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International News Title: Pakistan: Blank TV Screens ISLAMABAD — When I returned to Pakistan two months ago, the country was preparing for elections, and myriad private television channels were blasting criticism of the President, General Pervez Musharraf, around the clock, while the activist courts held the government’s feet to the fire. This weekend, everything changed. Between Saturday night and Sunday morning, Pakistan, it seems, tumbled from aspiring democracy to totalitarian state. The first sign of dramatic change was when the television screens went blank at around 5 p.m. on Saturday. Soon afterward I found out - but only by calling my parents in Britain who were glued to the BBC - that Pakistan was in the grip of a state of emergency. On the streets, hundreds of police and armed paramilitary had appeared. The Supreme Court was surrounded as darkness fell. Soon afterward, we found out later, security forces had quietly entered from the rear of the court and hauled off the judges. The main boulevard running through the capital, Islamabad, was sealed off. It was not until midnight that a grim-looking Gen. Musharraf appeared on state television, which was the only channel left on air, to confirm the news. By Sunday evening I had learned that my 65-year-old aunt, the headmistress of a school in Lahore, was in jail, as were several other family members and a host of friends. None are politicians. I had never known any of them to be violent. Among them were an economist, a corporate lawyer, and several school teachers. Their “crime” was to attend a meeting at the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan on Sunday afternoon in Lahore. The right to public assembly was removed under the terms of the “emergency.” Those arrested at the Human Rights Commission are still under detention and have been charged with unspecified offences ineligible for bail, adding a Kafkaesque element to the crackdown. They were first moved to house detention, when the authorities turned some private homes into sub-jails and bundled around 30 into each house. Then, they were suddenly transferred to Kot Lakhpat Jail, a brutal prison on the outskirts of Lahore. I left Pakistan when I was 5 with my parents but the rest of my family remained in the country, mostly in our hometown of Lahore. Now it seemed, as I called around to friends and family, that half the people I knew in that city, Pakistan’s throbbing cultural centre, were incarcerated. In Islamabad, large swaths are now blocked off by heavy police cordons. No one is allowed to approach the area where the judges live, now locked into their houses. Police at the barricades said yesterday they had specific orders to prevent any lawyer or journalist stepping onto Constitution Avenue, which houses the Supreme Court, the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, the parliament building and the Election Commission. The state broadcaster, PTV, which had previously been viewed by so few people that many had forgotten its existence, is now the only source of television news. Its bizarre news bulletins, which do not report the arrest of hundreds across the country and international condemnation, show Gen. Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz going about normal government business. We now scrabble around for news on websites and trade gossip over the phone. “What are you hearing?” seems to be the start of everyone’s conversation. The owners of private channels have been told that if they want to go back on air, they have to sign up to a “code of conduct” that includes a stricture not to broadcast anything that “defames, brings into ridicule or disrepute” Gen. Musharraf, any member of the armed forces, or the executive. We learned yesterday of the first assault on the print media. Presses in Karachi owned by the publisher of the country’s biggest-selling paper in the national language, Urdu, were raided by police - apparently on hearing that a special supplement was being put out. Government functionaries informed the press manager of a hitherto unknown new regulation: Special supplements are no longer allowed. In the absence of reliable news sources, wild rumours and speculation crisscross the country. I received calls yesterday from contacts ranging from Karachi in the south to Peshawar in the northwest. All had independently heard the same story: that Gen. Musharraf had been toppled in an internal army coup by the No. 2 General, Ashfaq Kiyani. This rumour was so strong that the government had to put out a denial, adding that Gen. Musharraf was so relaxed in the new dispensation that he planned to play tennis in the afternoon.
Poster Comment: Sounds like how some forums are run.
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