NEWDELHI: Twenty-eight-year-old Pakistani journalist Malik Siraj Akbar’s asylum request was accepted in the US. He left Pakistan, in the face of threat due to his reporting on the military suppression in Balochistan’s nationalist movement, which Pakistan has accused India of fermenting.
It has been a long journey for Malik from his small hometown on the Pakistan-Iran border to Washington.
Speaking on phone from Washington to Express, Malik made it clear the Balochistan nationalism was “entirely an home grown movement”. “I want Indians to give us a platform to hear our views. But, at the same time, no foreign power should hijack it,” he said. At the same time, he said as a “better democracy”, India should also champion the “export of democratic values”.
Malik has been working as a journalist since he was a 16-year-old schoolboy, starting with local urdu newspapers, before increasing his profile to bigger media houses and writing for the Pakistani national media.
In 2005, he studied in Chennai-based Asian College of Journalism, before returning to take up Quetta bureau chief post in a Pakistani national newspaper.
Frustrated that majority of his stories on Balochistan did not even get published, he started Balochistan’s first online English newspaper, Baloch hal in 2009.
As a side-effect of his reporting, Malik has had numerous brushes with military and intelligence agencies wanting to ‘advice’ him. In 2007, he was taken for numerous questioning from the Quetta press club by military intelligence personnel, telling him not to report enforced disapperances.
His latest run-in was in January 2010, when he was accosted both before and after he attended a conference in Delhi. “I was met at Lahore airport by the same intelligence agent who had warned me not to go to India for the conference. He was there with other people and wanted to take me away”. Luckily, his travelling companions, a German national, and two senior Pakistani journalists managed to shield him on that day.
But, that was not the end, there were regular “sessions” with other intelligence agencies, as well as the anonymous phone calls.
It was when he was on his US government-sponsored Hubert Humphrey fellowship last year that one by one, his friends and colleagues were disappearing, and turning up as corpses with torture marks. His friends and family wrote to him incessantly, advising him not to return back. “They wrote that even smaller, more unknown journalists are being killed, you have no way of surviving here.”
In a July report this year, Human Rights Watch has accused “military intelligence agencies and the paramilitary Frontier Corps” of orchestrating widespread disappearances in Balochistan. The report details 45 alleged cases of enforced disappearances, the majority in 2009 and 2010.
In November 2010, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority blocked his website, Baloch Hal, under provisions that allows the government to restrict information that might be prejudicial to the national interest.He applied for asylum in August, and it was granted within three months on October 27. “It was a rare approval, but I got it as I fulfilled all the criteria that I would, if I remain alive, only then can I write, talk about Balochistan,” he said.
On two consecutive days on Nov 15-16, the deputy state department spokesperson Mark Toner had to answer queries on the grant of asylum to Malik, noting that US had “serious concerns” on the freedom of press in Pakistan. Malik’s immediate priority now is to get a job.
“I know that when all this attention goes away, I will be left a lot more lonelier”.