May 19, 2005
An unknown gunman has shot and killed a young Afghan female television presenter two months after pressure from religious conservatives forced her from her job fronting a popular youth music show.
Police believe that the killing of Shaima Rezayee, 24, at her home in Kabul, was linked to her former job presenting the music programme Hop, a mixture of music videos and chat between male and female presenters.
Ms Rezayee was the only female presenter on the show, broadcast on the private station Tolo TV, which has won as many young urban fans as it has drawn fire from mullahs incensed at its Western-style programming.
She was dropped by the station in March as its bosses came under increasing pressure from clerics to desist from disseminating what they saw as anti-Islamic values and practices.
Her apparent assassination, however, appears to raises the stakes in the battle between liberal progressives and religious conservatives for the soul of a new generation and the freedom of the media in a modern Afghanistan.
Tolo TV is one of the latest in a rash of private stations that have been set up since the fall of the Taleban, testing the boundaries of acceptability in an Islamic republic.
The station went on air last October, the brainchild of an Afghan returnee from Australia who already owned Arman, a wildly popular youth radio station. Now a self-sufficient operation, Tolo is the most popular station in Kabul with a reported 81 percent of the market.
But its popularity has drawn the ire of the country’s powerful mullah and members of the Supreme Court, still incensed after losing a battle last year to have women removed from the nations television screens altogether.
In March, the national Ulema Council, a government panel of religious scholars, issued a statement accusing the station of "broadcasting music, naked dance and foreign films, which are against Islam and other national values of Afghanistan". Hop was top of their hitlist.
The information ministry, having received complaints from mullahs, asked the station to tone down the show, objecting specifically the racy videos of popstars like Jennifer Lopez, and the "casual" chat between male and female presenters.
Under pressure as they prepared to go national with satellite broadcasting, the station dropped Rezayee. A makeover feature where hairy Afghan youths were pulled off the streets and given a sharp new Western look was also dropped.
In an interview three months ago, Ms Reyazee noted that the split in attitudes towards her and other women on television was largely generational, pitting the urban youth, who delight in their new freedoms to watch satellite television and foreign movies, against their conservative elders, unready for such changes.
"Whenever I go out, some people say some bad things," she told a foreign broadcaster. "But there are more who praise it, especially my family. And a lot of young people in this country encourage me."
Still, religious radicals outside the political mainstream see a benefit in keeping Tolo on the air. Taleban insurgents have benefited from its uncensored news programming, often sending the station rebel statements that other broadcasters refuse to air.
When the former Taleban foreign minister, Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil, was seeking rehabilitation to enable him to run in parliamentary elections, it was to Tolo that he gave his first interview.
Only today, Tolo broadcast a phone call it had received from the kidnappers of Clementina Cantoni, taken hostage earlier this week. And yet one of their demands was that Arman, Tolo’s radio counterpart, stop broadcasting its most popular show in which the host dispenses advice to lovelorn youths.
TimesonLine
