// 02.23.2009 at 4:24 pm //

YouTube, the Achilles’ heel of dictatorship

Everything was going on well in Pakistan and no one was closely monitoring the failings in the Pakistan Muslim League government, when out of the blue, on Friday, March 9, 2007, television channels broadcast that the-then president General Pervez Musharraf had sacked the country’s chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhary over allegations of misuse of power.

Pakistani media described the president’s action as an attempt to extend his term for another five years, as the chief justice was expected to pronounce it illegal, had the case been taken to the Supreme Court of Pakistan.

Broadcast journalists widely criticised the president’s action, triggering massive protests by lawyers, who were later joined by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and students’ organisations.

Police baton-charged and arrested the protestors and TV stations went live with the footage of these incidents.

New info channels

The situation got worse when a suicide bomber hit a police squad, posted to deal with the protestors during a lawyers’ rally outside the Lahore High Court.

The issue of Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) — an armed operation by the government against a group of clerics demanding strict Islamic law in Islamabad — coincided with these incidents that included suicide bombings as well. After all these chaotic incidents Musharraf declared a state of emergency in Pakistan on November 3, 2007.

The media became more and more critical and the government used this as an excuse to ban all the news TV channels, including their sister broadcasters just after the declaration of the emergency. The fear was that the sister broadcasters, including entertainment and sports channels, would be used for information dissemination by these media houses.

All the channels, including Geo TV, ARY OneWorld, Express News and Aaj TV, were banned.

Musharraf maintained that the channels were creating discord, misrepresenting facts and contributing to the instability in the country.

Most of the TV channels like Geo News went online and offered free TV services on their websites soon after the government issued notices to all the cable operators to cut transmission of all the news channels.

During the time of emergency, there was only one option for journalists and citizen who wanted to criticise the government. That option was YouTube.

YouTube was not utilised by the media organisations, but individually by journalists, lawyers, civil society activists and students, who used the website to express their anger against the government action by posting pictures of the protests in Pakistan.

Journalists also believe that  online media became a centre of attention during the ban on traditional media. Sonya Rehman, editor-in-chief of online publication The Green Kaleidoscope (TGK), says, “When Musharraf declared a state of emergency in November, 2007, the local media organisations, writers, analysts, journalists, activists and members of the civil society were up in arms.”

She says, “It was a very surreal, almost dark patch for our media houses. Anger ran deep. Those who had placed their faith in Musharraf began questioning his motives and his credibility as a ‘leader’. It was said that Musharraf had imposed a state of emergency to re-assert himself as a leader in light of the immense opposition that seemed to be pouring in from all sides.”

Sonya says, “Whatever the case may’ve been, it was a terrible move on Musharraf’s part. But to combat this  blanketing of the media in November, back in 2007, websites such as YouTube were available for Pakistanis to voice their opinions, put up video clips, and state things how they saw them to be. YouTube, back then, in addition to social networking sites like Orkut and Facebook, came as a great source of relief, as they gave a podium to a wide cross-section of the Pakistani civil society in their hour of need.”

Mobile society

Out of a population of around 165 million people, the number of Internet users in Pakistan is only three to five million people. On the other hand, there are 89.9 million mobile subscribers as of December 2008.

In fact Pakistan has the highest Internet mobile penetration rate in the region, and YouTube can easily be accessed from mobile phone handsets using GPRS technology and all the cellular companies offer this service on cheap rates.

Analysts believe that online media is becoming significant in Pakistan. “People of Pakistan are aware now and they want to know what is happening in their country and by blocking news channels the government had redirected them to the Internet,” says Maqbool Ahmad, a journalist working for a local newspaper.

YouTube can therefore be said to have played an effective role in putting cracks in the Musharraf dictatorship.

During elections, TV channels often used its videos to criticise politicians. Before being banned, different television channels aired a YouTube video of the Pakistan Central Board of Revenue chairman Abdullah Yousaf dancing in front of then prime minister Shaukat Aziz and President Musharraf, which generated a lot of criticism against the CBR chief.

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// Tagged Case Studies, dictatorship, Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, YouTube