Tag: Dawn newspaper

Pakistan: Imran Khan Warns of Civil War if Elections Not Called

These comments were met with sharp criticism from Shehbaz Sharif, who asked the PTI chief not to “exceed the limits” defined by the law and constitution.

New Delhi: Ousted Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan on Wednesday admitted that his government was a “weak one” which was “blackmailed from everywhere” as the power was not with him and “everyone knows where that is”.

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chairman was ousted from power in April after losing a no-confidence vote in his leadership, which he alleged was part of a US-led conspiracy targeting him because of his independent foreign policy decisions on Russia, China and Afghanistan. He has been calling for fresh elections.

In an interview to Bol News on Wednesday, Khan said he is waiting for the Supreme Court to decide on his party’s plea to provide protection to protestors from his party, after which he said he would issue the date for the next march demanding general elections.

“We will see if they allow us to go towards elections through legal and constitutional means otherwise this country will go towards (a) civil war,” he warned.

These comments were met with sharp criticism from incumbent Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and other government representatives.

Khan was also asked to recall the events of the night of the no-confidence vote against him, who was issuing orders and who had impeded the cases against the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leaders.

Khan said his government had been “weak” when it came to power and had to seek coalition partners, adding that if the same situation were to arise again, he would opt for re-elections and seek a majority government or none at all.

“Our hands were tied. We were blackmailed from everywhere. Power wasn’t with us. Everyone knows where the power lies in Pakistan so we had to rely on them,” the 69-year-old cricketer-turned-politician said, without elaborating any further who he was referring to.

Khan, who came to power in 2018, reportedly with the backing of the military, is the only Pakistani prime minister to be ousted in a no-confidence vote in Parliament.

He said it was imperative for the country to have a “strong army” due to the threat posed by the enemies but said there was also the need to strike a “balance” between having a strong army and a strong government.

“We relied on them all the time. They did a lot of good things too but they didn’t do many things that should’ve been done. They have the power because they control institutions such as NAB (National Accountability Bureau), which wasn’t in our control,” he said.

The former prime minister said while his government had the responsibility, it did not have all the power and the authority.

The Pakistan Army, which has ruled the coup-prone country for more than half of its 73 plus years of existence, has hitherto wielded considerable power in the matters of security and foreign policy. However, the army has continuously denied its involvement in politics.

The PTI chief said the current political situation was a problem for the country as well as the establishment. “If the establishment doesn’t make the right decisions then I can assure in writing that (before everyone else) they and the army will be destroyed because of what will become of the country if it goes bankrupt,” he said.

“Pakistan is going towards a default. If that happens then which institution will be (the worst) hit? The army. After it is hit, what concession will be taken from us? Denuclearisation,” Khan said.

Khan said that if Pakistan were to lose its nuclear deterrent capability, it would be fragmented into three pieces. “If the right decisions aren’t made at this time then the country is going towards suicide,” he warned.

Prodded further to share his thoughts on the night of the no-confidence vote, Imran declined to go into details and said: “History never forgives anyone. Things come out. If you ask me, I won’t go into details, but when history will be written then it’ll be counted as such a night in which Pakistan and its institutions were damaged a lot.

“Those same institutions weakened Pakistan which gave it its foundation and strengthened it,” he said.

Khan warned that the country would descend into a civil war if fresh elections were not announced. He said there was “no question” of returning to the National Assembly as that would “mean accepting the conspiracy” that had removed his government.

The PTI chairman has been protesting ever since and calling for fresh elections because, in his words, the incumbent coalition government led by Shehbaz Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party was imported and not a true representative of the Pakistani people.

Khan led thousands of PTI supporters to Islamabad last Wednesday in a protest and had planned to stage a sit-in until new elections were announced but abruptly called off the sit-in at the last minute after making it to the capital. However, he had threatened to return after six days if the government failed to give a date for snap polls in the country.

Sharif bites back

Pakistan PM Shehbaz Sharif slammed Khan’s comments, accusing him of crossing limits.

According to Dawn newspaper, in a separate statement shared on the PML-N’s Twitter, Sharif said Khan’s remarks were proof that the PTI chief was “involved in a conspiracy, not politics”. He accused Khan of spreading “chaos” due to his “frustration and sick mentality”.

“This is not a statement but a conspiracy to spark the fire of anarchy and division in the country,” the statement says, according to the newspaper.

“Losing power does not mean that you wage a war against Pakistan, its unity and its institutions,” he said, warning Imran not to “attack” the federation and country’s institutions. “Don’t exceed the limits [defined] by the law and Constitution.”

