By Manjeet Kripalani
Tuesday, November 13 2007 01:36 PM
URL: http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/internet/0,39044908,62034343,00.htm

Aided by the Internet and emergence of Web tools such as Facebook, students and local media in Pakistan have found several ways to bypass the government's media blackout and galvanize the community.

On Nov. 7, at 2 p.m., about 1,000 students of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), the most elite business school in Pakistan, gathered to protest recent actions by President Pervez Musharraf and the arrests of several lawyers.

The students, mostly children of Pakistan's intelligentsia and middle classes, learnt that on Nov. 4--the day after Musharraf imposed the rule of emergency on the country--police had entered the premises of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and dragged away over 70 of Lahore's best minds, including lawyer and human rights activist Asma Jehangir, and locked them in jail or put them under house arrest.

A complete blackout of cable television, which is the most pervasive medium in Pakistan, radio and the Urdu press blocked images from public view, but word spread.

The students decided to participate in the protests. That was when the blogging began.

On Nov. 5, blog site The Emergency Times and an attendant wiki emerged.

Describing itself as "an independent Pakistani student initiative against injustice and oppression", The Emergency Times  gave readers a regular update and comments on the emergency rule, and student activities against it across Pakistan.

Others followed suit, including Metroblogging Lahore and Metroblogging Karachi, all of which began posting comments about the crisis and its impact on Pakistani cities.

Facebook users joined in, using the social networking site's Event Info to inform students of Islamabad's Hamdard University to gather outside the college, in support of other protesting students at LUMS, as well as Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad and Punjab University in Lahore.

The Facebook tagline: "The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall."

Upon his return from the Nov. 7 protests, Facebook member A. Moiz Penkar, wrote: "Just came back from there. Made me very sad but hopeful. Big thumbs up to everyone who came!"

Cyber call of protest
Pakistan may be under military siege, but its citizens have found a place to make themselves heard through the sophisticated use of the Internet.

An unexpected but robust underground e-resistance movement is under way in Pakistan, spanning from blogs, to flash mobs, to e-mail, to streaming video broadcasts, to mobile phone multimedia and text messages.

Pakistan's student community may be made up of young members of the country's elite, but they have become a vital addition to the lawyers' democracy movement.

The students, and Pakistan's independent media--such as the Geo, Aaj, and ARY television channels--have moved rapidly to the Internet to disseminate news and information locally, as much as possible, and to galvanize the Pakistani Diaspora and international community.

"It's not really the ingenuity of the medium, but citizens' journalism coming out in unprecedented force," said Kiran Khalid, a New York-based American-Pakistani freelance reporter working on a documentary on media censorship in Pakistan.

Indeed, the LUMS protest sparked one in Boston, U.S., at the same time--thanks again to Facebook. News of a protest by opposition leader Benazir Bhutto also sparked one in London, U.K., led by Jemima Khan, the former wife of another opposition leader, Imran Khan, who is under house arrest.

Students have been holding "flash" protests in Karachi, the country's commercial capital.

Through mobile text messages, students have been gathering across the city, shouting protest slogans, and disappearing quickly before the police arrive.

For ordinary Pakistanis, mobile text messages have proved a saving grace, and one not yet withdrawn by Musharraf.

Internet penetration in Pakistan is low, but the country is one of the world's fastest-growing mobile phone markets, with user numbers growing 73 percent in the past year.

The country of 160 million currently has 67 million cellular subscribers.

Leading the information dissemination charge, however, are Web sites, the most popular being pkpolitics.com.

Run from London, the site posts daily news updates, newspaper Web sites and streaming video interviews by Pakistan's most popular--and now gagged--television hosts, Talat Hussain of Aaj TV and Hamid Mir of Geo TV.

Soon after their channels were pulled off the air, the TV hosts found a way to film, record and ship stories out via Dubai, where it is beamed to the world via cable TV and the Internet.

Anil Kalhan, a professor of law at Fordham Law School in New York, runs his own Web site and has been writing on the legality of Musharraf's moves for Asia Media as well as blogging on Dorf on Law.

Manan Ahmed, a Pakistani PhD student a the University of Chicago, also runs his own site chapatimystery.com, which features pictures of the protests against Musharraf.

"With the media being muzzled, there will be lots of rumor and misinformation spread through official sources in Pakistan," Manan said. "The Internet is keeping this agitation alive, and this is very, very important because when the next catalyst for change against Musharraf surfaces, there will be accurate information out there for them to rely on."