Najam Sethi received a prestigious press freedom award Tuesday for his work in the face of constant death threats. Sethi, editor-in-chief of the Friday Times, accepted the 2009 Golden Pen of Freedom from the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), warning that extremists now posed as great a threat to press freedoms as repressive governments.
Speaking at the WAN's annual conference in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, Sethi noted that the Taliban had prevented the sale of his newspapers in areas of Pakistan under their control and had placed him on a hit-list along with three other Pakistani journalists.
"My family live in a constant state of siege, guarded by eight police commandos around the clock," Sethi said. A long-time advocate of a substantial peace dialogue between South Asian nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, Sethi said the media in both countries were "entrapped by a narrow nationalism" that provided a powerful barrier to government-to-government contact.