Pakistan Arrests 300 Workers From Opposition - New York Times

Pakistan Arrests 300 Workers From Opposition - New York Times

June 7, 2007
Pakistan Arrests 300 Workers From Opposition
By CARLOTTA GALL

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, June 6 — The police have arrested more than 300 political party workers over the past few days in a crackdown before a protest planned this week against new government curbs on the news media, a government official acknowledged Wednesday.

Opposition parties have said hundreds of their workers have been rounded up in house raids in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province.

The home secretary of Punjab, Khusro Fazal Khan, told the independent channel GEO Television that the police had arrested 312 local political leaders and workers throughout the province.

Opposition legislators protested the arrests at the opening of a new session of the national Parliament, which had been on a three-week recess, but they were refused time by the speaker. Journalists covering Parliament staged a rowdy protest in the press gallery on Wednesday evening, interrupting the debate on the floor.

The president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, signed a decree on Monday giving a government regulating agency stronger powers over the news media and the ability to rewrite regulations without recourse to Parliament.

The decree added to the pressure on the three main private television channels, which have been told to stop live coverage and live political talk shows. Their transmissions were blocked for several days across much of the country.

Journalists and editors said the government was cracking down to prevent critical coverage of General Musharraf’s suspension of the chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, and of the violence in Karachi related to his ouster. Forty-eight people were killed there on May 12 as police officers and rangers stood by.

Opposition parties allege that much of the shooting was conducted by the Muttahida Quami Movement, a partner in the governing coalition, and television images backed up their claims. Thousands flocked to rallies on Saturday in the north of Punjab to greet the chief justice.

“There was a crackdown in the whole of Punjab,” said Pervez Ashraf, a member of Parliament for the People’s Party of Pakistan, the main opposition group, in discussing the detentions. “They entered houses by breaking doors, and hundreds of people were arrested.”

Another legislator, Liaqat Baloch, from the alliance of religious parties, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, said, “Our people have been arrested in 36 districts of Punjab.”

Mr. Fazal Khan, the home secretary, said those seized were detained under a new measure, in force since Friday, that bans gatherings of more than five people. He said the government had to act after journalists had protested Monday and burned copies of the presidential decree.

“The government cannot sit idle after burning of the copies of the reference and other official documents, and holding rallies and public meetings by the opposition parties,” he told the television station.

Officials said some 200 people were held on Monday and Tuesday, with another 150 detained overnight and early Wednesday. Most of the arrests were made in the provincial capital, Lahore, and in Rawalpindi, Faisalabad and Multan, Agence France-Presse reported.

The police have also registered cases against 200 journalists, including seven prominent correspondents and editors, accusing them of interfering with the government and occupying the prime minister’s secretariat.

The deputy editor of Daily Ausaf, Chaudhry R. Shamsi, one of the seven journalists named in the case, said he was more concerned about the death threats that individual journalists were receiving than the suspension of commercial television stations.

“We want security for journalists, and we want life insurance,” he said.

The minister of state for information and broadcasting, Tariq Azeem Khan, said most of the amendments introduced in the media decree were cosmetic.

The two main additions were intended to give the media-regulating agency “more teeth” to carry out its rules, he said. “There is no drastic effort to gag the press; otherwise we would not issue 45 licenses” to media companies, he said. Three more were about to be approved, he added.

The three commercial television stations were back on the air on Wednesday after several days of disruption, apparently after the owners held talks with the government.

Hamid Mir, an announcer at GEO Television, said that it would prove to be only a temporary reprieve and that he expected more disruptions. He said he was sending his family abroad on Thursday because of threats and because his children were being followed to school.

“They just want control,” Kashif Abbasi, anchor of a popular daily talk show on ARY Television, said of the government. “You cannot talk against the army, the judiciary, and we are told, ‘Be polite about the president,’ ” he said. “If you take out the judiciary, then this is the whole crisis,” he said.

He said he expected the pressure to continue until presidential elections, which are due by Oct. 15. “That’s the big task ahead,” Mr. Abbasi said.