In the Heart of Pakistan, a Deep Sense of Anxiety

Opposition party leaders were arrested in Peshawar, northwestern Pakistan, during a rally Tuesday to protest the government's imposition of emergency rule. (Photo by Mohammad Zubair -- AP)

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Government officials have defended the emergency measures, saying that certain elements are a threat to law and order. They have also said that the judges who were removed from the Supreme Court had released militants from prison for political reasons.

As part of the emergency measures, the government has also blocked transmissions by privately owned television stations.

Hamid Mir, an anchor with Pakistan's independent Geo TV network, said Tuesday that Geo's chief executive had been taken to a safe house operated by the country's Inter-Services Intelligence service, or ISI, and accused of "anti-Pakistan activities."

That was followed up by an e-mail in which the CEO, Shakil Rahman, was warned that "Pakistan Army is the backbone of Pakistan, don't try to damage it." If he did, the e-mail continued, he and his family "would be hunted down like rats."

The activists arrested during the meeting of the Human Rights Commission of Lahore are now being referred to as the "Lahore 70." They were denied bail by a court here; some were taken to prison, others were placed under house arrest.

Relatives and supporters have held a candlelight vigil and are now speaking out.

"My 61-year-old educator mother was jailed for attending a meeting to talk about how to make a better Pakistan," said Zaki Rehman, a corporate lawyer, whose mother is a high school principal in Lahore. "She's not Osama bin Laden hiding in some rocky hill station. The level of violence against civil society and those seeking to question Musharraf's rule is making this one of Pakistan's darkest periods in an already sad history."

"Where are the mass arrests in the border areas?" said Sarwat Ali, a professor of music at the National College of Arts. "That's not happening. To the government, the terrorists are those social and political groups who are ready to speak up."

On the college's leafy campus, where the English writer Rudyard Kipling once helped set up a museum, some students and professors said it was ironic that thousands of military personnel had been diverted from fighting terrorists to the edges of campuses and court buildings across the country.

"In art, we must use the general to address the specific," said Shahid Sajjad, 72, Pakistan's most famous sculptor, whose gray locks were pulled back into a ponytail as he hosted the opening day of an exhibit of his work at the college. "Artists must think in terms of all human pain, which is the same all over the world. When we do that and send it around the world through art, we can see that in Pakistan we are facing a lot of pain right now, and we need to work our way out of this chaos."

His favorite piece on display was a towering statue of two human figures holding a collapsed corpse. The body, said Sajjad, his eyebrows raised, represents "knowledge being held captive."

Correspondent Griff Witte in Islamabad and special correspondent Imtiaz Ali in Peshawar contributed to this report.