For several months, unmanned American Predator drones have been flying over Northern Pakistan in what feels like daily missions. Local newspapers report the strikes that kill scores of people with disheartening ease. They say the ‘operations’ were ‘successful’.
Sometimes, they tell us that the dead were militants.
Sometimes they tell us they were Al Qaeda operatives.
Other times, they say they were part of the burgeoning Pakistani Taliban. They’re never civilians. There are never mistakes; the drones remove the possibility of human error.
This is terrorist hunting, American-style.
Dead women and children killed in their schools and fields are ‘human shields’, young boys armed with only blackboard slates in their local madrassahs, since they have no government schools to attend, are future jihadis, it is inconceivable that anything less than the hysterical is possible.
But never before have we allowed a foreign country, American or otherwise, to carry out strikes on our own soil. It’s unheard of.
Never before have we allowed machines to fly through our skies and kill our citizens for free, as if life here costs nothing and can be swiftly cancelled out if the political will is strong enough.
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Tonight, as I write this, the BBC is reporting that a US missile strike in North Waziristan has killed eight school children. Two missiles, fired from yet another drone, hit the school this morning. The school was near a supposed Taliban commander’s house.
The Pakistani Army issued a classic we’re investigating this response. The United States has said nothing. This is how wars are fought now.
The new President of Pakistan has hungrily asked for drone technology for himself; he needs it, he says, to fight Pakistan.
The new parliament has vowed vigorously to continue to help America, and its allies, the Pakistani Army, to launch successful operations against the terrorists. Or militants. Or Al Qaeda. Or schoolchildren, if they happen to get in the way.
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In 1984, during the height of Zia’s dictatorial repression, a bomb was planted in central Karachi’s popular Bori Bazaar. Bori Bazaar is a busy market named after the religious sect of Bohri Muslims who wear distinctive long petticoats and blouses with hijab-like hoods. When the bomb exploded, scores of women and children who frequent the bazaar to shop for fabric, beads and colourful homeware were among the injured.
Upon hearing the news Ali Sonara ran to the bazaar from his home nearby in Lyari. He was certain that the bomb had been planted by the military but if Bhutto activists raised protests, the neighbourhood would be swept and men would be swiftly carted off to jail or, worse, to stadiums for public lashings.
When Sonara arrived at Bori Bazaar he ran back and forth between ambulances helping to shift bodies onto stretchers. He coordinated blood donations and was dealing with the panicked families of the dead and injured as best he could when Zia’s Chief Minister, Ghous Ali Shah, turned up surrounded by film crews to survey the wreckage. Ali Shah claimed that the blast had been the work of the antimilitary activists, terrorists they called them then, and that the state would soon find these terror mongers and punish them without mercy.
As soon as Sonara saw Ali Shah, he raced over to him and punched him squarely in the face. It was the desperate act of a desperate man. The Chief Minister promptly arrested Sonara for planting the bomb in Bori Bazaar. He was later released without charge.
When, in May 1986, Benazir returned to Karachi from self-imposed exile in London, it was Sonara, with the help of several other prominent activists, notably Ali Hingoro, who arranged for her reception in the city. At the time, General Zia’s supporters in Sindh, the Muhajir Quami Movement (MQM) party, had been set up in Karachi to present an alternative to the People’s Party, whose power base was in the province.
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On 18 September, General Naserullah Babar, Benazir’s powerful Interior Minister who would proudly herald the Taliban in next-door Afghanistan as ‘my boys’, had taken to the floor of the National Assembly in Islamabad. General Babar announced that there were going to be, according to his top-level information, two bomb blasts in Karachi as a protest against the arrest of the terrorist Ali Sonara. He informed the assembly members and the press that the perpetrators of the violence were going to be from the MQM party or the Shaheed Bhutto party. Sure enough, there were ‘blasts’, and the government was quick to blame my father’s party.
Papa [Mir Murtaza Bhutto] began his statement. ‘There is a plot against me, formulated by the most criminal elements within the police force, such as Wajid Durrani and Shahbaig Suddle.’
