Pakistan: A country where liberal journalists risk death

Mohammed Hanif at the BBC:

The life of a liberal journalist in Pakistan is not an easy one. Write about someone fighting a blasphemy case, or someone whose faith is considered heresy, and you may very soon find yourself in deep trouble.

Shoaib Adil, a 49-year-old magazine editor and publisher in Lahore, has many well-wishers and they all want him to disappear from public life or, even better, leave the country.

Since blasphemy charges were filed against him last month, the police have told him that he can't return home, he can't even be seen in the city where he grew up and worked all his life. It wouldn't be safe.

As a journalist, Adil has been a vocal critic of religious militarism. But the threat to his life doesn't come from the Taliban.

He is the victim of an everyday witch hunt by Pakistan's powerful religious groups – the kind of witch hunt that's so common and yet so scary that it never makes headlines.

For the past 14 years, Adil has been editing and publishing a monthly current affairs magazine, a rare liberal voice in Pakistan's Urdu media. Back issues of Nia Zamana read like a catalogue of human rights abuses.

The June issue's cover story, for example, reports on the murder of a human rights lawyer, Rashid Rehman in the city of Multan in central Pakistan. Rehman, defending a literature professor accused of blasphemy, was told in the court by the prosecuting lawyers that if he didn't drop the case he would not live to see the next hearing.

Sure enough, Rehman was gunned down in his office before the next hearing.

More here.