Guess Who Will be Saved?

Anti-Musharraf campaign by mobile phone
By Irfan Ghauri
Daily Times, June 5, 2007

ISLAMABAD: With the government taking increasingly stringent measures to gag the media, text messages, popularly known as SMS, critical of President General Pervez Musharraf, the government and its allies have started pouring into the mailboxes of mobile phone users.

Those initiating such messages remain anonymous and the message keeps circulating. Most of the messages have a derisive tone. Some use strong language.

One such message pretends to be a campaign letter from the president himself. It reads: “I kicked the elected prime minister out of the country... I appointed myself the president... I made the nuclear hero [sic] apologise for his services... I kidnapped more than 250 Pakistanis... I almost sold a steel mills for the price of plastic toys... I made the chief justice of the country beg for justice... I am shifting the General Headquarters (GHQ) to Islamabad for Rs 1,000 billion... Please vote for my Pakistan Muslim League (Q) chamchas... or don’t vote at all, so I can enlighten you some more with my Jamia Hafsa moderation... yours Mush!”

Another SMS poses the question: “If a boat carrying Musharraf, Shaukat Aziz and Altaf Hussain sinks, guess who will be saved?” “Pakistan”, goes the answer, as one scrolls down the SMS.

Still another message is “Imagine the pleasure of living in a land where the chief justice cannot get justice for himself and the army chief security for his life.”