The prime minister said the nation would not accept such “nefarious” plans at any cost and would not let them succeed. He vowed to defeat such “impure” aims.

(With PTI inputs)

Afghanistan Closes Pakistan Border Point Hours After Reopening Gates, Says Report

The borders had been closed down due to the coronavirus pandemic for over a month, which had stranded Afghans and Pakistanis in each other’s territories.

New Delhi: The first day of the limited opening of two border points between Afghanistan and Pakistan saw Afghan officials closing down the Chaman border point as they wanted Pakistan to take back their own nationals too.

From Monday, Pakistan had opened the Torkham and Chaman border points on the request of the Afghan government, for four days, to allow the return of its nationals.

The border had been closed down due to the coronavirus pandemic for over a month, which had stranded Afghans and Pakistanis in each other’s territories.

As per Afghan news agency Pajhwok, the Afghan embassy in Pakistan had announced that only 1,000 people a day will be allowed to enter the country based on a bilateral understanding with Pakistan.

The returning nationals were to be quarantined separately in different locations – Afghans at Torkham township and Spin Boldak, and Pakistanis in Chaman.

At 10 am on Monday, the border points at Torkham and Chaman opened. Special priority was supposed to have been given to women and children.

Also read: Afghanistan’s Open Border With Iran Leaves it Vulnerable to COVID-19

However, the Pakistani newspaper Dawn has reported that the return of Afghans went on smoothly for only five hours.

After about 400-500 Afghans returned, the Afghan border authorities closed the border with Pakistan at Chaman at around 3 pm, the newspaper reported. “Officials said that Kabul wanted Pakistan to also allow Pakistanis who were stranded in the Afghan border town of Spin Boldak in large numbers to cross into their country,” said the report.

A district official in Pakistan, Zakaullah Durrani told Dawn that that Afghanistan had closed the border “all of a sudden”.

As per the article, Afghan authorities wanted Pakistan to also take back their nationals who were stranded at Spin Boldak.

“Pakistani and Afghan border authorities negotiated at the border but the issue could not be resolved till the closing time of the border at 5 pm. Afghan border authorities said that they would not open border until the issue was resolved,” said the report.

It is not yet clear if Chaman border point was opened on Tuesday, but there are reports that Torkham border had a major rush of Afghans nationals hoping to take advantage of the relaxation of border restrictions.

Afghanistan has reported that it has 423 COVID-19 positive patients, till Tuesday morning.

 

Pakistan Rearrests Four Men Acquitted in Daniel Pearl Murder Case

The High Court in the province of Sindh on Thursday acquitted the four, including Briton Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was sentenced to death in 2002 for masterminding Pearl’s murder. The other three were sentenced to life.

Karachi/Islamabad: Pakistani authorities on Friday ordered the detention of four men set to be released after being acquitted by a court over the murder of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl, and the government said it would challenge the acquittal next week.

The High Court in the province of Sindh on Thursday acquitted the four, including Briton Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was sentenced to death in 2002 for masterminding Pearl’s murder. The other three were sentenced to life.

Wall Street Journal reporter Pearl, 38, was investigating Islamist militants in the city of Karachi, the capital of Sindh, after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States when he was kidnapped in January 2002. He was beheaded weeks later.

The Sindh provincial government’s Home Department issued the order to arrest and detain the four before they were released from prison.

“The government of Sindh has sufficient reason that Ahmed Omar Sheikh and Fahad Nasim Ahmed, Syed Salman Saqib, Sheikh Muhammad Adil be arrested and detained for a period of three months from the date of arrest (April 2, 2020),” a top official of the department said in the order, seen by Reuters.

The official cited concern that the released men may act “against the interest of the country”.

The law to keep them in detention is one that the government has often used to keep high-profile suspects, particularly militants, in custody after being unable to successfully prosecute them in court.

The re-arrest of the four gives the government time to put together a legal appeal against their acquittal.

The appeal will be filed next week in the Supreme Court, the country’s top court, by the Sindh provincial government, Pakistan’s interior ministry said in a statement on Friday.

“Ministry of Interior, Government of Pakistan reiterates its commitment to follow due process under the laws of the country to bring terrorists to task,” the statement added.

Also Read: Daniel Pearl Murder: Pakistan Court Overturns Death Sentence of Main Accused

The United States denounced Thursday’s court acquittal of the four, with the top U.S. diplomat for South Asia writing on Twitter that it was “an affront to victims of terrorism everywhere.”

“We welcome Pakistan’s decision to appeal the verdict,” acting U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Alice Wells said.

Scrutiny

Pakistan joined the US-led “war on terrorism” after the September 11 attacks on the United States but it has been dogged by suspicion that it has for years secretly backed some militant factions as tools in its decades-old confrontation with rival India.

