Outside Islamabad

Blogger/Outsider: Sahar Habib Ghazi

“Islamabad?! That isn’t even in Pakistan. It’s ten miles outside Pakistan.” If only I had a penny for the amount of times I heard that from Lahoris and Karachites—let’s just say I’d be one rich lady.

Recently I, a green-blooded Islooite, have started wondering whether there is some truth to such statements. Beyond the obvious well-manicured green belts, spotless streets and respectful fellow drivers that are so un-Pakistani, maybe this detachment to Islamabad which is growing by the day, is a symptom of something larger.”

That’s a few lines from a column called “Born and Bred in Islamabad” that I helped launch for The News back in 2006. Anyone could send in an entry, and the newspaper ended up publishing dozens over the coming months.

Ironically, I wasn’t even born in Islamabad.

I was born to Pakistani immigrants in Long Island, NY. We lived in a perfect little house in a shaded lane in Levittown where I attended a private Roman Catholic school, until my parents decided to take the boat back to their old country.

A day after we arrived at the Islamabad International Airport, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan dismissed the government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s daughter Benazir on alleged corruption charges. Soon, Nawaz Sharif, a man ideologically allied with her father’s arch-rival, General Zia-ul-Haq, was sworn in.

Nawaz and Benazir played musical chairs with the Prime Minister’s seat until 1999 when General Musharraf took away the reins of democracy all together.

The 1990s have gone down in Pakistani history books as years defined by the “politics of revenge.”

That is the Pakistan I grew up in. That is the Islamabad I grew up in.

And that is the Islamabad that continues to haunt me as a journalist even though I have technically been living outside the capital for most of the last decade.

Outside Islamabad is a culmination of my experiences working as journalist inside Pakistan and now observing events from the outside. I am currently living between Karachi and Palo Alto, California running Hosh media, an organisation I launched when I was a 2010-11 Knight Fellow at Stanford University.

Soon after Musharraf took over, I left for college in the U.S., where I majored in political science & economics from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. After graduating I moved to DC, to work at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a bipartisan think-tank and America Abroad Media (AAM), a non-profit production house, specializing in international affairs programming.

At AAM I got my first glimpses of behind-the-scenes radio and TV production. But I wanted so much more.

So I moved back to Islamabad where the media revolution had just started unfolding.

Private TV channels were practically nonexistent in Pakistan when I left for college in 2000. For years, most Pakistanis relied on heavily censored state-run broadcasts. But things started to change in 2002 when the government started dishing out cheap TV licenses. Within a few years, information starved Pakistanis were surfing two-dozen independent news channels.

In 2005, I joined GEO TV,. As an associate producer I covered the 2005 earthquake and its aftermath from Islamabad, Balakot and Muzaffarabad.

I also interviewed 19-year-old Dilshad Nasir, who was smuggled from Pakistan, through Iran and Turkey, only to walk his last steps in Greece. Nasir’s family had scraped together $2000 to pay an agent for his safe transit to Europe where they thought he had better chances of earning a living. But Nasir fell sick along the treacherous trek through Turkey and Greece’s border area and was left for dead. Greek authorities found him passed out on the side of a road and treated his frostbitten feet, before shipping him back to Pakistan. His legs were still shaking from the amputation when he narrated his ordeal to me.

A few months later I sat across exiled Malaysian politician, Anwar Ibrahim. He was in Pakistan giving talks about the potential for democracy in the Muslim world. With the camera zoomed into a close-shot, I asked him how he felt about democracy, when Prime Minister Mahathir had him jailed. With a smile, Ibrahim said that democracy would pave the way for his return to Malaysia one-day.

In 2006, I moved to Karachi to join a team launching Pakistan’s first English-language news channel, DawnNews. As a producer and later senior duty editor, I helped set-up editorial guidelines that today define a channel regarded as Pakistan’s most credible.

With all the breaking news happening, I made it a point to occasionally escape the control room for the field. One reporting assignment I am particularly proud of involved stakeouts and hidden camera-work.

It started when I noticed the dreary sign ‘Kidney Center’, on a trip to Islamabad. The center fixed foreigners up with poor donors from villages. Organ recipients were charged handsome sums, but donors often were left with barely enough to travel home. It seemed absolutely unfair but turned out to be completely legal. At the time, there was no legislation in Pakistan preventing the trade.

A few months after my report aired, President Musharraf passed a decree banning “unrelated transplants”. I headlined my news bulletin with the new law.

A year later, Pakistan got its first dose of real politick in over ten years. Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto crept out of the shadows of their exile and returned for the 2008 general election.

In Islamabad, I helped shape coverage for DawnNews with a weekly show on polling activity in the capital called “Election Avenue”, and a documentary called, “TravElection: Rawalpindi.”

At the time, suicide attacks were becoming the norm in Pakistani cities and the country was in a “state of emergency” with media freedoms curbed. By polling day, I had mastered the art of speaking to plainclothes ‘agency’ men.

This came in handy a year later, when my proposal for the “Disposable Ally” was approved. The documentary series about the on-again, off-again alliance between the US and Pakistan was the first of its kind. Even though the US has been a significant factor in Pakistan’s history, no one ever documented it for TV or film.

As a Pakistani-American equally proud of both my identities, I always struggled to understand the contradictions in the relationship between the countries. Interviewing, researching and directing the series was a process of discovering myself.

As has been everyday since I moved to Islamabad, and tried to understand a capital so detached from the rest of the country.

I can be reached at sahar@outsideislamabad.com.

WATCH: DawnNews, The Disposable Ally series

WATCH: DawnNews, TravElection: Rawalpindi Promo

TravElection Rawalpindi from Sahar Ghazi on Vimeo.

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