User:Shaheryar Jamali/sandbox

'''It was after midnight when newspaper reporter Bux Ali Jamali was jarred awake by police, dragged out of his house and taken to a local hospital. There, corrupt doctors certified that he was drunk -- a serious crime in this Islamic state -- and police imprisoned him for nine days without bail.

That is the version of events related by Jamali, who said his real offense was writing tough stories about local development that enraged high government officials -- including, he and others say, the family of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

The police account is that Jamali was on his way home when an alert officer noticed that he obviously had been drinking. After confirming this suspicion through a doctor's exam, police said, the officer locked him up.

Advocates of a free press charge that Jamali's arrest is part of a growing government effort to crack down on Pakistani publications, which have become aggressive and independent after years of living under authoritarian rule.

Journalists and civil rights activists said the recent moves -- which include lawsuits and contempt cases against reporters and columnists -- are among the harshest anti-press actions taken in Pakistan since the country was ruled by Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, from 1977 to 1987. The steps underscore distrust and hostility between the elected government and the press as the two institutions test their relations.

"For the last 40 years, the bureaucracy and the people in power got used to nothing but acclaim, and now they don't want to hear even mild criticism," said Zamir Niazi, a former newspaper editor and the country's leading analyst of press issues.

Niazi and others said they were particularly disappointed that the crackdown has come during the administration of Bhutto, whom many in the West view as a champion of democratic values. In her own country, however, Bhutto is often seen as a feudal power broker whose prime interest is protecting the position of her friends and family.

"Even the military dictators could not dare to take such a brutal action against the freedom of the press in this country," said Abdul Hamid Chappra, secretary general of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists.

{Last Thursday, the government banned for 60 days six Karachi-based newspapers with a combined circulation of several million, seizing their presses. Bhutto's spokesman, Farhatullah Babar, defended the move in a telephone interview with The Washington Post, saying there is "no move on the part of the government to limit press freedoms; the press is enjoying unprecedented freedom in the history of the country." He said the government banned the six Urdu-language papers "because for the last several months they have been sensationalizing news about developments in Karachi . . . and inciting people to violence against the government."

{Noting that more than 1,500 people have been killed in the last year in clashes between political and religious groups in Karachi, the country's business capital, Anwer Sen Roy, editor of the banned Public newspaper, said, "Sensation and anarchy on the streets was reflected in the news pages."}

"Having cracked the whip on the opposition and the business community, the government has now turned on the press," said Razia Bhatti, editor of Newsline, one of Pakistan's top newsmagazines. She was referring to the numerous opposition politicians who have been jailed during Bhutto's term and the frigid relations between her government and the business community.

Bhatti said that Bhutto's tough line on aggressive journalism is partly in response to the harsh press criticism she received during her first stint as prime minister, which was cut short in 1990 when the president dismissed her government. She was reelected prime minister in late 1993.

It has never been easy being a reporter in Pakistan. Over its nearly 50-year history, government censors have closed papers and spiked stories while reporters and editors have been physically and verbally attacked and their offices ransacked.

These days, under Bhutto's democratically elected government, most of the physical abuses have been curbed, most journalists agree, but the government's treatment still falls short of the liberal image that Pakistan is trying to project.

The treatment of Ali, the allegedly drunken reporter, is one of the most dramatic recent examples of official press harassment, journalists said. He and others said they believe he was singled out because he was writing stories critical of development in the home town of Bhutto's husband, Asif Zardari. The town, Nawabshah, is about 130 miles northeast of Karachi.

Ali, 28, said he has been a reporter for a local daily newspaper named Kawish (which means "struggle") since 1990 but began having problems with local government officials only after writing recent exposes about commercial developments in Nawabshah's three public parks. "I was outraged when they demolished the only public library in one of those parks" to make way for new construction, he said. Authorities initially refused to release Ali from jail after his arrest on the night of May 9. He was granted bail on May 17 after a Post reporter called Ramzan Channa, the superintendent of police in Nawabshah, and noted that bail was permitted under Pakistani law.

The case is pending. Channa said the charge carries a penalty of up to three years in prison and flogging at the discretion of the court. "Zardari had nothing to do with this," he added.

Journalists and civil rights activists pointed to other examples of what they said were government attempts to intimidate and influence the press, including: * The June 10 arrest in Lahore of freelance journalist Zafaryab Ahmed, who has been charged with sedition. Ahmed, who is being held without bail, has reported extensively on child labor issues and played a major role in publicizing the murder earlier this year of 14-year-old child-labor activist Iqbal Masih. * A series of contempt-of-court charges against Ardeshir Cowasjee, the country's most popular newspaper columnist, for articles that questioned the independence of the country's Supreme Court and indirectly criticized the selection of judges by Bhutto's administration. Many observers contend the court charges were orchestrated by the government, an allegation the government denies. * A defamation lawsuit filed by Bhutto against Kamran Khan, a reporter for the News in Karachi and a special correspondent for The Washington Post, for a story in the News saying that Bhutto, during a meeting with British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, requested that Britain expel a leading Pakistani dissident, Altaf Hussain. The head of a political organization called the Mohajir Qaumi Movement, Hussain has 175 charges pending against him in Pakistan and has been sentenced in absentia to 70 years in prison.

Bhutto filed a lawsuit charging that the report was inaccurate and made her look "petty, spiteful and vicious." The day after the report appeared, the government demanded a retraction and unconditional apology. The News printed a front-page denial by the British ambassador, along with a note from the editor saying that the paper had not meant to cast Bhutto in a bad light.

Charging that the paper had not retracted the story or offered an unconditional apology, Bhutto filed suit, in her personal capacity, using as her attorney Pakistan's deputy attorney general, in his personal capacity. The suit seeks $350,000 -- an astronomical sum by South Asian standards -- for "the grievous harm to {Bhutto's} reputation and mental agony and torture" the report caused her.

Last week, Interior Secretary Nasirullah Babar said that Pakistan has asked Interpol to assist in securing Hussain's extradition from Britain. Bhutto's spokesman said the extradition request had nothing to do with the suit against Khan, which he said Bhutto would continue to pursue.

Special treatment for journalists who give Bhutto favorable coverage, including overseas trips and government postings. While the government denies giving favors in exchange for positive coverage, one example cited by Pakistani journalists is Maleeha Lodhi, former editor of the Islamabad edition of the News. Despite having no diplomatic experience, she is now Pakistan's ambassador to Washington. Editors and reporters who worked with Lodhi said that while she was editor of the Islamabad edition, she routinely killed stories critical of Bhutto and the United States that had appeared in other editions of the News. Kaleem Omar, a reporter who works out of the paper's Karachi bureau, said that in her last six months at the News, Lodhi killed 117 of his stories that appeared in other editions of the paper.

Lodhi denied killing stories critical of Bhutto and said her story selections as editor had nothing to do with her appointment as ambassador. She noted that as a columnist, she often wrote critically of Bhutto and said she did not use Omar's stories because they were too long and opinionated for the news pages. CAPTION: BENAZIR BHUTTO'''