reporting/audio by Becca Vetter ::: graphic by Victoria Meldrum

Faqiri's Fight: A Ball State student from Afghanistan fights for freedom of speech
by Jill Blocker

Mohammad Qais Faqiri knows what he wants to fight for.  He wants to advocate for freedom of expression, start journalism programs for high school students and promote civil rights in his home country of Afghanistan.

“I want to help society know what rights they are guaranteed to,” 24-year-old Faqiri said. “These rights are what they are missing back home.”

Faqiri came to Ball State University in August 2007, after winning a Fulbright Scholarship. He is majoring in journalism and plans on taking the skills he is learning in the United States back home with him when he graduates to promote a free and open society in the news industry.

“The program told me that I was coming to Ball State and Indiana the day before I flew out, so I didn’t know a lot about it before I got here,” Faqiri said. “When I arrived I called my mom and said, ‘Hey mom, I’m in Indiana,’ and she said, ‘What? You’re supposed to be in America, why are you in India?’”

Faqiri said his family was proud of him because they know that studying in America was something he really wanted to do. His parents always encouraged learning about other people’s ideas when he was growing up. He attributes his individualistic views on life to this support.

Reading is one of Faqiri’s favorite hobbies. When he was 11 years old he was reading about former President Lincoln, he said.

“What 11-year-old do you know that does that?” he said, with a laugh.

Reading has helped him become who he is today. Knowing that different ideas exist, people are able to see options and question everything; not just accept everything that is handed to them, he said.

Faqiri lived in Pakistan from 1996 to 2002 and returned to his mother’s hometown in Afghanistan once the Taliban was overthrown. When he returned he began working as an interpreter and public relations reporter for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières. MSF is an independent, international medical humanitarian organization that provides aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, disasters or exclusion from health care in nearly 60 countries, according to its Web site.

After two years of working with MSF, Faqiri got a freelancing job with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, a London-based media program that strives to build peace and democracy through free and fair media, according to its mission statement.

In 2004, he worked as one of the first journalists in northern Afghanistan with a news organization. After a few months, he began working for NATO as a press-liaison officer, giving information and conducting press conferences for three years while going to college. Then he came to Ball State.

“We were always going after explosions, murders and fights, but the normal, routine things were not news,” Faqiri said. “What I’m thinking now is that everything is news back home, and I can’t wait to go back and start writing.”

The United States and Afghanistan constitutions give you freedom to report, but in Afghanistan it is not always protected. In the Middle East, the government, religious extremists and educational departments repress speech.

Telecommunications professor Phil Bremen worked for NBC as a reporter in the Middle East from 1981 to 1987 during the Iran-Iraq war, where he experienced some of the differences between the U.S. and Middle Eastern media outlets.

“It’s not just that the business of journalism is different,” Bremen said, “It’s that the understanding of journalism is different.”

Faqiri said that he wants to bring awareness to the people of Afghanistan of what their rights are and promote an open media without restrictions.

“The restrictions of speech are against the Afghanistan constitution,” Faqiri said. “It’s a violation of the constitution and no one is talking about it.”

Faqiri said he personally has seen the strict regulations against freedom of speech in Afghanistan through a friend’s experiences. His friend, who went to college with him, has been in prison since October 2007 in Afghanistan for downloading an article off the Internet that questioned and analyzed women’s rights in Islam. Other students at the university they attended in Afghanistan saw the article and complained about it, causing his friend to go on trial and go to prison.

“In the complex society we live in there, it’s not as easy to enjoy the freedom like we can here,” he said.

In the United States, one of the only ways information can be restricted is through military protection of national security. However, if the media gets a hold of that information it is their decision on whether or not to publish, Scott Reinardy, a journalism professor at Ball State, said.

“Laws of the constitution create a framework for speech protection, but it also depends on the people’s initiative to implement that freedom,” Reinardy said.

Bremen said that the traditional role of journalism is to ask questions and challenge authority; those roles are not globally respected values.

“In the United States, we have a separation of powers that much of the world does not,” Bremen said. “In Islamic nations there is even sometimes not separation between state and church. That makes it so citizens [who have broken the law] have nowhere to appeal. We, in America, take that separation for granted.”

Faqiri said he also saw this inability to defend oneself against the government when his friend was sentenced to prison in a trial with no jury or lawyers.

“The freedom, choices and options that people have in the United States are the biggest differences from Afghanistan,” he said.

Throughout the history of Afghanistan there has been no real central government, which makes it hard for rights to be protected and laws to be upheld.

“There’s no place that appreciates reliable information more than a place where reliable information is hard to come by,” Bremen said.

In Afghanistan reliable information is hard to come by and protect, but Faqiri said he still plans on going back and fighting for those rights, even though consequences could be death.

“I’ve learned a lot here so now I can exercise the freedom of the press and now,” Faqiri said. “I can fight for it.”

But for now, he’s enjoying his time at Ball State before he graduates in December 2009.

“Life is always giving you chances,” Faqiri said. “I’m very happy I got this one.”