Describing Owen Bennett Jones is no easy task. Throughout our half-hour interview, and then in the talk he gives at St Peters College, he comes across as professional. He exudes confidence and serenity, he is tall and well-spoken and smartly-dressed, and is exactly what you’d expect of one of the country’s leading correspondents – if you ever did imagine such a thing. But occasionally you get the sense of the maverick lurking beneath his professional demeanour. After reading economics at LSE, Jones was accepted onto the highly competitive BBC journalist trainee scheme. When he was denied permission to take time off to report on the Romanian revolution he abandoned his place and went to Romania as a freelance journalist. He has been working as a freelance reporter – chiefly, in fact, for the BBC – ever since. Throughout the interview he is friendly but reserved, though at moments he suddenly lights up: discussing Nawaz Sharif’s first press conference as Prime Minister of Pakistan, for instance.
Jones has been stationed in Pakistan for the last few years, from where he covered the recent elections, but has recently returned to live in England, so that he can send his children to school. He insists, however, that Pakistan is “a lovely, lovely place to live”. And for his wife? “The West has this idea of Pakistani women as deeply oppressed, but there are many liberal and liberated women in Pakistan. It’s not London, but it’s not Riyadh: conservative men often don’t want their wives to vote because they are likely to vote for the more liberal parties. They say allowing women to vote skews the result. But liberal men are happy for their wives to vote. In the tribal areas most women wear the burqa, but in Islamabad you see very few women wearing it. And in Karachi women are working in collaboration with the police to ‘befriend’ Jihadi men, who they then hand over to the police. So women are operating in many different respects.”
The issue is, evidently, more complex than I had suggested. And does the recent election of Sharif bode well for women in Pakistan? “It’s hard to say. Sharif is hard to predict. When he was last in government (in 1999) he was extraordinarily…” Brutal, I suggest? “Not brutal, incompetent. And power hungry. His supporters tried to ransack Parliament; he was overthrown by a coup and exiled from the country. This is the third time he has become Prime Minister: when you remember that, this really is the most extraordinary political come-back.” Jones was not surprised that Sharif won, but, like both Pakistani and international press, he was surprised by the size of his victory: “I thought he’d get 105 seats: he got 125. I think he too was surprised.” According to Jones, the election came down to the issue of electricity: “There are power cuts for eighteen hours a day across Pakistan: the country can’t work. The populace thought Sharif was the candidate most likely to sort it out.”
I ask Jones what he makes of Sharif’s infamous first press conference, held in his private palace surrounded by peacocks and strewn with chandeliers and stuffed lions, held on-the-record, but bizarrely with no cameras permitted. Jones laughs: “Oh that was because the Indian journalist’s visas expired the following day. He wanted them to get the message that he was going to improve relations between the two nations, but he couldn’t hold a conference specifically for Indian journalists so he invited everyone along. But he had to allow local press to take the first photographs, so he insisted the event was off-camera.” The conference was extremely short, and followed by a magnificent buffet lunch for all press which Sharif quickly left: as Jones later explains, “He was – and apparently still remains – nervous of the media.”
The election was, in Jones’ view, the most jubilant day in Pakistan for years. “Young men carried their elderly mothers to the polling station on their backs, supporters for every candidate were out in the streets celebrating the elections together. The people were happy.” Further, it was an extraordinary demonstration of the life and verve of the Pakistani media, a force which has been developed rapidly in the last couple of years. There are now over thirty 24-hour news channels in Pakistan. They attract huge viewing figures and their coverage of local and national issues is incredibly thorough. Jones explains that Geo TV – the largest independent TV channel – gave particularly brilliant election coverage, and is one of the most exciting media groups in the country: “They have a reporter stationed every 30km across the country. It’s extraordinary: they broadcast cutting political satire as well as great news coverage. You go into these stations and it’s a really exciting place to be.”
Pakistan is, Jones concludes, a surreal location from which to report. He recounts two stories he ran just before election day. One was exposing the personal cost to a candidate of running in an election – from the initial fee, to ‘gifts’ for party leaders to hold rallies in your region ($100,000-$200,000), expenses of parties, food and transport for the team, to bribes to local TV stations for air time. A successful candidate will take his seat having spent at least $1 million. No wonder corruption is rife amongst politicians, each trying to make back what they’ve already spent.
Jones’ report exposing these costs was overlooked in favour of a shorter, jokey piece he wrote for the BBC website. This suggested that the white tiger which had accompanied Sharif on his election campaign, and was rumoured to have died from the exhaustive campaign schedule, was actually “in rude good health” in Lahore. The piece provoked a storm of response, with many accusing Jones of trying to promote Sharif through the resurrection of the ‘dead tiger’, cited by Sharif’s opponents as an emblem of his own dying campaign. The local press refused to run the story as it was considered too controversial. Others insisted that Jones couldn’t have properly identified the stripes of the tiger he was shown. Meanwhile, animal rights lobbyists attacked Jones on Twitter for neglecting to describe the conditions in which the tiger was kept.
While other journalists might be frustrated by the way in which their serious investigation is overshadowed by the huge public interest in their most light-hearted article, Jones’ amusement at the tiger story suggests he takes some delight in provoking the public. Despite his professional demeanour, one senses that the headstrong journalist who abandoned the BBC to make his own way to Romania is still reporting at large.
