PAKISTAN: Teachers score victory

BY FAROOQ TARIQ &

RAJA MEHBOOB HUSSAIN

LAHORE — On August 8, the military government of President Pervez
Musharraf declared that its previously announced plan to privatise Pakistan's
educational institutions would not take place.

A month earlier, the announcement by Punjab provincial governor Lieutenant-General
Khalid Maqbool that state schools would be denationalised sparked a protest
movement of teachers across Punjab.

On July 29, about 200 teachers were arrested in Lahore while they were
trying to enter a girls college for a protest meeting. The police's brutal
handling of the mostly women teachers provoked widespread public outrage.

Almost all political parties, trade unions and other civil society organizations
supported the teachers.

Fearing that the teachers' protest movement would spread from Punjab
to other areas of Pakistan, the military regime decided to make a retreat
on its schools privatisation plan.

[Raja Mehboob Hussain is the information secretary of the Punjab Professors
and Lecturers Association. Farooq Tariq is general secretary of the Labour
Party Pakistan.]

From Green Left Weekly, August 21, 2002.

Visit the Green Left Weekly
home page. 

From GLW issue 505