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Deirdre Tynan 5/12/08
On the battlefields of southern and eastern Afghanistan, Islamic insurgents are
struggling to persevere in the face of the formidable firepower of NATO and
American forces. In the country’s culture war, however, religious radicals are
poised to achieve a spectacular victory, according to two self-styled free
speech advocates.
"What we are seeing is the re-Talibanization [of Afghanistan] … by
stealth," said Saad Mohseni, whose family controls the Moby Media Group,
the operator of independent television and radio stations in Afghanistan.
"Socially and culturally, they seem to be achieving their goals."
An ongoing controversy involving two Indian-made drama series broadcast on
one of the Moby group’s television stations is developing into a key test for Afghanistan’s
democratization process. Religious radicals, many of them from the southern Pashtun
belt that is oriented toward Pakistan, are bitterly opposed to the Indian
dramas, even though they are hugely popular – with as many as one out of every
three Afghans tuning in every week.
President Hamid Karzai’s government is bowing to the pressure exerted by the
ultra-conservatives, and, in turn, the Ministry of Information and Culture is
calling on Moby to pull the plug on the shows, contending that the
"un-Islamic" soap operas are offensive to Afghan sensibilities. The
Moby executives dispute the Culture Ministry’s assertion, citing the fact that
90 percent of television sets in the country tune into the programs when they
are on.
Saad Mohseni, along with his brother Jahid, also a director of the media
group, have been touring the United
States to draw attention to the free-speech
crisis. In New York,
recently, the duo said the culture clash between advocates of civil society and
the country’s radical conservative element was reaching "a dangerous
stage."
The problem from the Mohsenis’ perspective is two-pronged: According to Saad
Mohseni, "a small group of individuals has hijacked the system," and
the determined action by zealots has, in turn, exposed a serious flaw in the
country’s nascent republican system of government. "There doesn’t seem to be
a system of checks and controls on government actions," he said.
"There’s no [government] leadership on this issue."
Without Karzai taking an active role in the debate, the radicals have been
able to gain the initiative. "The voice of reason always tends to be
drowned out by radicals," Jahid Mohseni added.
The Mohseni brothers have vowed that Moby media, via its Tolo TV channel,
will continue broadcasting the Indian dramas – "Tulsi" and
"Kasauti Zindagi Kay" – until the government can provide a legal basis
for the Culture Ministry’s ban. They suggest the complacency exhibited by the
president on the issue is connected to a desire to weaken independent media
outlets in advance of the 2009 general election, as well to mollify hard-line
elements within the government. The Mohseni brothers also noted that several
top presidential aides and advisers have ties to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who led a
CIA-financed, ultra-conservative militia during the war of resistance against
Soviet occupation, and who subsequently was branded an international terrorist
by the State Department.
Tolo TV, and more broadly the Moby Media Group, is no stranger to
controversy having produced an Afghan "Pop Idol" featuring both male
and female performers, topical talk shows and news programs that have been
recognized internationally for their quality and professionalism. Moby, with
its two television channels, controls roughly 70 percent of Afghanistan’s
broadcast market share, along with a 60 percent market share for its radio
stations. The group’s media dominance makes it a natural target for other
groups, and the political-business forces behind them, that are seeking to
capture a larger audience for themselves.
The Mohseni brothers insist that the media group has taken care to ensure all
programming is culturally sensitive. "They’ve banned the serials without
any thought, but we’ve been editing them and pixelating certain scenes right
from the get go," Jahid Mohseni said in an interview with EurasiaNet.
"The shows are very conservative. There’s nothing in them that we believe
is contrary to Islam. If they are going to ban Indian serials, they should ban
all Indian serials, not just one or two."
The station remains open to working with the Culture Ministry to address
official complaints. But authorities have yet to specify their gripes, the
Mohseni brothers assert. "If the Ministry has it all figured out and it’s
a legal issue, tell us what the problem is. They are fully dubbed shows, so we
can edit them. If it’s an issue with the story line, we might be able to fix
that too. From our point of view it’s got nothing to do with an actual problem
with Islam, it’s about harassing free media," Jahid Mohseni said.
Karin Karlekar, a senior media analyst with Freedom House who oversaw the
production of this year’s Freedom of the Press index, agrees with the Mohsenis’
assessment of the dispute. "The ban is part of a larger attempt to
undermine freedom of expression," Karlekar said.
"It’s particularly worrying because we had seen positive changes Afghanistan
recently," Karlekar continued. "Commentators have pointed out that
some factions of the government maybe trying to deal with the Taliban, and are
catering to more conservative trends. I would definitely not rule out linking
this to elections."
The Afghan National Journalists Union and Nai, an Afghan media development
organization with significant media law expertise, have both called on the
government to back away from meddling with programming. "If such actions
continue, this will signal Afghanistan’s
legislative powers are starting to engage in censorship," said Nai
Executive Director Mujeeb Khalwatgar. "This is not appropriate for a
government which claims it is working to promote democracy."
Saad Mohseni said the advocates of civil society could not afford to be
complacent. Perhaps the only way to get the Culture Ministry to reverse its ban
would be to pressure on Karzai personally, and the only way to do that
effectively is to have such pressure come directly from the Bush
administration, he said. "The Afghan government is in a defiant
mood," Saad Mohseni said, adding that future assistance to Afghanistan’s
reconstruction should be conditioned on the Karzai administration’s upholding
basic civil society tenets.
"We have to be proactive," Saad Mohseni said. "The outcome
[of the failure to take a forceful stand] would be an Afghan government that
resembles Taliban times."
Editor’s Note: Deirdre Tynan is a freelance journalist who
specializes in Central Asian affairs.
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