(PPF/IFEX) – The following is a PPF news flash: KARACHI: An army monitoring team consisting of six fully armed army personnel, three engineers of the Karachi Electric Supply Corporation (KESC) and a representative of the Electrical Inspector, government of Sindh, arrived Wednesday, without prior notice, at the headquarters of the Pakistan Herald Publications, publishers of […]
(PPF/IFEX) – The following is a PPF news flash:
KARACHI: An army monitoring team consisting of six fully armed army personnel, three engineers of the Karachi Electric Supply Corporation (KESC) and a representative of the Electrical Inspector, government of Sindh, arrived Wednesday, without prior notice, at the headquarters of the Pakistan Herald Publications, publishers of the Dawn Group of Newspapers, and insisted on an immediate inspection and testing of “all the existing electric installations”.
A spokesman for the newspaper group said “The highhanded manner in which the inspection by the army monitoring team was carried out left an indelible impression that a punitive raid rather than an electrical inspection was the basic objective of the operation.
The management of the newspaper group protested at the strongarm tactics by the inspection team, who threatened the newspaper management with the immediate disconnection of the electric supply to the press and the consequential stoppage of all newspaper printing and publishing activities in Pakistan’s largest independent English newspaper and magazines publishing house, if immediate access was not allowed. The Pakistan Herald Publications (Pvt) Ltd, publishes the daily Dawn, the evening daily Star, monthly Herald, monthly Spider and bimonthly Aurora.
The inspection team demanded immediate entry and access to all floors of the publishing establishment, particularly publishers, editors and journalists’ offices, satellite communication rooms and secured areas where sensitive pre-press and printing technology effects the daily printing of Dawn and its sister publications.
The army inspection team categorically refused to allow its military personnel to follow security identification procedures which have been enforced in Dawn’s headquarters since the bomb blasts over a year ago, when journalists and press workers’ lives had been threatened by as yet unidentified terrorist groups.
The military officer in charge warned press photographers against taking photographs of the inspection, stating “this was a secret operation ordered by the higher ups and that no photographs were to be published in the Dawn Group of Newspapers.”
“It is very difficult for governments to live with an independent press in Pakistan. Of late, the present administration has become increasingly hostile towards any criticism whatsoever in the press, and this hostility has manifested itself under various guises in particular, with respect to the Dawn Group of Newspapers. The presence of armed army personnel however, in this kind of operation, is unprecedented. Perhaps this is the administration’s way of indicating what lies ahead for the remnants of a besieged free press in Pakistan,” the spokesman added.
“There have been sufficient warnings over the last few days, both direct and indirect, to publishers, editors and journalists of the Dawn Group that the authorities were preparing for something ‘significant’. In particular, the government has strongly protested with respect to the writings of a senior Dawn journalist who had earlier commented in a dispatch from New York that the administration of Chief Executive Musharraf was preparing to initiate a new round of repressive measures against the free press. Recent legal notices sent to Dawn by the regime’s minister of information and a senior official of the Ministry of Information in Islamabad, not to mention the watering down of a proposed Freedom of Information Act draft, have served as major indicators of a new press strategy being pursued by the present administration. The independent policies followed by Dawn and its sister publications may well prove to be the first target of such repressive measures.” the spokesman said.
Ends/PPF