Suddle was the District Inspector-General of Karachi and Wajid Durrani was the Senior Superintendent of the Police,
But Papa mispronounced one of their names; it wasn’t Shahbaig Suddle, it was Shoaib Suddle. We wouldn’t forget Shoaib Suddle’s name again, not ever.
Papa said and pointed to Sonara. ‘Naseerullah Babar, the Minister of the Interior, said on the floor of the National Assembly that there would be blasts after Sonara’s “arrest” and that the MQM or SB would be behind it. If he had this information what did he do to avert any danger of the blasts actually going off? Nothing.
The Interior Minister knew about these supposed blasts because it is his office that planted them.
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‘In one breath, the leaders of the world preach peace and in the next threaten to obliterate civilization with atom bombs… our position’, wrote Zulfikar, speaking of Pakistan, ‘is pathetically unstable’.
Zulfikar must have been only twenty-one years old when he committed himself to the renewal of his Muslim brethren, saying, ‘I genuinely consider any accomplishments of the Islamic people as a personal feat, just as I consider any failure of the Muslim world as a personal failure.’
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Their [Bhuttos] first child, a daughter, Benazir, born in June 1953, was named for her father’s sister, who died as a young girl. Her mother delivered her in one of Karachi’s Christian hospitals. Begum Mazari, the sister of the renowned Baloch fighter Akbar Bugti and the wife of the Sardar of the Baloch Mazari tribe, remembers visiting Nusrat in the hospital after her first delivery.
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It is said that it was Nusrat, his foreign-born wife, to whom Zulfikar owed his political career. An Iranian friend of Nusrat’s had married Iskandar Mirza, the President of Pakistan. As the government was facing a steady stream of unsettling upheavals, Nusrat mentioned to her friend Naheed Mirza that she might ask her husband to invite Zulfikar to join politics; he was from a good family and had a brilliant young mind lauded in his professional sphere. Mirza, it was known in certain circles, was looking for someone fresh to represent Sindh.
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President Mirza, who assured the nation that martial law would be lifted within three months (they all do that, it must be force of habit) and that a referendum was soon to take place, justified his actions by blaming political parties for the poor state of affairs.
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Military dictators and those who passionately enable them are nothing if not trite. In the late 1950s this may have been somewhat of an original rationale, but by Pakistan’s sixtieth anniversary of independence and three dictators later, the ‘elections don’t help anything’ reasoning has become a remarkably familiar refrain. Mirza, none the wiser, was ousted from power by the army twenty days after martial law was instituted.
Military dictators in Pakistan tend to cuddle up to any power that promises to protect them and it is no small surprise that the power which most frequently enables militarism in Pakistan is the United States.
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Countries like Thailand and the Philippines were eager to band together under SEATO, fearing a Korean War-inspired outbreak in their own countries, but Pakistan, miles away from communist Korea, was hardly at risk. India, Burma and Indonesia refused point blank to be part of SEATO and Ceylon eventually wriggled out of negotiations too.
The great alliance was to be made up of three countries: Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines.
CENTO caused a great deal of disruption within the Arab world as it was seen as a ploy to destroy Arab unity. Pakistan, by virtue of being a signatory, became suspect – and not for the last time – in the eyes of Arab states.
Pakistan did nothing to improve its PR when it played a subversive role during the Suez crisis and came out on the side of the aggressors on all the aspects of the conflict: the nationalization of the canal itself, Anglo-French collusion with Israel and aggression against Egypt. As a result, Pakistan’s image in the Middle East was pitiful. A Syrian newspaper, Al Badra, wrote that Pakistan, like Israel, was solely a creation of British imperialism.
There is no doubt that CENTO was extremely detrimental to Pakistan’s relationship with Arab and Middle Eastern Nations, but it was SEATO that cemented the notion that Pakistan acted wholly as an American tool.
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As Foreign Minister, Zulfikar made no secret of his disgust at many of the decisions of the government and isolated himself from the machinations of the state when he spoke out in the National Assembly, pointing out that: It was said that the foreign policy of Pakistan was bankrupt; that we must walk out of the alliances of CENTO and SEATO, but the next day on getting into office, there were dazzling somersaults and it was solemnly said that without CENTO and SEATO Pakistan would not survive. These are some of the people who have played havoc not only with our internal life, but have made us feel ashamed in the world outside in our external dealings.
