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Jang's battle with Sharief may end press freedom in Pak

Pakistan's largest group of newspapers, Jang, is embroiled in a public fight with the Nawaz Sharief government, which could lead to the closure of the 51-year-old group and spell the end of press freedom.

On Monday, the government was asked by the Supreme Court to release newsprint to the group. The court was hearing a petition by the group, which has turned sharply critical of the Sharief government in recent months.

Based in Sharief's hometown Lahore, the group had filed a constitutional petition on the freedom of the press in the Supreme Court last week, accusing the government of ''harassment and intimidation'' for its critical coverage.

The group has been forced to stop the publication of several magazines, while its mass circulated newspapers, the English language The News and the Urdu language Jang are down to a skeletal size. Also its bank accounts have been frozen by the government.

A distraught group owner Mir Shakeel said, ''I have been pushed to the limit. Pushed to the limit by what they've done to my child, the Jang.''

He explained the group decided to go public because their ''pleadings'' with the government to stop the pressure have not helped.

''I have begged them over the last seven months, but there's no relenting. I've taken this step (petitioning the Supreme Court) unwillingly. It is difficult to stand up to State power,'' he said.

For several months the group has been ''blazing away with all it has'' particularly after the prime minister's announcement of the controversial Shariat bill to Islamise law courts in Pakistan, observed a Pakistani columnist.

This was a ''complete departure from a long-established policy of pragmatism and caution,'' he added.

Unfortunately for the Jang , its media activism also coincided with its plans to launch Geo, a Dubai-based satellite channel for south Asia -- a red rag for a government that wants to control the media.

''The government feels that the Jang group is a monster in the making, with its move into the electronic media challenging the official monopoly on truth,'' explained The News senior editor Imran Aslam, who has been supervising Geo 's development.

In a country where only 30 per cent of the 130 million population is literate, the government wants complete control of the electronic media. The Jang group wields a lot of influence through its publications which represent 55 per cent of all reading material in the country.

Pakistan's Information Minister Mushahid Hussain, a former journalist, has in turn accused the group of trying to ''blackmail'' the government for its refusal to allow the group to move into the electronic media, a charge Aslam brushed aside.

''We don't need government permission,'' he stated. '' Geo is being operated by an off-shore company.''

What Geo needs, however, is financial backing and by hitting at the group, the government has ensured that it cannot move ahead with Geo, he said.

Since August last year, the Jang group has been issued several income tax notices, and the cases have been transferred to an office under the accountability cell headed by ruling party senator Saifur Rehman, who is probing the alleged financial misdeeds of Benazir Bhutto, her husband Asif Zardari and other opposition leaders.

''They re-opened and activated all dormant cases of the Jang group,'' complained group owner Shakeel. In October, the government served the group with tax notices totalling over 720 million rupees (about 13 million dollars). Soon after the group's bank accounts were frozen.

The group then appealed before the income tax appellate tribunal where it was upheld, but the harassment continued. Between November 25 and December 22, 1998, 25 notices were served on the group for various offences.

On December 22, a demand for two billion rupees in tax arrears was made against the group. ''They are trying to make it an administrative and tax issue rather than the freedom of expression,'' said a visibly upset Shakeel.

''If the Jang group has defaulted, the obvious question is, why hasn't that been allowed to be sorted out the normal way,'' asked prominent human rights activist and former editor of The Frontier Post, Aziz Siddiqui.

Matters came to a head a week ago when the group's newspapers published full-page protests against the government, which listed the many attempts made to bring the group in line including demands to sack 16 senior journalists perceived as anti-government.

On January 28, Shakeel, at a dramatic media conference in Lahore, played tapes of conversations, mostly between him and senator Rehman of the accountability cell, in which he was informed the government's wishes and demands.

Caught on the wrong foot, an embarrassed Hussain tried to wriggle out by offering to set up a neutral five-member committee to ascertain if the group is being victimised by the government.

Now the fight is up before the Supreme Court, the only other institution apart from the media that the Sharief government has not been able to entirely tame.

UNI

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