Zafaryab Ahmed received the first annual fellowship of the Oak Institute for the Study of International Human Rights--a one-semester fellowship established to allow a front-line human-rights worker to take a sabbatical for research, writing, lecturing and teaching as a scholar-in-residence at Colby. For the inaugural fellowship, Ahmed was selected from 68 nominees, in part because he fit the preferred criteria of being involved in on-the-ground human rights work at some level of personal risk.     Though teaching is only one direction the fellowship can head, Ahmed is conducting a course, International Studies 298: Human Rights--Child Labor. Response on campus is enthusiastic; when 54 students registered he had to split the group and teach two sections. One section includes all of the Pakistani students at Colby, and discussions have been lively and, at times, contentious.     "Child labor is a very volatile topic--a topic where everyone has a strong opinion," said Aida Khan '01, who is from Karachi. Initially she felt compelled to challenge some of Ahmed's generalizations about Pakistan, "to balance out the view that everyone else in the class gets of Pakistan." She realized that this was a patriotic reflex, and she realized that her early attempts to give perspective to Pakistan's problems may have made it sound as if she favored child labor. "Maybe the first class you go in there with a closed mind because you're defensive," she said. But as freewheeling discussions have looked at various human-rights issues through the lenses of economics and history and politics, she has relaxed and opened up. "There's so much to learn," she said.     Asked if Ahmed's teachings at Colby would get him in trouble with the Pakistani government, Khan said, "I don't know if he can get into any more trouble." Ahmed's criticism, however, is not reserved for his own country's actions by any means; he is equally critical of U.S. policies on human-rights abuses around the world.     Besides teaching, Ahmed is busy with speaking engagements around Maine--at other colleges, in public schools and for various conferences. He was planning a Children's Rights Day program later in the semester.     The Oak Institute was established with a major endowment from the Oak Foundation. The deadline for nominations for next year's Oak fellow passed January 1, and a selection committee was reviewing dossiers to choose the second Oak Human Rights Fellow, who will be announced this spring. In addition to the fellowship, the institute supports human-rights programs on campus and scholarships for international students at Colby. Iqbal was sold or "bonded" by his mother to a carpet manufacturer at the age of 4, when his tiny hands were his most valuable asset. At age 10, Iqbal escaped with the help of the BLLF and began a new career speaking at rallies, encouraging thousands of other children to follow his footsteps to freedom. He became an international celebrity and in 1994 won the Reebok Human Rights Youth in Action Award. He appeared on 60 Minutes and in other Western media, and he dreamed of becoming a lawyer. Then, on Easter Sunday 1994 he was shot dead while riding a bicycle in his home village. Another youth confessed to the shooting but later recanted, and the BLLF contended that the carpet-industry "mafia" was responsible, angered by a drop in carpet exports that it attributed to Iqbal's campaign.     Ahmed, who calls Iqbal "a valiant soldier for human rights," pressed for an independent investigation of the boy's death in his columns that appeared in Pakistan's national news media. For his efforts he was branded "the Indian agent" and his cause was labeled the "Western, Jewish and Indian media campaign against Pakistan." During the spring of 1995 he agreed in a phone call to travel to Rome to meet an Indian filmmaker who wanted to make a film based on Iqbal's life. When Pakistani federal agents arrested him at his home on June 5, 1995, Ahmed knew that the BLLF phones had been tapped.     Zafayab Ahmed is no go-along-to-get-along middle-class intellectual. Pakistan is a society with monumental problems, and Ahmed is a self-proclaimed crusader and career troublemaker. He was born in 1953, six years after Pakistan gained independence from India. He is from Lahore, the capital of Pakistan's Punjab province and the nation's second-largest city, with more than five million residents. His country declared martial law when he was in the first grade and went to war with India when he was in junior high school. He got involved in politics, working with an aunt on behalf of Fatimah Jinnah, a local candidate who mounted a strong challenge against the military dictatorship. By the time he was 15 and in college (equivalent to high school in the U.S. education system) he was active in the student movement that would grow into a major opposition movement in Pakistan. It was then, he says, that he began working for civil and human rights, and it was also when he was first beaten at a demonstration. "The next day the newspaper headline was, `Local student leader injured,'" he said. Asked if he was emboldened as a result, he replied, "No, scared. And my parents were furious."     But they could not keep him home. And just as French and American students threatened revolution during the late 1960s, Pakistani students protested too. Ahmed marched with workers, fellow students, teachers and peasants protesting the authoritarian bureaucracy and civil rights violations. He grew accustomed to getting arrested with dozens of his comrades only to be released the same evening. Later, as an undergraduate student at Punjab University majoring in political theory and European history, he decided that all political power structures corrupt people, and he gave up on the hierarchical student protest movement to become, in his own words, "an independent free-agent troublemaker." At about the same time, he says, many of his peers were graduating and sitting for the civil service examinations.     In the mid-1970s he earned his first master's degree, still at Punjab University, studying international relations and politics and Eastern and Western political thought. His thesis was on the mass protests in which he had participated during 1968-69. Though never a Maoist himself, he says Mao Zedong was popular in Pakistan because China supported Pakistan in the 1965 war against India and because Mao's "power to the people" slogans were seductive to a populace trying to shake free of an authoritarian regime. But his master's work ultimately led him to conclude that China's brand of socialism could not be replicated in another society; neither was Pakistan ripe for democracy. "We didn't understand our society historically and structurally," he said, "and any social change movement cannot succeed without an understanding of the social and political structure of the society." Slogans and convictions were not enough to bring meaningful reforms to his troubled country. Ahmed continued his studies at the University of Manchester in England, where he earned a second master's degree, in sociology.     He returned to his country to teach and had appointments at Aitchison College and the University of Agriculture at Faisalabad. But he got into disagreements over the content of his courses or his principles and moved on. In Karachi he helped establish a non-governmental organization for working class children and then moved into journalism, working for the English-language Dawn. He moved back to the Punjab province and eventually landed at Viewpoint, where he took up the cause against children and families in bonded labor in the brick kiln industry. His work there was reprinted in international journals, but Viewpoint closed in the early 1990s for lack of funds.     When his public calls for an independent investigation of Iqbal Masih's murder and his intention to work on a film about the martyr landed him in the Lahore jail, he was adopted as a "Prisoner of Conscience" by Amnesty International. Amnesty and The Body Shop later named him one of 12 Defenders of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He spent two months in prison before local and international pressure prompted a sympathetic judge to order his release for medical reasons. Amnesty International still maintains a campaign to have the sedition charge dropped. "They don't have any evidence," Ahmed told his Colby audience. " But I'm the most dangerous kind of criminal," he said, the sense of humor in clear view. "I don't know what they will do. They can do anything. They can call me an American agent now."     Despite spending two months in the Lahore prison in Pakistan, despite possibly facing death by hanging on charges of treason and conspiracy, despite having been without gainful employment for all but eight months since his release from prison, Ahmed loves his home country and lives to improve it. "Somebody has to shout. Somebody has to be the bad boy," he said. "I am willing to go back. I will go back. I can't leave my country to them." Though he ignored the 90-day limit on travel that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif arranged, Ahmed says he will return to Pakistan either when his trial begins or when it is clear that he will be more effective there in his crusade to help free South Asian children from the virtual slavery of the bonded labor system.