Foreign policy was an extraordinarily weak point of Ayub’s, who couldn’t have cared less about diplomacy so long as American money kept flooding in through military pipelines,
A year into his post as Foreign Minister he [Bhutto] wrote that ‘the foreign policy of a nation is a manifestation of its sovereignty.If a people enjoy all power, except the right to conduct foreign relations, it cannot be regarded as independent.’
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While bilateral relations were the centrepiece of Zulfikar’s foreign policy, there was no easy way to avoid the fact that relations between Pakistan and China had seriously deteriorated under General Ayub. The General was constantly pushing China out in order to make room for the United States, blind to the glaring fact that Pakistan was no longer America’s favourite client.
Relations with China, and conversely with the United States, took a sharp turn in 1963 when Zulfikar, seen as the architect of Pakistan’s bilateral foreign policy, took up the position of Foreign Minister.
In anticipation of Pakistan’s possible rapprochement with China in December 1962 and the young Foreign Minister’s socialist leanings, the United States transferred 300 million rupees in counterpart funds, meant to initiate credit expansion, from the State Bank of Pakistan to US commercial banks operating within Pakistan. It was a clear warning to Pakistan. But Zulfikar did not respond well to threats.
An emissary of the United States – rumours point to Henry Kissinger – told Zulfikar once that if he were one of their senators, they would have dealt with him before he got out of hand. I wouldn’t be a senator, Zulfikar cockily replied, I’d be your president.
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General Ayub disregarded his Foreign Minister’s advice not to go to Tashkent, and ignored the protests from the Pakistani people, who believed they had been double-crossed by the Soviets. Dictators tend to do as they please – it is one of their less endearing traits – so General Ayub flew to Tashkent in January 1966.
The United States, meanwhile, was pleased that Pakistan had forgone China at Tashkent and announced its decision to resume military and economic aid to both Pakistan and India.
Two days after the announcement, Zulfikar Bhutto resigned as Foreign Minister and left General Ayub Khan’s government.
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The Punjab is the seat of power in Pakistan. Most of the armed forces and bureaucrats come from the Punjab province. If you win in the Punjab, they say, you take all of Pakistan. ‘It was the status quo we were fighting,’ recalls Dr Ghulam Hussain, an elderly comrade of Zulfikar’s. ‘We wanted class consciousness, we wanted real change.’
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General Ayub’s regime, meanwhile, was not coping well with the expansion of Zulfikar’s popularity since he had resigned. Those who were coming out to support him were ordinary people, activists, students and labourers – not bureaucrats or military lackeys, the kind of crowds they could control.
The state consoled itself with the belief that the strength of the army and the state was far greater than any support that the people could muster; the establishment in Pakistan pays little heed to the voters (who rarely get a chance to vote, and almost never get a chance to vote freely).
At that point, elections, free and fair general elections, had never been held in the twenty-year-old country. What did bother the state, however, was the support Zulfikar received internationally.
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The city of Lahore is unlike other cities in Pakistan. It is large and winding with canals to guide one through the urban sprawl that has grown all around this historic fort city. In the summer the roads are full of people riding their bicycles and tongas to work across large avenues lined with shady trees. The canals are dotted with young children and men splashing about in the water to escape the sweltering heat.
In the autumn, however, the climate is cool – unlike in the rest of the country – and slowly, as the winter months draw near, a mist descends over Lahore. In contrast to the craziness that one finds in other metropolitan areas in Pakistan, Lahore always has a sense of calm about it. The neighbourhoods are spacious, the restaurants teeming with lazy eaters out to sample some of Punjab’s finest dishes, and the schools and universities carry on educating their students in some of the finest institutions the country has to offer.
Lahore lacks that sense of urgency, of needing to prove itself, as if it has already arrived. Lahore is quietly aware of its envied place in Pakistani history.
