Youths silent rally met with force in Pakistan

BY JAMES RUPERT
Published: November 14, 2007

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan

Ahsan Pirzada and his high-school buddies spread the word via Facebook, e-mail and cell phone text messages: Let's meet at McDonald's after school on Monday.

But not to hang out. About 100 students pulled out banners, taped their mouths shut in symbolic protest and marched silently toward the office of President Pervez Musharraf. Before they had gone 1,000 yards, truckloads of police, including an anti-terrorist squad, swooped in and dispersed the threat, hauling about 50 teens to a police station.

The students, from well-off families and elite private schools, "were peacefully making the point that we do not accept this" emergency rule by Musharraf, said Pirzada, a polite young man with a constantly beeping cell phone.

The teenagers' march, and an unusual wave of campus rallies, is part of widening protest against Musharraf's 10-day-old seizure of total government powers. But while Pakistanis appear nearly united in opposing his actions, it is still mainly urbanites of the tiny elite and the small middle class who are taking to the streets.

"We know that many people cannot afford to join us," said Samad Khurram, a Harvard University student who stayed home this semester to work in the pro-democracy movement. "At least 30 percent of Pakistanis are surviving day to day on their wages. They can't afford to take off a day to protest" or to risk indefinite arrest.

Musharraf's government has arrested many thousands of political or human-rights activists and is trying to choke off protest by also keeping independent TV stations off the air.

Daily economic survival -- not politics -- was the focus on the grease-stained curb in Islamabad where Ali Irfan squatted yesterday, surrounded by steel and aluminum viscera of a car engine he was rebuilding. At 20, he's about the age of many of Monday's marchers, but never really went to school. He has worked for more than 12 years as a sidewalk mechanic -- 8 a.m. til 8 p.m. with Sundays off.

Might he protest against Musharraf? "I don't pay attention to that," Irfan said, shrugging.

"If he had children, he would even have no time to see them, much less think about politics," said Mansur, a middle-aged mechanic who gave a single name and who owns one of the businesses. Many young mechanics like Irfan make less than a dollar a day, and it can easily take a man until age 30 to be able to start his own shop and have the money to think of getting married, Mansur said.

Musharraf's opponents and Pakistani political scientists say a mass protest movement could topple the general. Historically, Pakistan's army has declined to defend discredited leaders against broad, popular uprisings. But with half of Pakistanis unable to read, illiteracy and poverty effectively prevent a mass pro-democracy movement as broad as those of Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine early this decade.

"We are finding people very hesitant" about joining protests, Khurram said. "They don't like Musharraf, but they are still sitting on the side, trying to gauge the situation. They're not sure it's worthwhile to go into the streets."

Another damper to protests is the growing lack of enthusiasm, and even cynicism, over civilian political party leaders. Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif each twice served as prime minister in the 1990s and are widely blamed for corruption.

An opinion poll in September, sponsored by the Washington-based International Republican Institute, found nearly half of Pakistanis believed Bhutto was exploring a political deal with Musharraf to "improve her personal situation," while just over a quarter thought she aimed to "bring democracy."

While Bhutto drew hundreds of thousands of supporters to Karachi last month, no political party has raised the kind of enthusiasm Pakistanis gave in the spring to former Chief Justice Muhammad Iftikhar Chaudhry. Pakistan's lawyers' associations organized rallies for Chaudhry that literally swamped his car amid adoring crowds throwing flower petals. Chaudhry, whom Musharraf dismissed as his first act under his emergency decrees, is under house arrest and effectively silenced.