Pakistan denies that but it has been under the close scrutiny of a global watchdog on terror financing, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), with its frequent inability to prosecute terrorism cases a particular concern of the agency.

Sheikh was born in Britain and enjoyed a privileged upbringing and studied at the London School of Economics.

He was arrested in India for his involvement in the kidnapping of Western tourists in 1994 as part of his support for Muslim separatists battling Indian security forces in the disputed Kashmir region.

He was one of three men released from an Indian prison after militants hijacked an Indian airliner in late 1999 and flew it to Afghanistan, where the then-ruling Taliban government helped negotiate an exchange.

(Reuters)

Daniel Pearl Murder: Pakistan Court Overturns Death Sentence of Main Accused

According to the report, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh’s seven-year prison sentence will be counted from the time served in jail.

Karachi: A Pakistani court on Thursday overturned the death sentence of British-born top al-Qaeda leader Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was convicted in the abduction and murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl here in 2002.

Pearl, the 38-year-old South Asia bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, was abducted and beheaded while he was in Pakistan investigating a story on the alleged links between the country’s powerful spy agency ISI and al-Qaeda.

Sheikh was arrested from Lahore in February 2002 and sentenced to death five months later by an anti-terrorism court.

The incident came three years after Sheikh, along with Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, was released by India in 1999 and given safe passage to Afghanistan in exchange for the nearly 150 passengers of hijacked Indian Airlines Flight 814.

On Thursday, the Sindh High Court commuted the death sentence of Sheikh, 46, to seven years in prison. Sheikh has been in jail for the past 18 years.

A two-judge bench headed by Justice Mohammad Karim Khan Agha also acquitted the three others – Fahad Naseem, Salman Saqib, and Sheikh Adil- serving life sentences in the case, the Dawn newspaper reported.

The bench announced the verdict on the appeals filed by the four convicts 18 years ago.

It also dismissed an appeal of the state seeking enhancement of life term of the three co-accused, the paper said.

According to the report, Sheikh’s seven-year prison will be counted from the time served in jail.

While arguing the case, the lawyers for the appellants submitted that the prosecution had miserably failed to prove its case against their clients beyond any reasonable doubt and prosecution witnesses were mostly policemen, whose testimonies could not be relied upon.

They had further contended that Naseem and Adil’s confessions before a judicial magistrate were defective and not voluntary.

They also argued that the recovery of the laptop from Naseem was shown to have been made on February 11, 2002, while computer expert Ronald Joseph had deposed that he was given the computer for verification on February 4 and he examined the laptop for six days.

Also read: The Changing Face of War Reporting

Deputy Prosecutor General Saleem Akhtar had supported the trial court’s verdict and submitted that the prosecution had proved its case against the appellants’ beyond a shadow of doubt and had requested the court to dismiss the appeals, the report said.

According to a report in The Express Tribune, in 2014, an anti-terrorism court had acquitted Qari Hashim, a co-accused in the case due to a lack of evidence. The same year, Sheikh allegedly attempted suicide in his prison cell by hanging himself with a cloth from the ventilator.

In January 2011, a report released by the Pearl Project at Georgetown University following an investigation into his death revealed that the wrong men were convicted for Pearl’s murder.

In February 2016, the Pakistan Army arrested more than 100 militants and foiled a jailbreak attempt by al-Qaeda terrorists to free Sheikh and other leaders of the terror group.

Thursday’s verdict came more than a month after the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force warned Pakistan that stern action will be taken against it if the country fails to check the flow of money to terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) among others.

The FATF, which supervises the effective implementation of legal, regulatory and operational measures for combating money laundering, terrorist financing, last year placed Pakistan on its ‘Grey List’ of countries for failure to curb funnelling of funds to terror groups like LeT and JeM.

If not removed off the list by April end, Pakistan may move to a blacklist of countries that face severe economic sanctions, such as Iran.

Pakistan Probes Link Between Soybean Dust And Deaths in Port City of Karachi

More than 200 people have been hospitalised or treated for breathing problems since Sunday.

Karachi: Authorities in Pakistan are investigating if exposure to soybean dust, which can cause severe allergic reactions, is responsible for at least 14 deaths and dozens of illnesses in the southern port city of Karachi.

More than 200 people have been hospitalised or treated for breathing problems since Sunday as authorities try to determine if a leak of toxic gas was to blame after many patients complained of an unfamiliar odour.

“While we are working on this complex bioanalytical problem, we think this may be due to overexposure to soybean dust,” Pakistan‘s International Center for Chemical and Biological Sciences told authorities in a letter on Tuesday.

