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Media observes “black day”

— Photo: AFP

NOT TO TAKE IT LYING DOWN: Journalists staging a protest in Lahore on Sunday.

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s media community observed a “black day” on Sunday in protest against Saturday’s police action that left several journalists injured.

Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary took suo motu notice of the police crackdown in which a number of lawyers were also injured, and ordered several top officials of the police and administration to present themselves before the court on Monday.

In the capital, hundreds of journalists marched in procession up to President Musharraf’s Aiwan-e-Sadr office, a few hundred metres from where many journalists were badly beaten up as they covered the agitation by the lawyers.

Representatives of political parties and civil society groups and the legal community also turned out to express solidarity with the journalists.

Mazhar Abbas, secretary-general of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists, said the main demand of the media community was for the suspension and removal of the capital’s top police officer.

“The Inspector-General Islamabad was responsible for whatever happened. He gave direct orders to the police to attack. We are asking that he should be sacked. We completely reject the enquiry ordered by the government,” Mr. Abbas said.

Mr. Abbas said the police deliberately targeted the press to prevent coverage of Saturday’s events outside the Supreme Court.

“My statement would have been different if it was only a matter of teargassing and baton charge. But we saw the police cutting the wires of at least two channels,” he said.

On October 3, when the National Assembly will reconvene for a session that will include the presidential election on October 6, the PFUJ said it would boycott the proceedings, and would present a “seven-year charge-sheet” against the government on issues relating to the media.

“The kind of things that have happened to journalists under Musharraf is unprecedented. They have been killed, kidnapped, their lives in danger,” said Mr. Abbas, who recently found bullets in an envelope in his car. He is a recipient of this year’s International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Meanwhile, the opposition All Parties Democracy Movement (APDM) has given a country-wide strike call on October 6, the day of the presidential election.

The APDM leadership has collected the resignations of its 236 legislators in the National and provincial assemblies, which are to be handed over to the respective Speakers on October 2.

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