It is the city that the Mughals built as their capital this side of the border and holds not only the tomb of Jahangir, the Shish Mahal or palace of mirrors, but also the Shalimar Gardens, designed by the architect of the Taj Mahal for the emperor Shahjahan. Lahore is also the home of the sandstone Badshai Mosque and Kim’s gun, made famous by Rudyard Kipling, and is heralded as the birthplace of Pakistan – it was in Lahore that the original Muslim League, led by Jinnah, passed the Pakistan Resolution at its annual session on 23 March 1940.
Lahore is where the dream of Pakistan was born. Lahore added another notch to its historic record, as the birthplace of the Pakistan People’s Party, when in 1967 Sindh’s famous son came to the Punjab to make his own history.
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When news had spread that Zulfikar, free of General Ayub’s regime, was about to launch his own political platform, the General’s government took steps to ensure that this would not go smoothly. Assembly in public spaces in Lahore city and its neighbouring districts was banned under Section 144 of the criminal code to prevent Zulfikar from holding a massive public gathering that would potentially embarrass the government.
Section 144 is an establishment favourite. It has been put into effect on numerous occasions – it was used during the 1971 civil war, employed to halt union and trade demonstrations, and more recently put forward by General Pervez Musharaff to thwart people from rallying around radical Islamic parties in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.
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Six Point programme of 1966. The Six Points voiced the party’s demands for a parliamentary form of government with a central parliament directly elected by the people; for the powers of the federal government to be restricted to defence and foreign policy, leaving all other affairs to constituent units; for separate fiscal policies or currencies to be introduced to stop the flow of capital from East Pakistan; limited powers of taxation for the federal government; provincial rights to enter into trade agreements with foreign countries and full control over its earned foreign exchange; and finally for the provinces to have their own militaries and paramilitaries if necessary.
Essentially, politely, the Awami League was asking for more than provincial autonomy; it was asking for its own country.
On the issue of the Awami League’s six points, the PPP, as Dr Mubashir Hasan puts it, ‘accepted five and a half’, rejecting mainly the notion of separate assemblies and a new Bengali currency.
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Zulfikar, who had a wicked sense of humour, kept one reminder of his former boss – a large portrait of the General [Ayub] in uniform. He hung the portrait, painted at his commission, in his drawing room in Larkana. To this day, members of the General’s family have asked for the portrait but family rules – handed down from Zulfikar himself – forbid it. Ayub hangs in our drawing room still.
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Zulfikar, while writing the manifesto with his colleagues, translated his vision of bilateralism more clearly than he had previously. He was the lone voice in Pakistan calling for the nation to leave the British Commonwealth which, in his estimation, had ‘lost any meaning it might have had at one time’ by serving colonial interests and taking the side of the United States in its war against Vietnam.
Under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s presidency, Pakistan voluntarily withdrew from the Commonwealth in 1972. Pakistan voluntarily rejoined the Commonwealth in 1989, under the premiership of Zulfikar’s daughter, Benazir.
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The first ever general election held in Pakistan, on the principle of one man, one vote, took place on 3 December 1970. Twenty-three political parties contested 291 seats in the National Assembly, putting up a total of 1,237 candidates. Three hundred and ninety-one candidates ran as independents.
The results were predictably divided; the Awami League took East Pakistan and the PPP won the majority of seats in the West, sweeping Punjab and Sindh. East Pakistan, however, made up 56 per cent of Pakistan’s population and so the balance hung in the Awami League’s favour. However, any constitutional settlement hinged on the two parties reaching an agreement to share power, which would leave Mujib with East Pakistan and Zulfikar with the West and General Yahya Khan in charge of the military.
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Mujib wanted the constitution to be framed by his party, allowing him to form the government, while Zulfikar was not comfortable with the army’s assurances that the PPP would be given as equal a hand as the Awami League in the proceedings.
Effectively, promising power and position to both parties, the army played the two men against each other and ensured that no harmonious settlement was reached. After decades of Western hegemony over the country, the army – based in Western Punjab – had no interest in handing over power to its compatriots in the East. However, it was equally reluctant to allow the socialist Zulfikar to translate his party’s victory into government.
