Afghan Newspaper Hunts Corruption, but First It Has to Pay the Rent

Zaki Daryabi, the founder of Etilaat e Roz, scrolling through the day’s news one evening at his office in Kabul. Credit Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Zaki Daryabi, the founder of Etilaat e Roz, scrolling through the day’s news one evening at his office in Kabul. Credit Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
TT
20

Afghan Newspaper Hunts Corruption, but First It Has to Pay the Rent

Zaki Daryabi, the founder of Etilaat e Roz, scrolling through the day’s news one evening at his office in Kabul. Credit Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Zaki Daryabi, the founder of Etilaat e Roz, scrolling through the day’s news one evening at his office in Kabul. Credit Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

KABUL, Afghanistan — The first time Zaki Daryabi started a small newspaper in Afghanistan, it shut down within months. Mr. Daryabi, who had just graduated from university in Kabul, lost most of the money lent to him by friends to start his business.

But soon after, he restarted the newspaper, Etilaat e Roz. And now, five years later, it has found itself in the middle of some of Afghanistan’s most important national conversations.

The publication remains on financial life support. Mr. Daryabi often finds himself writing desperate grant proposals, asking creditors for a little more patience or amplifying the paper’s online presence on days when he can’t afford the $250 required to publish in print.

At the same time, though, Mr. Daryabi’s journalists churn out investigative reports that stir what has become an increasingly chaotic Afghan democracy, with its warlords and ethnic factions often needing reminders of the rules of the new game and the role of the news media in it.

The growth of the free Afghan news media is one of the biggest achievements since the toppling of the Taliban by an international coalition in 2001.

Under the Taliban, there was only the regime’s state radio and newspaper. Today, there are more than 300 radio and 200 television channels, more than 70 newspapers, and hundreds of magazines across Afghanistan.

The numbers, however, often overshadow the draining work and risks these news organizations take.

Newspapers in particular, most of which have been subsidized by donor funding over the past 15 years, face not just financial worries, but also the nagging question of whether they can really bring about change in a country where power often lies less in the constitutional order and more at the hands of strongmen and their patronage.

Coping with the political pressures, and the financial challenges, is a daily struggle.

For publishers like Mr. Daryabi, newspaper work means living a life of debt, and often making life awkward for loved ones. As his paper has published reports critical of President Ashraf Ghani’s government, Mr. Daryabi’s relationship with his father, a Ghani supporter, has become strained. His father does not understand why his son keeps embarrassing him in front of his friends.

“When I am sometimes thinking about leaving it all, it’s not about myself — it’s about my twins, and their future,” said Mr. Daryabi, the father of twin boys.

Etilaat e Roz operates out of a third-floor apartment in western Kabul, where a team of 10 starts late in the morning and works late into the night. The operation is so small that for major investigations Mr. Daryabi and his chief editor become reporters.

The paper has several distributors, on bicycle, who deliver the 3,000 copies at dawn five days a week. It relies heavily on its colorful online presence, with 300,000 subscribers to its Facebook page.

Advertisements cover only about 30 percent of the paper’s costs. Mr. Daryabi recently obtained a grant from Open Society Foundation for about $50,000, which will cover another 30 percent for the coming year.

There have been weeks when the paper hasn’t printed, simply putting the content online. During one of those stretches last year, Mr. Daryabi admits, he came closest to the lure of political money — accepting a onetime payment of $3,000 from former President Hamid Karzai’s foundation, arranged by one of his editors, who had once worked in the president’s office and told him that the paper was shutting down.

Mr. Daryabi’s team, after much internal debate, accepted the money and put it toward the rent.

The paper has conducted detailed investigations of the family networks that have controlled much of the Afghan state resources, including Mr. Karzai’s family; it devoted an entire issue to how some of these networks joined up in a scheme that took out about $900 million in reckless loans that collapsed the country’s biggest bank.

It has also investigated the sale by Mr. Ghani’s administration of a large section of prime real estate in Kabul at a dirt-cheap price to an election supporter.

Last week, the paper published a series of articles about ethnic favoritism in the presidential palace, a sensitive issue in a country that has long struggled with equality.

For months, Mr. Daryabi’s team and others had reported that Pashtuns made up the circle of people closest to Mr. Ghani’s office, marginalizing other ethnic groups in the most important conversations.

His paper found a document that was a smoking gun of sorts.

