Pakistan to deport Code Pink protesters

Pakistan authorities today ordered the deportation of the leader of the feminist U.S. antiwar group Code Pink, who was in Lahore to join protests against the emergency rule imposed by President Pervez Musharraf, according to a spokeswoman for the group.

Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of the group, said she was arrested at a student demonstration by agents of the Pakistan Inter-Service Intelligence and detained for about four hours before being released with orders to leave the country tomorrow morning. Pakistan officials told Ms. Benjamin that she was being deported for joining illegal protests.

"I'm OK — a little shaken up," Ms. Benjamin told The Washington Times by telephone from her hotel in Lahore. "They mistreated us."

Ms. Benjamin said she feared for her life as the agents held her at gunpoint in a car speeding through the city to the police station.

"I thought I was going to die in the car," she said. "They totally terrorized us."

Pakistani authorities also detained and then ordered the deportation of Tighe Barry, a longtime Code Pink activist who was participating with the student rally outside the Lahore Press Club.

"It's a sad state of affairs when the Pakistani government, a government that is trying to portray itself to the West as democratic, tries to harass and deport U.S. human rights activists," Ms. Benjamin said at the press club before her arrest. "If they do this to us, who have the protection of being U.S. citizens, imagine what they do to their own citizens."

Code Pink activists are arrested regularly in Washington for disrupting congressional hearings on the war, targeting Democrats and Republicans with protests.

Copy right: The Washington Times