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Pak govt may revive Press and Publication Ordinance

Pakistan's independent media is under unrelenting pressure to fall in line with the Nawaz Sharief government, human rights groups say.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in its latest newsletter has warned that the Sharief government was planning to revive the repressive Press and Publications Ordinance in its bid to tighten control over free press.

The PPO, which was repealed in the mid-1980s, has always been considered the state's strongest tool to control and curb free press. It has been used frequently to close down newspapers by successive governments.

"The very presence of such laws on the statute book is in conflict with the citizens' right to information," said Zafarullah Khan, president of Green Press, a group of environmental journalists who also monitor press freedom in Pakistan.

Already, the government has forced the country's largest Jang Group of Publications to stop the editor of its English-language newspaper The News, Dr Maleeha Lodhi, from writing under her name. And it continues to keep in custody the editor of the Peshawar-based Frontier Post on charges of drug trafficking.

Other targets include outspoken journalist Najam Sethi, editor of The Friday Times , who was released after 25 days in custody on June 3 after the government was forced to withdraw sedition charges against him. But Sethi is now fighting illegal tax notices.

An alliance of Lahore-based organisations representing journalists and civil society groups has issued a press statement saying the government is exerting enormous pressure on the independent press to give up dissent.

"The press is being forced through invisible pressures to adopt an elaborate system of self-censorship," the Committee for Free Press said in a recent statement.

"What is more alarming is that the newspapers are being pressured to submit to the ministry of information's detailed scrutiny on a daily basis. Not only news stories, but also the opinion pages are being subjected to arbitrary censorship in many organisations."

The Sharief government has sought to silence independent newspapers and non-governmental organisations ever since the introduction of the Shariah Bill, which its critics rejected as a law that would vest enormous powers in the prime minister.

An angry government took on the Jang group, which had taken a tough anti-Shariah Bill line. The clash took a serious turn earlier this year with the government stopping newsprint supplies to the group.

Huge support for the Jang group from within and outside Pakistan forced the government to back off in February, but the group has since been careful not to upset the government.

The HRCP sees a pattern in the government's actions to acquire unfettered powers and says that under Sharief the democratic institutions have taken a beating. "Political discourse has been polluted by polarisation and narrow interests, and authoritarian tendencies are becoming stronger in the country," it said.

Following the debacle in Kargil this month, from where the government has had to ask its army and anti-India militants to withdraw, some members of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League are demanding a "culture of openness" in the government.

They would like to be allowed to discuss and debate government policies, a right that was taken away in 1997 with the enactment of the Anti-Defection Bill by the Sharief government.

"If we are barred under the law from speaking or voting against government-sponsored legislations, we should at least be allowed to speak in party meetings," said a ruling party member.

Javed Jaidi, a senior Pakistani journalist, says it suits the government to keep the media under control and restrict it from sharing information with the public.

All mainstream political parties have blindly accepted the colonial principle of keeping the people in the dark though access to information is vital for a democracy, he said.

UNI

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