Federal Information Minister Dr Firdous Ashiq Awan has proved to be a visionary by spearheading the creation of the 17-point Pakistan’s true-face programme to be pursued with the active participation of media as well as press officers posted abroad, particularly in Western countries, for which purpose the Information Ministry recently conducted a capacity-building consultative conference.
It was the brainchild of the minister and she must be congratulated for conceiving such a comprehensive exercise that aims at rebuilding Pakistan’s image, correcting the world perceptions about our country in line with our actual realities. It was needed decades ago and its need became more compelling in the wake of negative propaganda unleashed with perseverance by Pakistan’s adversaries both on the eastern border and in the rest of the world.
Now, who does not know that the Western world in particular had started painting quite an ugly picture of Pakistan, projecting it as some medieval state that knows no civilisation or the basic concept of peaceful coexistence? Actual facts are altogether different from this projected (ugly) image. Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani’s government, especially Information Minister Dr Awan, acted very wisely and timely to arrest this decline of our national image and took the initiative of enhancing the abilities of our press officers posted in our embassies besides giving them the targets to achieve without being let down by challenges coming from different directions.
Equal stress was laid down during the Information Ministry’s consultative conference organised by its External Publicity Wing, to ensure orientation of journalists through press officers to enable them to have access at international level and promote the country’s image abroad.
Elaborating this point, Dr Awan has disclosed that the participants of the conference were of the view that interaction of senior journalists and intellectuals from Pakistan with think tanks of other countries would help project Pakistan’s point of view on the issues of national importance.
