A few weeks ago, in a letter to the editor a woman in my community took the township council to task over budget accountability. Another reader of the local newspaper commented that a story about the war in Gaza lacked fairness and balance.
On Monday, I met a journalist from Afghanistan. As recently as 2001, if he had criticized his government or commented on any current events, he might not have lived to see another day. Today, Ahmad Zia is editor of international news for Kabul Weekly, a newspaper based in the Afghan capital with a circulation of 10,000.
“Even today you have to put your life on the line to criticize,” he said.
The Taliban regime fell in 2002, when NATO forces – including troops from Canada – invaded the country in a so-called war on terror. Since that time, Hamid Karzai was installed as president, elections are scheduled this year, much reconstruction is underway, women may now attend school and Canadians might think a region that has only known a few decades of stability in its 2,000-year history is finally recovering.
Journalist Zia still has doubts. Several years ago, the fledgling Kabul Weekly began giving Afghans their own voice in three languages. It offered national news, politics, business and commentary. But the newspaper’s freedoms were not, Zia discovered, unfettered. Recently, Kabul Weekly reporters heard a rumour that the president’s touring car had been stolen. (The armoured Mercedes 600 was reported to be worth $1 million). They approached the Karzai administration for a comment. They were refused. Was the rumour true? No, said president’s officials. Could the paper come to photograph the car to dispel the rumours?
“The car is here,” they said, “but you are not allowed to take a picture of it.”
Freedom of speech in theory, but not necessarily in practice. By comparison, the weekly paper in my community has a circulation of 8,600 and enjoys freedom of speech without question. Rights of the media are enshrined in the Canadian constitution. Its provisions give Canadian reporters public access. They allow journalists the flexibility (through freedom of information legislation) to investigate if they suspect interference. And each week, those provisions grant editorialists such as myself the right to satirize, advise, advocate, oppose or criticize everything from the prime minister’s policies to a neighbour’s noisy dog.
In order to survive financially, my newspaper, like hundreds of daily and weekly newspapers across the country, enjoys access to the marketplace offering advertising space to pay its bills. In contrast, the Kabul Weekly must seek funding, usually through UNESCO or other non-government organizations, such as Journalists Without Borders. At that, the paper had to shut down for a few months in 2007 when it ran out of money. It then received an offer of $1 million to cover its expenses for a year. The offer came from the U.S. embassy in Kabul. The Kabul Weekly ultimately turned the money down.
“The Americans insisted on their right to preview anything the paper wrote before it was published,” Zia said. “We must defend our independence.”
At 41, Ahmad Zia doesn’t just spout his philosophical beliefs. He appears to live by them. Trained as a lawyer and fluent in five languages, in 1999 he evacuated his family to Canada, where he drove cab and took other jobs to support wife and children while he studied for a broadcasting degree at a Toronto college.
This week, he returns to Afghanistan to carry on his work with his brother, Faheem Dashty, at the newspaper and to pursue another objective. He plans to build a central public library in Kabul (the last one functioning was built 50 years ago and has no books). When it’s completed, he hopes in 2011, Zia said he will name it after the founder of the Kabul Weekly, Ahmad Shah Masoud, who was assassinated two days before the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.
“It is my dream,” he said, “to promote freedom of speech in my country.”
Zia was asked by journalists at a Toronto press conference if he feared for his own life. He shook his head and said he didn’t. But he pointed out that last week, a suicide bomber set off an explosive outside the Afghan Ministry of Justice, located right beside the Kabul Weekly offices. The explosion killed 20 people.
“We trust in God,” he said, “and continue.”