Although it was still testing blood and air samples, the agency urged extreme care during the unloading of soybean containers at the port, adding that exposure to soybean dust had been known to cause breathing ailments and deaths.

A man wearing a face mask waits to see a relative who is admitted after being affected from a suspected gas leak, at a hospital premises in Karachi, Pakistan February 18, 2020. Photo: Reuters/Akhtar Soomro

Karachi Commissioner Iftikhar Shallwani told the Dawn newspaper that a ship offloading a shipment of soybean had been removed from the port terminal.

Many schools in the area were closed for a third straight day on Wednesday as the authorities investigate.

On Tuesday, several dozen residents of the port area staged a protest to demand an impartial inquiry into the deaths and blamed authorities for not doing enough to prevent them.

Pakistan State Oil (PSO) is temporarily closing its storage terminal in the port area to help safeguard the health and safety of its staff, the country’s largest oil marketer said.

The company would turn to backup sources to ensure the move did not affect 24-hour supplies of petroleum goods, it added.

(Reuters)

The Cost of Extreme Media Censorship – a View From Pakistan

The latest round of coercive censorship is an attempt to ensure that media narratives conform to the goals and objectives of the intended outcomes of the elections scheduled for the summer.

There is a price to pay for professional broadcast journalism in Pakistan. That was the sobering message for the media from the blatant, but unofficial, blackout in large swathes of the country in April 2018 of Geo News, the market leader among 37 current affairs 24/7 channels. The blackout seemed arbitrary but not without method — transmission was disrupted intermittently, thereby delaying public awareness about the odd phenomenon.

Puzzlingly, for the public at least, there did not seem to be any explanation. The reason: neither did Jang Media Group, which owns Geo, publicise the matter at first or protest nor did the remainder of the media industry report it even when it understood what was happening. Social media leaks were the primary source of information about the blackout.

Analysts and commentators soon started connecting the dots with allied developments — popular commentators, analysts and writers across several newspapers, including The News, The Express Tribune and Jang complained that their regular write-ups were being declined. Clearly, overt censorship was at play and it was spreading across mediums and media groups. Some current affairs analysts, like Babar Sattar, Gul Bukhari and Mosharraf Zaidi, retaliated by sharing their declined write-ups on social media.

It was only after international media, including BBC, Al Jazeera, Reuters, The Economist, The New York Times and The Hindu picked up the story and reported extensively on it that the public discovered what was happening. And what they discovered from these reports is deeply troubling.

The security establishment, it appears, is enacting a wider enforcement of undeclared censorship on both the quantum and tone of ongoing current affairs news threads. Geo has refused to publicly acknowledge any discussions on the matter with the establishment even though in private its functionaries are not shy about mentioning their inevitable capitulation. The broadcast media’s regulator, the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA), has denied ordering any of its licensed cable distributors to censor Geo while the superior judiciary seems uninterested in investigating the matter beyond PEMRA’s explanation.

Pakistan’s history is replete with state-enforced censorship. But what explains the severely coercive nature of undeclared censorship now? Media managers privately say that the angry but spirited resistance put up by Nawaz Sharif and Maryam Nawaz to the restrictions on their political ambitions and careers, the media caricaturisation of rising judicial activism against the political classes, the spontaneous civil society-driven rights movement piloted by Manzoor Pashteen capturing popular imagination, and the scathing media blowback and social media commentary about the reported ‘Bajwa Doctrine’ appear to have hit a nerve. Any freewheeling discussion and sound bite on the mainstream media on these topics seem to have become unacceptable to quarters that seek – and to a large degree have achieved – a national current affairs narrative mostly articulated through a security perspective.

Even a cursory examination of the 147 daily current affairs talk shows on 37 TV channels reveal a telling trend: caricaturisation of politics, parliament and politicians; promotion of security doctrines, overt criticism of Nawaz Sharif by mostly censoring out his perspectives in favour of near-unbridled coverage of his opponents; mostly uncritical coverage of political statements and other activism by the judges; total blackout of the otherwise phenomenal Pashteen-led rights movement; and an army of retired military officials populating most of the talk shows to ensure that the discussions remain generally subservient to manipulated narratives and interests.

The recent actions against the likes of the Jang and Dawn groups, which now remain about the only sections of the mainstream media that make an effort to accommodate pluralist perspectives, came precisely because of this. The latest round of coercive censorship is an attempt to ensure that media narratives conform to the goals and objectives of the intended outcomes of the elections scheduled for the summer. Media professionalism is apparently not part of the plan.

This was originally published in Herald’s May 2018 issue. To read more, subscribe to the Herald in print.