PARIS, May 3: The Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) has applauded the government for “slowly but surely paving the way for a liberalization of the broadcast media,” but claimed that the adoption of new press laws “has posed a threat to the relatively critical tone of the print media.”

In a report published on Saturday to mark the 13th International Press Freedom Day, the RSF says that Gen Pervez Musharraf “did not keep his promise to respect press freedom. The ubiquitous security services harassed the country’s few investigative journalists, while the adoption of new press laws posed a threat to the relatively critical tone of the print media.”

With regard to relations between the press and the military regime, RSF Asia-Pacific specialist Vincent Brossel notes that “they worsened in the run-up to the October 2002 general elections. The security forces, especially the military’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), tried to influence newspaper editors by repeatedly giving them ‘advice.’”

According to the report, at least 25 journalists were injured by police, three of them seriously, when they walked out of a campaign meeting by President Musharraf in Iqbal Stadium in Faisalabad on April 14, 2002. Punjab Governor Khalid Maqbool had opened the meeting with a diatribe against the Pakistani press, accusing them of lying about the number that attended the president’s recent meeting in Lahore and urging the crowd to boo the news media for being irresponsible and misrepresenting the facts.

The journalists present walked out, shouting criticisms of the governor, and were booed by the crowd as they left. A witness claimed that a senior official ordered the police to make the journalists pay for this boycott, the report stated.

Officials ordered hospitals not to give the victims any medical certificates, needed to file a complaint. Information minister Nisar Memon said the same day that President Musharraf took the incident very seriously and had immediately ordered an enquiry so that the police officers involved could be punished. No one had been punished at the end of the 2002, the report claimed.

Police hit about a dozen press photographers with batons in Rawalpindi, on April 21 as they were trying to prevent activists of the Jamaat-i-Islami from staging a protest against the referendum on the renewal of President Musharraf’s mandate.

The authorities ordered daily Dopeher to close for 30 days on Jan 2, 2002, for reporting that there were divisions within the government about a ban on the Jihad movements. The police summoned the managing editor for questioning and then surrounded the newspaper’s offices to enforce the closure. The sanction, ordered under the 1963 press law, was lifted after four days because of protests from the national press.

On Jan 3, police in Hyderabad registered a criminal complaint against Ali Qazi, editor of daily Kawish, and Ayub Qabi, the newspaper’s executive editor, in what was seen by local media as an attempt to silence a newspaper known for reporting human rights violations and police abuses.

The government lifted a ban on the Indian TV sports channels ESPN and Star Sports on Jan 4, allowing private Pakistani cable operators to carry them again. Cable operators had been ordered to suspend the distribution of Indian channels six days earlier, at the height of the tension between the two countries, in order to combat “the evil propaganda against Pakistan.” The Indian news channels Zee News and Star News were still banned at the end of 2002.

The government banned the press on Jan 12 from publishing the communiques of the radical Islamist groups that had just been outlawed on President Musharraf’s orders.

On Jan 16, the government issued a decree establishing the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (Pemra) to license privately-owned radio and TV stations and cable TV operators thereby ending the state’s monopoly of the electronic media. But programming was required to comply with a code of values and to be strictly and regularly controlled, and foreign companies and non-resident Pakistanis were barred from requesting a licence.

Under the decree, the president appoints an “eminent professional” as chairman of the authority. The president also appoints the authority’s nine other members, three of whom come from the interior ministry, information ministry and telecommunication authority and the others are “eminent citizens” from different fields, including the media.

On March 9, authorities barred journalists from attending the trial of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s husband Asif Zardari on corruption charges before a court in Attock.

The All-Pakistan Newspapers Society (APNS), the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ) and the Council of Pakistan Newspaper Editors (CPNE) protested that the government had broken undertakings given to the APNS and CPNE on July 23 that there would be no government-appointed members on the press council and that the fines for defamation would not exceed $900.

Under the texts finally adopted, the government named several of the new press council’s members, including the chairman, the punishment for defamation set a minimum penalty of 800 euros in damages or a prison sentence, and the offences punishable under the defamation law were borrowed from an old press code banning affronts to “friendly countries.”

At the end of September, the non-governmental organisation Liberal Forum released initial findings from its monitoring of the news media in the campaign for the October elections. It found that the state-run radio and television was giving more air-time to the pro-government party, the Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-i-Azam), than to the two former ruling parties combined.

The PML-Q got a total of 15 minutes between Sept 10 and 23, against fewer than six minutes for the Pakistan People’s Party. The coalition of fundamentalist parties came second in air-time. President Musharraf told his information minister at the end of November that he appreciated the state-owned PTV’s performance during the elections.

The defamation ordinance, upping the penalties for journalists and editors found guilty of defamation to a minimum of Rs50,000 in damages or three months in prison, was signed into law by President Musharraf on Oct 1. The ordinance said “publication or circulation of a false statement or representation made orally or in written or visual form which injures the reputation of a person... shall be actionable as defamation.” It gave injured parties two months to file complaints, which were to be tried before a district judge with the possibility of appeal to the high court. This controversial law was enacted against strong opposition from news media owners and journalists.

On Oct 26, President Musharraf signed into law the ordinance creating a 19-member press council with the job of ensuring that newspapers and news agencies respect the “highest professional and ethical standards” while preserving the freedom of the press. The council was to enforce a new, 17-point “ethical code of practice” for the print media, hold enquiries into complaints, and recommend the suspension or even permanent closure of publications that refused to comply with its decisions.

The council’s chairman was to be a retired judge chosen by the president. Of the other 18 members, four were to be named by the APNS, four by the CPNE and four by journalists’ professional associations. One was to be named by the house leader in parliament, one by the parliamentary opposition leader, one by the higher education committee, one by the national commission on the status of women, one was to be a mass media educationist and one place was reserved for the Pakistan Bar Council. Decisions were to be taken by majority.

The information ministry put an announcement in Pakistan’s main newspapers on Nov 2 warning news media they could be prosecuted under the defamation ordinance of Oct 1 if they picked up reports from the South Asia Tribune, the Washington-based online newspaper created by Shaheen Sehbai in July after going to live in the United States. Some Pakistani journalists had been quoting from Sehbai’s news website, which ran exclusives about corruption and human rights violations by the military government.

According to the report:

• 25 journalists were killed because of their opinions or while doing their work in 2002.

• 121 journalists were in prison at the end of 2002.

• Nearly 400 news media were censored in 2002.

• 700 journalists and media workers were detained for periods of varying length.

• There were twice as many physical attacks and threats as the year before.

• 1,420 reporters were beaten, threatened with death, kidnapped, charged or harassed.

• 17 journalists have been killed because of their opinions or while doing their work since the start of 2003.

• 128 journalists were in prison because of their opinions on 30 April 2003.

• The world’s biggest prisons for journalists are Cuba (30 detained), Eritrea (18), Burma (15), China (11) and Iran (10).

• 136 journalists and media workers have been detained since the start of 2003, 246 have been threatened or physically attacked and 120 news media have been censored.