''If I could live my life again, I
would never, ever have ..
Yesterday's attempted assassination
of ''one of Pakistan's best known television presenters in the city
of Karachi'' made me wonder, not for the first time, why any
sensible Pakistani* would choose to become a journalist. You can find
many reports about previous crimes like this.
August 2013 BBC
reported : '' The mutilated body of journalist Haji Abdul Razzak
has been identified by his family, a day after it was found in the
southern Pakistani city of Karachi.''
In her article
in Al Jazheera about yesterday's event a freelance journalist
Rabia Mehmood bluntly stated ''Journalism in Pakistan, a threatened
existence''.
Even though Journalism
Pakistan claims a slight improvement, Pakistan is still one of
the most dangerous countries in the world to be a journalist.
In a previous
blog I mentioned how knowing Esperanto
and using Social Media have brought me into contact with
interesting people, whom I otherwise would never, ever have got to
know.
One of them is a Pakistani lawyer and
journalist whose special interest for human rights made life so
dangerous, not just for him, but also for his wife, son and daughter,
that they fled to Nepal and applied to UNHCR
for official recognition as refugees.
This happened at the end of April
2013. Since then they have been living in Nepal, where they have been
waiting for UNHCR to reach a decision about their fate. Once a month
he goes to the UNHCR office and asks for news. ''Be patient'', they
say and he goes home to his family and tells them: ''We have to be
patient''. Last time he went to the office they told him: ''We will
let you know soon.'' They are still waiting for ''soon'' to happen,
I do not play the blame game. UNHCR has
an unenviable
task. With an estimated 45,2 million displaced persons in the
world it is no wonder that applications like this one take a very
long time.
Yesterday he told me that he is going
back to the UNHCR office on Tuesday.
P.S. * Do I mean he is not a ''sensible
Pakistani''? Is it sensible to keep your mouth shut about the abuse
of human rights? Are journalists like my friend asking themselves: ''If I could live my life again, I would never, ever have....?
What do you think?
