Noor e Maryam Kanwer and husband Jaffer Abbas Mirza have only been in London a year and are already an integral part of a small but thriving Pakistani activist community in the UK that most recently was successful in preventing former president Pervez Musharraf from one, possibly two, events.

The first was at SOAS, which got plenty of media coverage, and the other was in Slough, details of which are still unclear. Kanwer explained that the same activists were responsible for both cancellations, with the difference that the second time round merely the fear of protests was enough for organisers to call off the event.

Hassan Bajwa, an accountant who lives in Slough and is part of the Awami Workers Party, agreed. He did say that the meeting was shifted to a Hilton hotel in the London borough of Hounslow because Slough was considered too small a city and that the Hilton was unable to provide the general with personal security. But there was most likely also fears on the part of the APML that Musharraf would be heckled, as word of the protests made the rounds.

In any case, Bajwa said the AWP, working with the PPP and ANP, were fully ready to protest.

Meanwhile, the SOAS event was cancelled when the World Baloch Organisation, the World Sindhi Congress, the Pakistan Solidarity Campaign, the AWP and individual activists and students complained about the university giving a platform to a former dictator who had asbconed from a country where is wanted in courts.

“I think it has set a good precedent, its very rare to see all these groups come together,” Kanwer said.

A campaign was also started on Change.org, which got 965 signatures, which said that allowing the event to take place would “send the wrong message that London is open to genocidal war criminals and will tarnish the name and image of SOAS, University of London and the British Government.” It was signed by "Concerned Citizens Uk, Pakistan Solidarity Campaign and the AWP UK."

The activists also got SOAS Welfare & Campaigns officer Dimitri Cautain on board to support their cause, as well as many students, pakistani and international.

Had the event gone through, the groups had decided they would stage a protest outside the event. Some people even contacted Kanwer asking if they could bring eggs and tomatoes to hit the man with.

Kanwer admitted a small part of her was disappointed the event was called off as she believed the protest would have been a sight to behold. Musharraf would have had a shoe thrown at him, at the very least, she said.

“We had this idea to chase Musharraf wherever he may go,” she said, adding that “We don’t have anything against him personally but he should not be allowed to legitimise himself.”

The protest against the SOAS event got the activists charged and created momentum for the them to raise issue against the ex general being in the UK in the first place, as they believe in democracy and want him to go back to Pakistan and face the courts.This sentiment is likely to have become stronger now that the ATC has declared Musharraf an absconder in the Benazir Bhutto murder case.

They decided to hold a protest outside 10 Downing Street and submitted a letter to UK PM Theresa May’s office, with similar wordings to the SOAS petition, demanding Muhsarraf be banned from the UK. The PM office has not yet responded.

##The Pakistani activist community in the UK

It is hard to get an idea of just how many Pakistani activists there are in the country. Bajwa said there are about 8-10 AWP workers in Slough, and some 50 in London. They work with different parties and organisations, including the Pakistan Solidarity campaign, in which some 100 people are involved, including Kanwer and Mirza, and the World Sindhi Congress, which has 50 members. Bajwa said like minded activists get together often in London.

There are also activists in Birmingham and Bradford, though, like their counterparts in Slough, they are not always able to travel to London to attend protests.

Social media, Facebook and WhatsApp groups are an activist’s best friend and every time an issue is raised, a new group is created to mobilise interested parties, Kanwer explained. The main WhatsApp group she knows of has some 300+ activists, though they are spread out across the UK and Europe as well as internationally.

The advantage of protesting in the UK is that “the Pakistani government is all about image building” and so they are forced to take some action, said Kanwer.

“The beauty of protesting in Pakistan is you’re closer to the masses but being in the UK allows you to lobby internationally,” she explained. She and Mirza, a student at SOAS, have already held around 15 events at SOAS and UCL, including one called Being Hindu in Pakistan with the SOAS India Society.

The previous high profile protest they organised was in January, when they campaigned against the disappearance of activist bloggers. Many organisations, including the World Sindhi Congress, took part. Its chairman, Lakhu Luhana, echoed Kanwer's sentiments when he said issues that often get sidelined by the media in Pakistan can get attention if they are raised abroad.

The activists had a clear strategy in place at the time: protest at the Pakistani High Commission and at 10 Downing Street, and write letters to organisations that donate money to Pakistan to question what was going on. The activists only completed the first step before the bloggers were released.

Kanwer's career as an activist has come full circle. The first time she ever thought she needed to make a difference was when Musharraf declared emergency in the country in 2007. A shy university student in Islamabad with no idea what she was doing, she gathered her friends to arrange a protest in Blue Area, where she complied with police orders not to chant any slogans so as not to get arrested.

10 years later and she is still protesting against the military ruler. Between then and now she has been instrumental in the long march for missing Baloch people – keeping activists in her parents’ home when no one else would give them a place to stay, despite vowing never to involve her parents in her work – and has also protested against the sipah e sihaba. On that occasion, she willingly got arrested, believing that would bring some media attention to the protest and knowing she had done nothing wrong.

She will be speaking at a UN human rights convention in Geneva next month about the difficulties of women raising their voices in Pakistan, and at a parliamentary session in September about extremism, minorities and Afghanistan (she is unsure if she will bring up Musharrraf).

Asked if the protests would deter Musharraf from trying to speak in public in the UK again, she said "I dont think he will, but if he does, we are here.”