On 1 March 1971, the National Assembly proceedings were postponed and General Yahya Khan dissolved his civilian cabinet. The army vetoed the proposed coalition government and the Awami League’s opportunity to form a national government was over. Riots broke out across East Pakistan. The bloodletting began.
The military, unsurprisingly, reacted with brute force to the rumblings in East Pakistan, most notably by sending General Tikka Khan, a soldier known for his eager use of force, to act as the military’s chief authority in the province. General Tikka Khan, a graduate of the Dehra Dun school and a Second World War officer who fought on the Burmese and Italian fronts under the banner of the Raj, enjoyed an infamous reputation. He was nicknamed the ‘butcher of Balochistan’ for his role in quelling the province’s secessionist unrest in the early 1960s.
He would soon add ‘butcher of Bengal’ to his CV.
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By 25 March 1971 talks between Bhutto, Yahya and Mujib had stalled and the military put into effect an emergency plan: within the next twenty-four hours Mujib was arrested, the Awami League banned and a cessation of all political activities throughout Pakistan enforced.
At midnight, General Tikka Khan led the assault on Dhaka University and various other points in the city’s old quarters. Thousands were killed. Pakistan was plunged into a bloody civil war as the East Pakistan Rifles, a paramilitary group, mutinied and joined the rebels fighting to take East Pakistan.
The army countered the insurgency by mounting a fierce offensive against the Bengalis. Within six months, on top of thousands dead and wounded, a refugee population of approximately 10 million had been created, with thousands fleeing across the border into India.
The violence of the conflict was staggering. Reports from East Pakistan placed the number of civilian casualties in the millions, citing figures of around 3 million killed. Pakistani officials, via the ludicrous Hamood-ur-Rehman commission – whose pages were edited by the army and whose full copy no one has yet seen – insisted the number was closer to some 30,000, a mere by-product of the war.
International figures, treading lightly, estimated around 200,000 dead on the Eastern front. While the numbers differ, there is no dispute regarding the sheer force used by the Pakistani Army against civilians, most notably women.
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In addition to reports of sanctioned violence towards women, there were charges levelled against the Pakistani Army for its use of violence towards intellectuals, academics and minorities, Hindus specifically. Word had spread to Karachi that the Pakistani Army, having killed 200 intellectuals in Dhaka, was planning to carry out the same kind of massacre in Sindh to quell inconvenient questions of their brutality in the civil war.
Abdul Waheed Katpar, the Sindhi lawyer who worked with Zulfikar early on his career, was present when the news reached the ears of the People’s Party chairman. I asked Katpar if he meant to say that Zulfikar believed the rumour that the army was planning to massacre Sindhi intellectuals. ‘Yes!’ replied Katpar ardently. ‘They don’t believe in anything, these Khakis.’ Zulfikar picked up the phone and called General Gul Hasan, the corp commander of Sindh. ‘He was furious,’ remembers Katpar. ‘He told him, “I’m hearing you’re killing intellectuals in the East. If you bring this vicious tactic to Sindh, I’ll be your second Mujib and rise up against you!”’
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By the summer of 1971, the Mukti Bahini, a Bengali liberation army, began to receive training and equipment from India. As India continued funding and instructing the East Pakistani secessionists, reports began to surface of increased border shelling between the two countries.
On 29 November 1971 the provisional government of Bangladesh was announced, just one week after General Yahya instituted a state of emergency and told his countrymen to prepare for an all-out war. As the year drew to a close, it was not only inevitable that Pakistan would be broken into two, but also that war with India was once again on the horizon.
On 3 December, the Pakistani Air Force struck Northern Indian military targets. The escalation in border shelling had reached its peak and this time India reacted with its full military might.
By 4 December, India had launched an air, ground and naval attack into East Pakistan, converging on Dhaka. Two days after their spectacular invasion, the Indians had all but taken over East Pakistan, tightened their grip around the soon to be capital city of Dhaka and recognized the provisional government.
The Indian government violated a tenuous peace between the two countries and continued to violate Pakistan’s sovereignty by securing its hold on Dhaka.
