Pak varsity bars Bangla professor's attendance in conference

Pakistan has refused to allow a prominent Bangladeshi foreign relations expert from attending a conference in Karachi apparently for his write-ups on the 1971 liberation war, reports said here today.
"I was supposed to fly to Pakistan on December 1 but they (Karachi University administration) have told me not to go," Imtiaz Ahmed, a professor of International Relations department and director of Centre for Genocide Studies at Dhaka University said.
Ahmed suspected the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami of Bangladesh might have raised questions about his writings on the Liberation War which prompted the Karachi University (KU) authorities to bar him from joining the conference.

"I am surprised hearing the decision," he told a Bangladeshi news agency while calling the university's decision a "barrier to freedom of speech".
The Bangladeshi professor was supposed to present the keynote paper at the conference titled "Challenges of Transition in Social Sciences".
"I didn't write anything against the people of Pakistan. I wrote about the role of Pakistan in 1971 which is known to all," he said, defending his papers on the 1971 war.

Pakistan's Dawn newspaper also carried a report, saying, "Giving in to pressure from a student organisation, the administration of KU recently stopped a Bangladesh-based scholar from participating in a conference."

The KU's decision came two weeks after Bangladesh issued a diplomatic note strongly protesting a recent resolution of Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) provincial assembly on the conviction of a Jamaat leader on 1971 war crimes charges.
Earlier in November, the foreign office summoned the Pakistani envoy to denounce Pakistani home minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan for his comments against 1971 war crimes trial and asked "vested quarters in Pakistan to mind their own business and set their house in order".
Bangladesh has been demanding apology from Pakistan for the atrocities carried out by its troops in 1971.
Officially three million people had died during the nine-month long liberation war against Pakistan.