Resisting Martial Law (Just Don't Tell Mom)

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 9, 2007 — -- Pakistan's fastest-growing guerrilla force is less worried about getting jailed by President Pervez Musharraf than getting in trouble with mom and dad.

Amid a media crackdown that has knocked TV news off the air and threatened journalists who criticize Musharraf with jail terms, Pakistani students have come together over the Internet. But please don't tell their parents.

They're finding new ways to meet virtually in a country where police are brutally putting down street protests.

"I can't talk on this line. It's probably under surveillance," Rashid, a leading student activist at Lahore University of Management Sciences tells me when I reach him on his mobile phone. He calls back a minute later from another line. Like other students interviewed, he only wanted to be identified by one name.

Rashid and a group of friends have launched the Emergency Times (pakistanmartiallaw.blogspot.com), a daily newsletter that provides legal explanation, commentary and regular updates of Pakistan's widening political crisis.

"When martial law was imposed, we decided we had to do something," he explains.

The first edition set out to analyze Musharraf's legal explanation for suspending the Constitution. It started getting passed around by e-mail, and before long, students all over the country were getting in contact, wanting more information. Pakistanis studying abroad also got in, flooding Rashid with requests for news.

Less than a week since emergency rule was imposed, they are handing out hundreds of copies of Emergency Times a day on the Lahore campus. The Web edition is e-mailed to thousands -- no one knows exactly how many. "Now we are updating it constantly," says Rashid.

In a country where half the population is illiterate and only 12 percent have access to the Internet, Rashid now wants to get their daily report into the Urdu print and radio media. "We believe we have a role, as students, to play in all of this," he says.

Under martial law, there's no freedom of speech or right to gather. Young Pakistanis who fear arrest if they meet in person are coming together in a host of chat rooms to discuss the political crisis --