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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan eased its crackdown on opponents Saturday, releasing opposition leader Benazir Bhutto from house arrest and saying it will lift a state of emergency within a month. But the government blocked a meeting between the deposed Supreme Court justice and Bhutto, who pledged to lead a 185-mile protest march.

Bhutto, apparently unbowed by her brief detention, said she would defy Musharraf's ban on public gatherings and lead supporters on a march from the eastern city of Lahore to Islamabad on Tuesday.

"When the masses combine, the sound of their steps will suppress the sound of military boots," Bhutto, a former prime minister, told around 100 journalists protesting a new media clampdown.

Musharraf insists he called the week-old emergency to help fight Islamic extremists who control swaths of territory near the Afghan border. But the main targets of his subsequent crackdown in this nation of 160 million people have been his most outspoken critics, including the increasingly independent courts and media.

Thousands of people have been arrested, TV news stations taken off the air, and judges removed. On Saturday, three reporters from Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper were ordered to leave Pakistan for an editorial in the paper that used an expletive in an allusion to Musharraf, said Deputy Information Minister Tariq Azim.

A heavy security cordon around Bhutto's Islamabad villa kept her under house arrest for 24 hours, but she was allowed to leave Saturday morning, meeting first with party colleagues and then addressing the journalists' protest.

But dozens of helmeted police blocked her white, bulletproof Land Cruiser when she tried to visit Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, the independent-minded chief justice who was removed from his post following Musharraf's state of emergency.

The moves have prompted sharp criticism from the United States, Musharraf's chief international backer, and last week he said parliamentary elections initially slated for January would be held no more than a month later.