Weinberg freshman Omar Khalid plays reporter for his friends in Pakistan. Their major news stations are down, so sometimes Khalid watches CNN so he can tell his friends 7,000 miles away what’s happening outside their doors.
“This is unacceptable,” Khalid said. “Press freedom is a right which has been guaranteed in the constitution of Pakistan. It’s not something the president has given. It’s the right of the citizens.”
The current crisis in Pakistan is taking place thousands of miles away, but it also affects Northwestern students with friends or family in Pakistan. Some students who are from Pakistan or have relatives there said they disagreed with the state of emergency declared Nov. 3 by Pakistani president and general Pervez Musharraf.
In recent weeks Musharraf has broadened presidential and military power, restricted Pakistani press and ordered the arrests of hundreds of judges, lawyers and political activists. He says he enacted a state of emergency to protect Pakistan against extremists and instill harmony in the country. Musharraf’s emergency ruling has led to an escalation of violence, including confrontations between security forces and protesters. The events have raised questions about authoritarianism in Musharraf’s regime.
“I think Musharraf is the right man for the job, but the steps that he is taking are absolutely unacceptable,” Khalid said. “He’s only uniting the opposition against him.”
Noreen Nasir, a Weinberg freshman who grew up in the U.S. but has relatives in Pakistan, spoke of GEO Television, a channel known for exposing government problems. The channel was banned after the emergency ruling.
“Most of the people in Pakistan don’t really know what’s going on because they don’t get anything besides what the government is telling them,” said Nasir. “We’re getting GEO (in the United States), but no one in Pakistan is. That’s really sad.”
However, Weinberg freshman Faizan Amlani, who came to the U.S. in August to attend NU, said he approved of Musharraf’s actions.
“This was bound to happen because the press had gone a bit too far,” Amlani said. “The press yielded the freedom the wrong way. Some issues are not supposed to be shown to the entire public.”
NU students with connections to Pakistan are also affected personally by the crisis.
“I was worried a lot when one of the major suicide bombings happened on the way that my sister goes to school,” Khalid said. “I also have a friend who lives a minute or two away from that place.”
Ateeq Rauf, a Medill graduate student , attended the Pakistani Lahore University of Management Sciences for his undergraduate degree. Two professors from the school were detained after a peaceful human rights discussion of which the president disapproved, Rauf said. One of the arrested teachers had taught Rauf while he was at school.
“It’s actually hard to believe sometimes what’s actually going on,” Rauf said. “This situation is one of the darker chapters of Pakistani history. It’s very disturbing and bleak.”
Nosherwan Yasin, a compliance officer for the Mental Health Services and Policy Program at the Feinberg School of Medicine who moved to America from Pakistan about 21 years ago, said Pakistan is used to this sort of conflict, and he is optimistic that things will be resolved eventually.
“Since people have lived through this before, they don’t feel Pakistan will collapse,” Yasin said. “They feel that everything will get better with time.”
Rauf said no one can really know what it’s like to be in midst of such conflict unless they live it.
“It’s a different perspective from the outside,” said Rauf. “One cannot imagine what it is like living in Pakistan, sitting from outside the country and gathering news and such … Evanston is totally, totally a very different world than Lahore (Pakistan) is at this point.”
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
Reach Heidi Kim at [email protected]