A senior employee of Mr. Ghani’s administrative office had shared a memo on an internal Telegram channel, highlighting how members of other ethnicities should be sidelined in favor of Pashtuns. Within minutes, the employee had written in the group again: “wrong channel.”

It was too late. The memo was leaked to the news media, and Mr. Daryabi’s team picked on it, carefully documenting every step of their reporting, and knowing that the authenticity of a document on an explosive issue like ethnic prejudice would be questioned.

The articles set off a week of intense debates across Afghan television channels and newspapers, and particularly on social media, where many lashed out at Mr. Daryabi and his paper.

Daud Noorzai, the new head of Mr. Ghani’s administrative office, insisted that the memo was the work of one individual and did not reflect the deeper thinking of the office he was leading. But that did not ease concerns about rot in the system.

Mr. Ghani, who was in New York for the United Nations General Assembly at the time, ordered his attorney general to conduct an inquiry.

To Mr. Daryabi and his team, Mr. Noorzai’s acknowledgment of the problem and Mr. Ghani’s promise of accountability were a much needed victory during another difficult stretch when they had been contemplating shutting their enterprise down.

“In an environment where being branded and stamped as partisan is so common, we want our newspaper to stand for one thing: a newspaper,” said Khalil Pajhwok, the chief editor. “We are after earning trust as a professional media that doesn’t take sides, and that means we have to do trustworthy work, without censorship, that is factual.”

Mr. Daryabi was raised in a village in Jaghori, an enigma district of sorts that has a robust culture of books and ideas in an otherwise restive Ghazni Province. He is 31, based on the date his father scribbled on the back of the family’s copy of the Quran.

Or he is 28, based on how old the district governor thought he looked when he signed Mr. Daryabi’s ID card and officially registered his age when he began his university studies in Kabul.

As a student of political science, Mr. Daryabi started writing articles for a local newspaper, getting paid about $5 a piece. After graduation, he cobbled together about $16,000 from friends and family to start Etilaat e Roz, which in its first incarnation largely focused on entertainment.

After it closed, Mr. Daryabi, who does not speak much English, was called by a printing house to lead an English paper started primarily to make money from advertisements. Mr. Daryabi took the job on the condition that he could use the company’s resources to restart Etilaat e Roz. They had a deal.

After a year of running two newspapers, he could afford to work full-time on Etilaat e Roz, which now focused on politics.

Mr. Daryabi said that in those days, in 2012, there was more optimism about the country’s future and the media’s role in it.

But the difficult years since — with a messy election that threatened to break the country apart, a violent Taliban onslaught and his paper’s financial issues — have not beaten him down completely, he said.

“The raw material for a democracy is still there,” he said.

(The New York Times)



What to Know about the Latest Effort to End Türkiye's 40-year Kurdish Conflict

FILED - 02 November 2041, Hesse, Frankfurt_Main: A man displays a flag with the image of imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan at the Kurdish Newroz celebration in Frankfurt. Photo: Boris Roessler/dpa
FILED - 02 November 2041, Hesse, Frankfurt_Main: A man displays a flag with the image of imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan at the Kurdish Newroz celebration in Frankfurt. Photo: Boris Roessler/dpa
TT
20

What to Know about the Latest Effort to End Türkiye's 40-year Kurdish Conflict

FILED - 02 November 2041, Hesse, Frankfurt_Main: A man displays a flag with the image of imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan at the Kurdish Newroz celebration in Frankfurt. Photo: Boris Roessler/dpa
FILED - 02 November 2041, Hesse, Frankfurt_Main: A man displays a flag with the image of imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan at the Kurdish Newroz celebration in Frankfurt. Photo: Boris Roessler/dpa

A group of 30 Kurdish fighters clad in camouflage fatigues burned their weapons in a large cauldron in northern Iraq on Friday, in a symbolic gesture marking the first concrete step in an effort to end one of the Middle East’s longest-running insurgencies.

The ceremonial laying down of arms by members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK -- including 15 women — comes months after the group’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, called on it to disarm and disband as part of a new peace effort with Türkiye. Ocalan repeated that call in a video message to his fighters this week.

The process in Türkiye was initiated in October by Devlet Bahceli, a firebrand ultranationalist politician who has usually opposed any concessions to Kurdish identity or rights.

While Turkish officials have welcomed the first step toward the PKK’s disarmament, questions remain about the future of Kurdish fighters in Syria.

