On Eve of Pivotal Election, Pakistan Orders Times Reporter to Leave

By RICK GLADSTONE

Pakistan’s Interior Ministry has ordered the expulsion of the Islamabad bureau chief for The New York Times on the eve of national elections, the newspaper said Friday. The Times has strongly protested the move and is seeking his reinstatement.

The ministry did not give any detailed explanation for the expulsion order, which was delivered by police officers in the form of a two-sentence letter to the bureau chief, Declan Walsh, at 12:30 a.m. Thursday local time at his home.

“It is informed that your visa is hereby canceled in view of your undesirable activities,” the order stated. “You are therefore advised to leave the country within 72 hours.”

The timing of the order means that Mr. Walsh must exit Pakistan on the night of the elections, the first in the country’s history in which one elected civilian government completes its term and hands over power to another elected government.

Countering Extremism in Pakistan

Countering Extremism in Pakistan: Need of Political Approach

By Jamil Junejo

ESCALATING sectarian and religious violence has made a disquieting situation for religious minorities in particular and other vulnerable sections of society in general in the country. In just less than a year, a number of such cases from murders of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer and Federal Minister for Minorities Shahbaz Bhatti and mishandling of a 10-year-old Christian girl for her alleged misspelling of a word, the Sept 19 massacre of 26 Hazara Shia in Mastung to expulsion of Ahmedi students from a university in Punjab and scores of other such incidents have put the social, religious and sectarian harmony at peril.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations Kahane Chai is a splinter group of the terrorist group Kach.

“Kach is a hard-line Israeli militant group that advocates for the expulsion of Arabs from the biblical lands of Israel. The U.S. State Department listed it as a terrorist organization in 1994. Kach, as well as the splinter group Kahane Chai, condones violence as a viable method for establishing a religiously homogenous state. The group has not staged a large terrorist attack since 1994, although people affiliated with the groups have been arrested for “low-level attacks” since 2000, according to the State Department’s 2006 Country Report. In 2006 a U.S. Federal Court upheld that Kach was rightly listed as a terrorist organization in an appeal.? …

Read more » http://www.cfr.org/israel/kach-kahane-chai-israel-extremists/p9178

Sri Lankan Government orders expulsion of a Pakistani human rights activist‏

Peace Force Directress and Human rights protection officer ordered to quit country

–ordered on intelligence unit report –Imm. and Emigration Director

(Lanka-e-News, July 08, 2010, 10.50AM) Peace Force and non violence Directress, Tiffany Eastham of the SL division and Human rights protection coordinator Ali Pal have been informed by the Dept of Immigration and Emigration that their visas have been cancelled, and they cannot stay any longer in SL.

When Chulananda Perera, the Immigration and emigration Director General was asked about this visa cancellation, he stated that he had acted on the report furnished by the Govt. intelligence unit.

The decision to expel two chief Peace Force officers from SL amidst protests staged against the appointment of a Committee by Ban Ki Moon to advise him on the human rights violations in SL during the war has invited the focus and attention of all Organizations acting on behalf of human rights protection.

Read more >>- LANKAENNEWS