H.E. Pervez Musharraf
President
Office of the President
Awan-E-Sadar, Constitution Avenue
Islamabad
Islamic Republic of Pakistan
Your Excellency:
We applaud your decision to end the state of emergency in Pakistan and restore your country@quot;s Constitution. We hope you will soon take the further steps needed to bring something closer to true democracy to Pakistan. It remains unacceptable that you have removed the Supreme Court justices who ruled that your re-election was unconstitutional and replaced them with new judges who will assuredly support you. It is outrageous that at last report, five of the former justices, including Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudry, were still under house arrest, as were the senior lawyers who headed the campaign protesting your re-election.
The Overseas Press Club of America, an independent organization that has defended press freedom around the world for nearly seventy years, is concerned primarily with your government@quot;s repeated abuses of the media, and we are not assured that your latest actions will end them. It is unclear to us, for example, whether the end of the state of emergency will restore the right of the Geo TV group to resume broadcasting on its channels, or whether police will still be authorized to arrest without warrants members of the country@quot;s largest media organization, the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ), because of signs displayed and pamphlets distributed at a PFUJ rally protesting anti-media ordinances that were part of the state of emergency. We ask your assurance that Geo TV will be back on the air and that the case against PFUJ will be dropped.
On another matter, we are concerned about the disappearance on November 29 of Javed Lehri, a reporter for the daily, Azadi in Quetta. He and a friend, Ibrahim Baloch, vanished on their way to Lehri@quot;s home in Wadh Tehsil. Azadi@quot;s editor, Mohammad Asif Baloch, said that Lehri had covered a rally organized to protest the murder of Akbar Bugti, the head of the Baloch Nationalist Party, at which someone opened fire on the police. “They fabricated an entire case against my reporter, claiming he was involved in this incident,” the editor said. He charged that the two men “were without doubt kidnapped by secret service agents.” While we have no way of knowing whether this allegation is true, we urge you to order a thorough and transparent investigation to find out what has happened to Javed Lehri.
Your Excellency, the stability of your country is parlous. With lawyers across the country boycotting the courts and refusing to work before judges who took a new oath under the emergency, Pakistan@quot;s judicial proceedings are nearly paralyzed. Twenty-three former ambassadors and foreign secretaries have called on you to reverse all the steps taken since you imposed the emergency. We agree, and we think that reversal should include the constitutional amendments and decrees you have imposed to make sure that no court can challenge any of your actions. And as we have written you previously, the restoration of true press freedom is a necessary condition for any return to democracy. We urge you to make it possible.
Thank you for your attention. We hope you will reply.
Respectfully yours,
Larry Martz
Norman A. Schorr
Co-chairmen, Freedom of the Press Committee
cc:
H.E. Mahmud Ali Durrani
Ambassador of Pakistan to the USA
Embassy of the Islamic Republic of
Pakistan
3517 International Court, NW
Washington, DC 20008
Fax: (202) 387-0484
Permanent Representative
Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan to the United Nations
8 East 65th Street
New York, NY 10021
Fax: (212) 744-7348
Anne W. Patterson
U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan
Embassy of the United States of America
Diplomatic Enclave, Romna 5
Islamabad
Pakistan
Fax: (011.92.51.2) 227-6427
M.A. Zubari
Editor-in-Chief
Business Recorder
Recorder House, 531 Business Recorder
Road
Karachi 74550
Pakistan
ed.khi@br-mail.com
Rana Qaisar
Islamabad Resident Editor
Daily Times
Aqhbar Market, Moti Plaza
Murree Road, Rawalpindi
Pakistan
ranakaisar@hotmail.com
Abbas Nasir
Editor
Dawn
Haroon House
Dr. Ziauddin Ahmed Road
Karachi 74200
Pakistan
Fax: (011.92.21) 569-3995