I did not want to write an open letter to you. But after much deliberation, I thought it was important – not just for you to know what is happening in our beloved country, but also for the world to be aware of how dissent is being targeted in Pakistan, forcing journalists like me into exile.
It is also important to write this now. This week Pakistan’s leading news channel, Geo, is being shut down across the country, under orders alleged to have come from your office.
Insiders say the intensification of attacks on the press is part of an organised campaign by the army of Pakistan to ensure that efforts to engineer and manipulate the 2018 elections are not openly discussed in the media. But did you not just recently say that you are the biggest supporter of democracy? If that statement was true, then you must stop your men from pulling the plug on freedom of speech, which is an essential characteristic of democracy.
But before I tell you more about why freedom of speech is a fundamental right, I want to bring you up to date with what has been happening in my life. I currently live in Paris and have been here for the last seven weeks. When I decided to go into exile from my homeland, my wife and I were on the same page about it.
After my failed abduction attempt on 10 January this year by people I suspect to have been under your command, and the arrest warrants issued for me last year for “maligning the army”, we were left with no choice but to escape our own country. But we had to deal with another person in our family – Miranshah, our four-and-a-half-year-old son. We did not tell him what had happened or why we were being forced into exile. We decided to keep his childhood intact and to not burden him with the dark realities of his country of origin. Instead we told him that we were leaving to find better work in France.
He started to cry, and would not stop asking us what was wrong in Islamabad, and saying how he did not want to go to any other school as his friends would not be there. He screamed and shouted at us, and eventually just sobbed, with his head in his mother’s lap.