PAKISTANS MEDIA FINDS ITS WINGS CLIPPED IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Reprinted from Dawn, May 5, 2001

PAKISTANS MEDIA FINDS ITS WINGS CLIPPED IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

According to the "State of the Media and Press Freedom Report Pakistan 2000-2001," journalists were found prone to self-censorship given that they work without constitutional protections or democratic safeguards.

ISLAMABAD, May 4: The dawn of the new millennium brought little respite for the media
professionals in the country as the publications continued to be censored, suspended and closed down while editors, journalists and publishers were harassed, attacked and even murdered , says a report released by the Green Press Pakistan on the occasion of the World Press Freedom Day in a seminar here on Thursday.

According to the "State of the Media and Press Freedom Report Pakistan 2000-2001," journalists were found prone to self-censorship given that they work without constitutional protections or democratic safeguards. "The country¿s constitution has been suspended since October 1999, when Army Chief General Parvez Musharraf assumed power in a coup. The government undermined judicial independence last year when Musharraf ordered senior judges to take loyalty oath affirming the declaration of a national emergency and promising not to challenge the decisions made by him," the report states.

Speaking on the occasion of the launching of the report, the founding president of Green Press Pakistan, Zafarullah Khan, gave a brief preview of the report which records the excesses against the media during the military regime¿s rule. He said sporadic violence against journalists continued throughout the year but the most extreme case was the murder of Soofi Muhammad Khan, a reporter for the Urdu language daily ¿Ummat.¿ "He was killed on May 2, 2000, at a small town of Southern Sindh, in reprisal for stories he had written on drug trafficking and prostitution in the region."

Zafarullah said the broad day light abduction and beating of Shakil Sheikh, chief reporter of a national English daily in Islamabad, has so far gone unpunished and without even identification of the culprits. The report says during the past one year, newspaper offices were closed, raided and sealed by the government, while in some instances adequate safety precautions could not be provided to ensure protection to the newspapers against terrorist attacks. The government banned the publication of ¿The Frontier Post,¿ its sister publication, ¿Maidan,¿ and a weekly magazine of Skardu.

¿The Business Recorder¿ was forced to temporarily suspend its publication after a mob torched its printing presses and building the report says. Moreover, three newspaper employees died in a bomb attack on the advertising offices of Nawa-i-Waqt in Karachi, it adds. In NWFP, it says, the government forfeited all copies of a monthly, ¿Saut-ul-Haq¿ and a book titled "Shaur-e-Farda" (consciousness about tomorrow) for containing objectionable material. Moreover, a Lahore-based English Daily ¿The Sun¿ suspended its publications, while another Urdu daily ¿Wafaq,¿ being published for the past forty one years, expressed fears that it would be forced to shut down if the provincial and federal information departments failed to clear their advertising dues, the report adds.