Since Monday of last week, we've been hosting a Pakistan News Hunt with the Huffington Post's Eyes & Ears team of citizen journalists. Over a hundred HuffPost members have joined forces with our community to find good journalism on Pakistan, and together we've reviewed 138 stories so far, from reports on the recent violence in Gojra to the plight of refugees from the Swat region and Pakistan's evolving relations with Afghanistan, India and the U.S. Check our first week's results for this News Hunt, as well as our partner Matt Palevsky's excellent blog post on HuffPost.
Here's an update on our progress so far. We will post our final News Hunt results next Wednesday, August 12th. This means you have until Sunday to join our Pakistan News Hunt. Do it today!
Pakistan News Update
Last week was tumultuous for Pakistan on several fronts. As hundreds of thousands of displaced Pakistanis made a cautious return home from refugee camps to the devastated Swat Valley, religious violence rocked the city of Gojra, where Muslim mobs killed eight Christians and burned some 100 homes. And in Islamabad, Pakistan's Supreme Court declared the former President Pervez Musharraf's 2007 imposition of emergency rule illegal, turning down requests to try him for treason.
Despite these developments, coverage of Pakistan held a relatively low profile in U.S. and international news media. Major U.S. and U.K. newspapers provided our top rated coverage from outside Pakistan, but an array stories from Pakistani English-language papers and independent blogs gave us important details and perspectives not available elsewhere.
Violence in Gojra
The weekend's outburst of anti-Christian violence in Gojra brought many observers to attention. Hundreds of Muslims, driven by rumors that a Qur'an had been desacrated, attacked the city's Christian minorities in what the New York Times reported (NT reviews) was an eight-hour rampage:
"The blistered black walls of the Hameed family’s bedroom tell of an
unspeakable crime. Seven family members died here on Saturday, six of
them burned to death by a mob that had broken into their house and shot
the grandfather dead, just because they were Christian ...
"The attack in this shabby town in central Pakistan — the culmination of
several days of rioting over a claim that a Koran had been defiled —
shows how precarious life is for the tiny Christian minority in
Pakistan."
The Christian Science Monitor reported (NT reviews) the Gojra killings marked the third attack on Pakistani Christians in the past month, and warned that some might invoke Pakistan's blasphemy laws to rationalize the violence.
Dawn covered (NT reviews) Pakistani Christians' three-day of mourning of the attacks, and condemned (NT reviews) the violence on its blog. Dawn blogger Nadeem F. Paracha criticized the local government for doing "absolutely nothing" protect Christians:
"Smaller incidents of persecution of the Christians have never stopped,
but Gojra tells us that holocausts can repeat themselves as civic
virtue declines in Pakistan under the influence of extremism ...
"These are signals of doom. And the crime is being committed by the
non-state actors that were once considered “assets” of the
military-state. Their dominance in Punjab is well established and their
control over local population to the detriment of local administration
is also well known. The laws mean nothing under these circumstances."
Supreme Court Ruling
A long-awaited and substantial development in Pakistan's political sphere came late last week, when the Supreme Court ruled former president Pervez Musharraf's emergency powers decree in 2007 was unconstitutional, but declined to open a treason trial against him. Dawn ran (NT reviews) a well-received report on the story, and a blogger at Five Rupees weighed in (NT reviews) on the court's decision:
"the judiciary (and by that I mean [Chief Justice Iftikhar] Chaudhary) thinks Musharraf is irrelevant now that he is no longer in power. Therefore it makes little sense to waste time, energy, and political capital, and risk considerable political turmoil, for someone who doesn't matter anymore ...
In a related story, the Washington Post ran a highly rated op-ed on how Pakistani leaders have manipulated (NT reviews) pro-democracy forces in the country for political gain.
For a full listing of our top rated stories since the News Hunt started, click here.
Join the News Hunt
Our Pakistan News Hunt with Huffington Post continues through Sunday, August 8th. We hope you'll join the hunt before it ends and start reviewing reports on Pakistan from around the world.
We'd also like to welcome our new co-host for this Pakistan News Hunt, Emma Asomba, who joined us from Huffington Post last week, and will help us lead this community effort for the rest of the week -- keep an eye out for his insightful reviews on our Pakistan page. See you there!
-- Derek Hawkins, with Fabrice Florin, Kaizar Campwala and Joey Baker
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