Short-term restrictions on freedom of expression in the run-up to Thursday’s Afghan vote may mask deeper and longer term steps to curtail the rights of the media that independent journalists may find harder to resist, says Rohan Jayasekera

The country’s media is standing firm against a government call not to broadcast reports of violence on election day, charging that it violates their constitutional rights. Kabul fears that voters will be scared away from polling booths by the reports.

Fahim Dashti, the editor of the English-language Kabul Weekly newspaper, told Associated Press that the demand was “a violation of media law” and a constitution that protects freedom of speech.

But the pressures on the media in the run up to the vote have exposed several threats to the media’s constitutional rights to report. The increasingly re-ascendant religious establishment in Afghanistan is managing the likelihood of a Hamid Karzai win on Thursday by pressing for deeper commitments to their agenda, and for places for their chosen men in the next administration.

Given the recent growth in their influence in the last year, this could be an even more ominous prospect for the country’s media, which is already finding its freedoms sharply curtailed by a combination of militant threat and political intervention.

Two Afghan journalists were killed and more than 50 attacks and kidnappings were reported in 2008. Three more have died this year so far. The media itself has become more partisan as lack of income has driven them to financial reliance on political and ethnic factions.

Current information minister Abdul Karim Khurram has tended to respond to this situation, not by reinforcing Article 34 of the Afghan Constitution’s protections for freedom of expression, but instead falling behind the Article 3 requirement that “no law shall contravene the tenets and provisions of Islam”.

This has driven Khurram’s ministry, Karzai’s office and, reportedly, Afghanistan’s domestic intelligence agency (NDS), to issue a series of vaguely worded warning messages on so-called “appropriate content” and the dangers of “foreign influence”.

Many of these draw strongly from the conservative opinions of the country’s Ulema Shura, a government sponsored council of religious scholars.

The trend will be measured in the short term by progress in two cases. Firstly, a new mass media law passed in September 2008, despite Karzai’s earlier attempt to veto it, is still waiting to be formally enacted. The sticking point is the bill’s intention to reassert Afghanistan’s national Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA) broadcaster’s independent public service role.

A consensus between Karzai, Khurram and the parliament on the media’s right to independence in general and RTA’s public service mandate in particular would send a powerful message to the country’s journalists.

RTA was praised for facilitating an open debate between Karzai and challengers Ashraf Ghani and Ramzan Bashardost on 16 August, but also criticised by the country’s media commission for its bias in favour of Karzai.

According to a commission study of RTA news bulletins between 6-28 July, President Karzai dominated 67 per cent of the coverage, followed by independent candidate Dr Abdullah Abdullah, who received less than 10 per cent of air time, and Sayyid Jalal Karim, at three per cent.

The second test case focuses on Sayeed Parvez Kambakhsh, charged with offending the Quran and the Prophet Mohammed by circulating an Internet article on women’s rights and Islam, whose death sentence was commuted to 20 years’ imprisonment on appeal to the Supreme Court in February 2009.

With a few honourable exceptions, Afghan media workers and civil society activists have been nervous of associating themselves with his case. Here, international pressure has proven more telling, encouraging Karzai to start preparing his ministers and the Ulema Shura for a possible presidential pardon for Kambaksh.

Progress on both these issues will be just a start on addressing what is a much deeper crisis of confidence in the right to free expression here, but a much needed boost to the country’s independent minded media after the election delivers a result.