In the last three months, I have attended job interviews with 40 Pashtun journalists from Pakistan to work for Radio Mashaal, a new service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, RFE/RL, for Pakistan’s Pashtu-speaking people, especially in the regions bordering Afghanistan. For the broadcasts that start mid January, we had carefully short-listed the candidates from a long list of professional applicants. We were pleasantly surprised by the level of professionalism of these candidates and their dedication to all the high values we at RFE/RL stand for: free flow of accurate news and information ultimately helping to counter voices of extremism and intolerance and serving universal human rights and freedoms for all.
They came from different corners of Pakistan’s “Pashtu belt” — from Quetta in the south to Mardan in the north — as well as crowded multiethnic cities such as Islamabad and Karachi. They all worked for different Pakistani media outlets, both electronic and print. And everybody had a different story to tell. One had to emigrate from his native town in Balochistan to Karachi because of serious threats by the Taliban and pressure from local tribal leaders. Another had received warning letters from the Taliban hanged on the house door of her parents and a third one, a journalist and a popular singer, said he was forced to produce his new CDs with a pseudonym after receiving dozens of threatening phone calls from the extremists. Some others, obviously, had so far no noteworthy confrontation with the Taliban but felt that they could serve their professional goals better in an international and more professional media organization.
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