KARACHI, May 25: The APNS has strongly criticized the statement of the Federal Minister for Information, Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed, issued at the end of the inter-provincial information ministers' meeting held in Islamabad on Friday last.

It has also refuted a subsequent statement released by the spokesman of the Ministry of Information in which he expressed ignorance of the fact that the ministry had in any way agreed with the APNS stand which advocated a drastic reversal of the decisions of the Wage Board.

A statement issued by the APNS said the spokesman of the federal ministry of information was 'clearly' not telling the truth in an attempt to "cover up his ministry's conflicting stand on the Wage Board issue".

The APNS statement reads as follows: "The fact of the matter is that both the Ministers of Information and Labour represented by two federal secretaries and under the guidance of the federal Labour Minister had agreed in two separate meetings with senior office-bearers of the APNS that the Wage Board had become largely obsolete and needed to be dispensed with in its current form.

"The decisions of two meetings held on 21st August 2001 and 28th December later that year clearly contain the relevant clauses that establish the full agreement of the government to measures that sought to radically alter the decisions and mechanism of all wage boards.

This is contained in virtually all the clauses of the six-point non-paper and the modifying four-paragraph 'signposts' available as public documents since 2002 and included in the documents filed by the APNS attorney, Abdul Hafiz Pirzada, in the Supreme Court challenging the Wage Board. Our contention can thus be easily verified from the public record.

"The real reason for the cover-up and the lies, however, is that the original stand of the government has changed. Due to the bitter opposition with which the APNS-CPNE confronted President Musharraf's government at the inception of the black press laws, we have still not been forgiven.

Newspapers and documentation in the ministries will clearly inform history and the conscious citizen as to who spoke up and who remained silent. Our legal and just battle to reverse all wage boards for non-journalists and curtail draconian government interference in the workings of a free press will continue in the courts and in ministry boardrooms in Islamabad, whenever necessary."