Khabaristan Times

» see khabaristantimes.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A site does not always announce that it is dying. Sometimes it simply stops loading, and only for some people. On 25 January 2017 Khabaristan Times became unreachable from inside Pakistan while serving normally to everyone outside it, and the block was not noticed and made public until the 31st.

Pakistan is not my internet and English-language satire about the Pakistani military is not something i can claim to have followed. The mechanism is familiar enough from here, though. Three months after this happened Turkey blocked Wikipedia, and it stayed blocked for close to three years. What a national block feels like from inside it is not drama. The page is fine and up and simply not for you.

The publication started in 2014, edited by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid with Luavut Zahid as chief executive, and it ran satirical pieces on national and local politics. The standing targets were the establishment and religious extremism, which is Shahid's own description of why he thought the block came. In 2015 one piece traveled far enough to be picked up by international outlets and cited at the Women in the World symposium, which is a long way for a Pakistani in-joke to get.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the block ~

There was no order. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority published nothing and sent no letter to the people running the site. When reporters went and asked, a source there confirmed the block had followed complaints about objectionable content received from people and institutions. That sentence is the entire public record of the decision to remove a publication from a country of two hundred million.

The Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, passed in 2016, is what turned this into a single step. Blocking had previously gone through an inter-ministerial committee, and afterward the authority could do it on its own. The digital rights campaigner Farieha Aziz pointed out at the time what that meant in practice: the body deciding and the body enforcing had become the same body, with nothing in between.

January 2017 was already a bad month for Pakistani speech online. Five bloggers and activists disappeared during it and several resurfaced weeks later, some of them describing where they had been held. The block on a satire site landed in the middle of that and read to everyone as part of it.

~ the funny part ~

Satire is a measuring instrument. It only works when the reader can tell the joke from the thing being joked about, and it only gets removed when somebody in an office decides that difference is either not obvious enough or not permitted. Khabaristan Times was named after an invented country, which is the oldest defense the form has, and the invented country did not help.

The block did not take the site off the internet. It took the site away from Pakistan, which is where the readers and the entire point were. A satire site with no local audience is a joke told into a room that cannot hear it, and by April 2017 the publication had stopped existing.

~ what came after ~

The domain still answers in 2026. It now serves an Indonesian online gambling site, title tag and all, which is the standard second life of an expired news address and worth writing down because it means the archive is not where the address is. Anyone looking for the actual pieces has to go to the Wayback Machine.

Shahid went on writing elsewhere. The publication has no successor and nobody restarted it. What survives is the shape of the ending: a regulator with direct blocking power and no obligation to publish anything, and a small newsroom left with nothing to appeal against, because officially nothing had happened.

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