What is the PKK? The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, has waged an armed insurgency against Türkiye since 1984, initially with the aim of establishing a Kurdish state in the southeast of the country. Over time, the objective evolved into a campaign for autonomy and rights for Kurds within Türkiye.

The conflict between militants and state forces, which has spread beyond Türkiye’s borders into Iraq and Syria, has killed tens of thousands of people. The PKK is considered to be a terrorist organization by Türkiye, the United States and the European Union.

Who is Ocalan? Abdullah Ocalan, who as a student of political science in Ankara became deeply involved in leftist movements, formed the PKK in 1978 as a Marxist organization. He fled to Syria in 1979, along with other PKK members, where he remained until 1998, when Syria expelled him under intense pressure from Türkiye.

Ocalan was captured in Kenya in 1999 and imprisoned on Imrali island in the Sea of Marmara, where he remains to this day. His death sentence for treason was commuted to a life term in prison after Türkiye abolished the death penalty.

The 76-year-old endures as a symbol for Kurdish independence and rights and continues to wield influence over the Kurdish movement, with past messages relayed through family members or lawyers resonating beyond Türkiye, in Iraq and Syria.

Push for peace

In October, Bahceli, a close ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, suggested Ocalan could be granted parole if he renounces violence and disbands the PKK.

It was a major shift for the hardline politician who had previously strongly supported the state’s military action against the militant group and its affiliates in neighboring Syria and rejected any notion of negotiation.

In a message delivered through senior officials of the pro-Kurdish People's Equality and Democracy Party, or DEM, Ocalan called on the PKK leadership to take the decision to disband and disarm in February.

The PKK announced a unilateral ceasefire in March in response to Ocalan’s call and later announced its decision to disarm.

It was not immediately clear what concessions, if any, the Kurdish groups would get in return. PKK officials have said they expect former fighters to be given a path to integrate into the political system in Türkiye.

There are also concerns that some splinter groups may emerge within the PKK and that attacks may continue.

Soon after Bahceli's announcement, the PKK claimed an attack on Türkiye’s key aerospace company outside of Ankara that killed several people.

Previous attempts

There have been several peace efforts between the Turkish state and the PKK over the years, including secret negotiations held in Oslo, Norway from 2009 until 2011. However, none have yielded results.

The last attempt to reach a peace deal took place between 2013 and 2015 with a series of talks between Turkish officials and Ocalan, who declared a ceasefire and withdrew fighters to bases in northern Iraq.

Turkish officials took steps to improve Kurdish rights, including allowing Kurdish-language broadcasts. The process collapsed in July 2015, after a series of violent attacks, including one by the ISIS group that killed 33 pro-Kurdish activists.

Since then, Türkiye has cracked down on its pro-Kurdish movement and has jailed thousands of people, including the former leader of the main pro-Kurdish political party, Selahattin Demirtas, over alleged links to the PKK.

Reshaping the region

The latest peace effort comes at a time when Türkiye and the Kurds are both seeking security to face the challenges in the Middle East.

The renewed peace initiative unfolds amid fundamental changes reshaping the region, including the reconfiguration of power in Syria after the toppling of President Bashar Assad, the weakening of the Hezbollah militant movement in Lebanon, and the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

Türkiye strongly supports a deal reached between Syria’s new administration and the Kurdish-led and US backed Syrian Democratic Forces under which the SDF forces would merge with the new Syrian national army. The US envoy to Syria told The Associated Press this week that the sides remain at odds over the merger.

Hamish Kinnear, Senior Middle East and North Africa Analyst at risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft, said Ocalan’s decision to abandon the armed struggle coincides with a period when the PKK’s leverage is weak due to military setbacks and regional isolation.

“The PKK’s armed struggle was already faltering in the face of advances by Türkiye’s military, while its popularity among its traditional base was in decline,” Kinnear said. ”Ultimately, the peace talks were a useful off ramp in which improvement of Kurdish rights could still be pursued."

However, some believe the main aim of the reconciliation effort is for Erdogan’s government to garner Kurdish support for a new constitution that would allow him to remain in power beyond 2028, when his term ends.

Bahceli has openly called for a new constitution, saying it was essential to keep Erdogan in power for Türkiye’s future. Erdogan and Bahceli are reportedly seeking parliamentary support from the DEM.