retaliation.

“It becomes a way that the state still has control over you, still has a lever over your decisions,” Schenkkan said. “It traps you in a situation in which you’re not safe.”

Shah feels desperate, he told VOA one morning from his car outside an Islamabad court. “I only need protection. I only need protection,” he said. “In Pakistan, I cannot stay.”

It’s been a long time since the reporter has felt anything resembling security. “I cannot perform my journalistic duty,” Shah said. “My safety is constantly in jeopardy, and I live in constant fear of being kidnapped or killed.”

Source: Voice of America

It was an international summit of democracies, but several democratic countries in Asia and Africa were absent; some were not invited and some turned down the invitation.

Pakistan declined to attend, giving no excuse except that Islamabad will engage Washington, a close ally, bilaterally.

The real reason for Pakistan's absence, experts say, was not about democracy but about China.

"This was a fairly straightforward diplomatic decision," Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia institute at the Wilson Center, told VOA.

"China was not invited, and Taiwan was. Pakistan, out of deference to its Chinese ally, would not want to attend a forum where Taiwan was present," he said.

The only nuclear-armed, majority-Muslim country in the world, Pakistan has extensive economic and political ties with the United States and China.

In 2020, the United States was the top export country for Pakistani products — over $4.1 billion — while Pakistan imported products worth more than $12.4 billion from China, more than from any other country, according to the World Bank.

China is the single largest creditor to Pakistan with over $31 billion in loans, while the United States has given more than $32 billion in direct support to Pakistan over the past two decades.

It is unclear how Pakistan's preference to skip the U.S. invitation to gain China's approval will work out at a time when the country is facing serious economic challenges.

Yet Pakistan's decision was not driven purely by economic calculations, experts say.

Fragile democracy

The U.S. summit came at a critical time for democracies around the world. The pace of democratization has slowed, while authoritarian regimes have become more effective and influential, according to Freedom House, a U.S. entity that reports on civil and political freedom globally.

"Democracy is on life support in Pakistan," Kugelman said, adding that the country's democratic progress made since 2008 is in peril.

For much of its existence since 1947, Pakistan has been taken over by a military dictatorship whenever the country suffered a civilian political breakdown.

Amid intensifying political brinkmanship between the incumbent coalition government of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and former Prime Minister Imran Khan, leader of a major opposition party, there is fresh speculation about yet another coup.

A declaration of martial law by the Pakistani military "would be the worst possible outcome for the country," tweeted Madiha Afzal, a fellow in the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution.

The United States has long held a policy of supporting and promoting democracy across the world, but Washington seems to be distancing itself from the intensifying political drama in Pakistan.

"The sobering reality is that the U.S. has itself contributed to Pakistan's democratic deficit by emphasizing its relations with Pakistani military leaders. That may advance U.S. goals for Washington's relations with Pakistan, given that the army makes the big decisions on relations with the U.S., but it doesn't help a perpetually fragile democracy that today is gasping for breath," said Kugelman.

Turkey

The United States did not invite Turkey, a constitutional secular democracy and a NATO ally, to the first democracy summit held in 2021 nor to the one that took place last week.

Often labeled as an autocrat and dictator, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is blamed for taking Turkey on an undemocratic path — criticism that Erdogan has strongly rejected.

"Turkey is no longer a democratic state but is perhaps best described as an electoral autocracy," Paul Levin, director of the Institute for Turkish Studies at Stockholm University, told VOA.

Aside from concerns about its democratic backtracking, Turkey is the only NATO member country that has refused to enforce Western sanctions against Russia, particularly in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

"Ankara feels like it cannot afford to antagonize Russia, as it is dependent on energy imports and deferment of loan payments, as well as needing Russian cooperation to achieve its own objectives in Syria," Levin said.

By playing on both sides of the war in Ukraine, Erdogan tries to offset the economic crisis that Turkey has been facing, analysts say.

The absence of Turkey and Pakistan in the democracy summit was not conspicuous. Indonesia, the most populous Muslim democracy, Bangladesh and many others were also absent.

"Regarding why certain countries are not invited, we will not discuss internal deliberations. However, we reiterate that for the summit, we aim to be inclusive and representative of a regionally and socioeconomically diverse slate of countries. We are not seeking to define which countries are and aren't democracies," a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State told VOA in an emailed response.

Bringing 74 democracies to a forum, despite significant differences evinced in the final declaration of this year's summit, was officially lauded as a major achievement.

But that achievement has limits, some analysts say.

"There was a certain arbitrariness to the summit guest list that I fear takes away from the credibility of the summit itself," Kugelman said.

Source: Voice of America