LAHORE: Speakers at a meeting on Saturday celebrated the long-awaited unity in the ranks of the journalists spurred by an `unkind` remark about a respected veteran who has always held the flag of freedom of expression aloft.

Mr Husain Nagi was the guest of honour at the first programme in a new Lahore Press Club (LPC) series, titled `A Story Spread Over Half A Century`. The meeting was held in the wake of a recent incident in the Supreme Court where the bench had spoken about Mr Nagi in a tone that led to widespread protests byjournalists.

The participants said the authority who had spoken harshly of Mr Nagi had actually done a favour to the journalist `community`: the statement had reunited the journalists who had set up a national joint action committee under none other than Mr Nagi to protect their rights and honour.

They said they stood firmly behind their own venerable Baba in the person of Nagi Sahib, `a role model of decency, truth, uprightness, honesty, wisdom and an untiring fighter for civil rights`.

Senior journalist Masoodullah Khan mentioned how Mr NagiLAHORE: Speakers at a meeting on Saturday celebrated the long-awaited unity in the ranks of the journalists spurred by an `unkind` remark about a respected veteran who has always held the flag of freedom of expression aloft.

Mr Husain Nagi was the guest of honour at the first programme in a new Lahore Press Club (LPC) series, titled `A Story Spread Over Half A Century`. The meeting was held in the wake of a recent incident in the Supreme Court where the bench had spoken about Mr Nagi in a tone that led to widespread protests byjournalists.

The participants said the authority who had spoken harshly of Mr Nagi had actually done a favour to the journalist `community`: the statement had reunited the journalists who had set up a national joint action committee under none other than Mr Nagi to protect their rights and honour.

They said they stood firmly behind their own venerable Baba in the person of Nagi Sahib, `a role model of decency, truth, uprightness, honesty, wisdom and an untiring fighter for civil rights`.

Senior journalist Masoodullah Khan mentioned how Mr Nagichallenged the authorities with his high quality and truthful newspapersPunjabTimes,PunjabPunch and Sajjan (Punjabi), and how he stood against Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto at the peak of his power.

Mr Nagi, who was interrogated in the infamous Lahore Fort cell and was jailed for more than once for resisting attempts to suppress the truth, told his audience in the Saturday meeting that he appeared before three military courts and went to jail and did it all very politely.

He recalled the incident of his expulsion from the Karachi University for demanding, as the president of the students` union, withdrawal of rustication orders of threestudentsfromBalochistan.

He started journalism with a job inthePakistanPressInternational in Karachi and there began a lifetime of struggle for the rights of journalists.

Mr Nagi said journalists from for the former East Pakistan played a leading role in the movement for the freedom of the press in the 1960s, rejecting Ayub Khan`s Press and Publication Ordinance and forcing several amendments to it.

As an office-bearer of the Punjab Union of Journalists, Nagi Sahib had spearheaded severalmovements for the rights of journalists during the Ayub, ZA Bhutto and Gen Ziaul Haq regimes.

`Journalists were united as they fought for their rights till Zia came in and divided them,` the veteran recalled. `They continued to stand divided afterwards on the basis oftheir self-interest.

The idea of creating the national-level JAC to tackle the issues faced by journalists in the country was floated by Imtiaz Alam. Alam was among the people who paid a tribute to Mr Nagi at Saturday`s meeting along withChaudhry Khadim Hussain, Khalid Chaudhry, Wajahat Masood, Shahbaz Mian and LPC President Azam Chaudhry. They expressed their resolve to fight against any move to tarnish the image of journalists and to chain the media.