Thursday, November 4, 2010
2 p.m. – 4 p.m.
Joukowsky Forum
Najam Sethi -- AF-PAK Politics and Strategy
"AF-PAK Politics and Strategy," with Najam Sethi, Editor, Friday Times, Lahore, Pakistan.
Najam Sethi was educated at Government College, Lahore and Cambridge University, UK. He is Pakistan’s most decorated journalist. Newsweek magazine called him “a crusading editor” for his campaigns against corruption in government in the 1990s, for which he was imprisoned in 1999 by the Nawaz Sharif government and set free by the Supreme Court of Pakistan. As an “equal opportunity offender”, he braved imprisonment during the regimes of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s and General Zia ul Haq in the 1980s. He also has three international press freedom awards to his credit for courage in journalism: Golden Pen Award 2009 from the World Editor’s Forum and World Association of Newspapers; Courage in Journalism Award 1999 from the Committee to Protect Journalists, New York; and Press Freedom Award 1999 from Amnesty International, UK.
He is the Founder Editor-in-Chief of The Friday Times, Pakistan’s most outspoken secular liberal weekly paper and the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Daily Times and Daily Aajkal, from 2001-2009, both national secular liberal papers. He is currently Editor-in-Chief/Executive Director of Dunya TV, a national news broadcasting network, where he appears thrice weekly as a political commentator. For many years he wrote the Pakistan report in The Economist Intelligence Unit and still remains the Pakistan Correspondent of The Economist, London.
He writes op-ed articles for world newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, The Independent, UK, and various Indian and European papers and is a regular media commentator on top TV and Radio channels of India and Pakistan, including BBC; NPR, NDTV, CNN, etc.
Location: Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Reception to follow.
Cosponsored by the Brown-Harvard-MIT Joint Seminar on South Asian Politics, the Watson Institute for International Studies, and the Brown Afghanistan Working Group.