Crisis Balochistan | November 30, 2011

Francesca Marino and Gauri, photo: Giornalisti Calabria

Note: Italian journalist Francesca Marino was detained at Pakistan's Karachi airport after authorities discovered her name had been added to a blacklist of unwelcome journalists. Francesca kindly emailed me her account of the event. I have translated it from the Italian with the help of GoogleTranslate. I apologize for any errors. - Wendy Johnson

"When I arrived in Karachi I was stopped by airport police who mumbled 'something wrong' with my visa. An hour later I discovered that the visa had been 'blacklisted.' A peek at the printout from the computer indicated they had been ordered to arrest me.

I was held overnight in the Karachi airport police office--not officially under arrest, but with no access to a lawyer, of course. The next morning I was taken to the offices of the Federal Intelligence Administration (FIA), again without a lawyer, and was detained until the afternoon. Authorities were seeking information about my work and questioned why I travel so frequently to India. Those questions reveal a lot about the quality of Pakistani intelligence, for one only has to enter my name in Google to find my articles and information--not a secret--that my husband had died and was buried in Benares, India. (And the fact that I have a lovely little girl, adopted two years prior in Calcutta, code-named Gauri--a dangerous international spy who provides trafficking information regarding cookies that cross the border.)

During this ordeal, I was provided no official reason as to why my visa has been blacklisted. The real issue, however, is that this was a trap. I was duly granted my visa by the Embassy of Pakistan in Rome on October 25. The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) blacklisted my visa on November 1 (when, from what they knew, I should have been in Pakistan). This carefully prepared trap did not work, however, because I had delayed my trip to Pakistan and airport security stopped me while entering--not exiting--the country. I was to be arrested upon exit from Pakistan, when authorities could accuse me of anti-Pakistani activities, an offense for which the death penalty may be applied.

Ultimately the situation was resolved by Interior Minister Rehman Malik, who gave the order to validate my visa for 72 hours. Diplomatic sources and news media colleagues, however, advised me to leave the country immediately. Even though the problem was temporarily resolved by the validation of my visa and, in theory, I was free to stay in the country, no one was able to guarantee my personal safety, nor rule out that I might meet with a car accident, find myself 'by chance' in the middle of a firefight or become the victim of a kidnapping. So, from Karachi I took the first flight to Lahore. From there I traveled, under the protection of the Italian Embassy, to Delhi.

Despite being treated with extreme courtesy by both the airport police and the FIA (which had categorically refused to arrest me for no reason), the fact remains that the behavior of the Pakistani authorities was completely illegal and it confirms, once again, the pathetic state of so-called democracy in Pakistan.

My articles, lectures and the book that I recently published with Beniamino Natale, "Apocalypse Pakistan," have never been welcomed by the Islamabad government, nor perhaps was my meeting in Brussels with Mehran Baluch, but thus far I had never had any problems, apart from some isolated verbal confrontations.

I have decided to publicize this incident as much as possible because apparently blacklisted AFTER visas have been granted (always in the name of the law) to more than a hundred journalists, writers and human rights activists. My experience, therefore, may not be an isolated case and others who may be less well known and connected than me, may suffer real troubles.

A friend has written that this week a group of MPs will formally raise the issue in the Italian Parliament, asking the government to officially question Pakistan about the freedom and safety of journalists. The same will be done in a couple of days in the European Parliament."

Francesca Marino is a South Asia expert, a free-lance journalist and a writer. She writes for Limes - Italian Review of Geopolitics, for the daily Il Messaggero and the weekly L'Espresso and gives speeches and lectures at universities and other organisations all over Europe. She is the only female journalist to have interviewed, in person, Mohammed Hafeez Saeed, Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief, in March 2010. She wrote her first book on India (India in 100 immagini - laterza editions) in 2007 and recently in April 2011, with Beniamino Natale, a book on Pakistan called "Apocalisse Pakistan" - Memori editions. "Apocalypse Pakistan - Anatomy of the most dangerous country in the world" analyzes the political situation of Pakistan, a country that is a "key ally of the West in the war on terrorism," but also the state in which they hid and still hide the leaders of international Islamic terrorism.

Additional coverage:

La giornalista Francesca Marino espulsa dal Pakistan, Nov 26, 2011
FNSI: Solidarity to the Italian journalist expelled from Pakistan: Her name on a journalists' blacklist
Giornalista italiana espulsa dal Pakistan: Il suo nome sulla lista degli sgraditi al regime