Pakistan Pulls The Plug

In what is beginning to feel like a monthly ritual from some part of the world, we have another government-sanctioned media blackout, this time in Pakistan (again), where President General Pervez Musharraf has imposed emergency rule.

According to the AFP, Pakistan police raided the country’s biggest selling newspaper to make sure they didn’t put out a special edition on the crackdown:

Police on Monday raided a printing press belonging to Pakistan's biggest-selling newspaper group amid tough curbs on the media imposed under the state of emergency, officials said.

They stormed the Karachi premises of Awam, a sister publication of Jang group, following reports it was bringing out a special supplement on the emergency imposed by President Pervez Musharraf at the weekend, they said.

A government official in Karachi said that under emergency rules, the evening newspaper is not supposed to publish any special supplements, and police went to check that the restriction had not been violated.

This tactic is part of a wider campaign against the media in the country, as reported by the Washington Post:

Efforts to mount a nationwide campaign against Musharraf are likely to be hurt by the crackdown, particularly the continuing blackout of independent television stations, which had become a major catalyst for anti-Musharraf protests earlier in the year. "If you don't have television, you don't have crowds," news anchor Kashif Abbasi said.

Abbasi said the government was pressuring the stations to sign a new code of conduct that would impose severe restrictions on what the stations could report. He said journalists would resist the move. "Do we have a choice? We can't sit there and report, but not talk about the president, the prime minister, the government or its policies," he said.

The only televised news Sunday came from the state-run channel, which ran clips from Musharraf's speech to the nation.

President General Pervez Musharraf must surely be thinking that ‘If it worked once, it’ll work again.' Previously this year, he made blocked a few TV stations signals after he suspended the country’s chief judge.

Previous efforts to silence the media have been seen – and written about in this space – in Venezuela in May and Burma/Myanmar just last month.

While this writer isn’t the heartiest proponent of so-called citizen journalism, it may be the best of getting a full grasp of what's going on there. This is a current ally we're talking about, one that receives $150 million in support from America every month. Here's hoping that a Pakistani with a cell phone or other portable device can bring us the reality on the ground there.

In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, it is suggested that “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” In Pakistan, Musharraf has stifled the law by suspending the constitution and arresting throngs of laywers. He has now moved on to Step Two in the Power Grab Playbook – Silence the Media.