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It was in the early weeks of December that Zulfikar was sent by General Yahya Khan to plead Pakistan’s case at the United Nations Security Council. It was on the 15th of the month, after the UN had ruled in Bangladesh’s favour by supporting its claim to independence, that Zulfikar angrily declared, ‘So what if Dhaka falls? So what if the whole of East Pakistan falls? So what if the whole of West Pakistan falls? We will build a new Pakistan. We will build a better Pakistan… We will fight for a hundred years.’
Zulfikar had felt from the start, leaving aside his respect for Mujib as a compatriot, that the Awami League’s Six Point programme would divide the new and fragile country. Now, disgusted with the proceedings at the Security Council, Zulfikar ripped up his papers and walked out, angry and frustrated. ‘My country hearkens for me, why should I waste my time here in the Security Council?’
On 16 December, Pakistani forces surrendered and the following day a ceasefire was put into effect.
Yahya Khan resigned his position four days later and Zulfikar, having just left New York, flew to Islamabad to assume the presidency.
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China supported Pakistan wholeheartedly. It used its United Nations veto to keep Bangladesh out of the international body, refusing to recognize the new state as a legitimate sovereign nation. In fact, China did not recognize Bangladesh until October 1975, long after Pakistan had extended its recognition, which it did in February 1974. China also refused to exchange ambassadors with India until it had fully restored diplomatic relations with Pakistan in the summer of 1976.
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The following day, even Zulfikar was said to have admitted to the press that there was ‘some kind of deadlock’. Both sides continued to hold their breath and wait.
That evening as Indira Gandhi walked alone in the gardens of the hill station where the negotiations were taking place, Zulfikar, himself frustrated by the failure of their talks thus far, went out to join her. The two leaders walked alone, without delegates and advisors, for some time. They spoke freely and without the usual tension that seemed to dog their relationship on every other occasion. Both of them had come to Simla for peace, a peace that did not leave their countries beholden or indebted to the other but that guaranteed them both a measure of political equality.
As they walked in the evening cool of Simla’s summer, Zulfikar and Indira came to an agreement.
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Feudalism was an ill that was universally recognized within the party apparatus and a vow was made to amend the inequities of Pakistan’s landed elite. Zulfikar held true to the promise of land reforms. The government instituted a ceiling of 250 acres of irrigated land and 300 acres of unirrigated land, making the reforms the most radical in Pakistan at the time.
Zulfikar lost much of his family’s land in the reforms, slicing away his children’s inheritance.
Zulfikar acknowledged that the reforms had further to go and formulated stricter ceilings, 100 acres for irrigated land and 200 for unirrigated land, to be put into place during the second stage of land reforms, but they were too late. He would not have the time to implement them.
Unfortunately, in Pakistan, politics is nothing if not personal – it seems to be the country’s one constant. But rather than engage in the pros or cons of nationalization, it suffices to say that in a country where twenty-one men controlled the nation’s economy, nationalization was the only available means to redistribute wealth.
The move might not have been permanent, but only a short-term remedy on the way to a mixed economy. But, again, Zulfikar was not to have the time to test out his economic theories.
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By the time of the Raj, Balochistan had been part of the Mughal, Persian and Afghan kingdoms and had added culturally, linguistically and ethnically to its population.
By the nineteenth century, the province was divided into four princely states, the majority of which were brought under the suzerainty of the British Raj. Wars and imperial struggles further unified the larger area that is now Balochistan, a province rich in mineral resources, namely gas, but whose population is poor.
As the subcontinent began to break apart, two states were asked where they wanted to go: Balochistan and Nepal. As the Baloch remember it, the people of the province voted to be independent – like Nepal, they didn’t choose to belong to either Pakistan or India. The centres of Baloch authority unanimously rejected the idea of joining Pakistan and declared their independence. However, they were ruled by princes, who were easily bribed.
The Pakistani Army was sent in and forced Prince Mir Ahmed Yar Khan of Kalat to change his tune; the Khan of Kalat signed an agreement revoking Baloch claims to independence and brought his people into Pakistan. His brother, on the other hand, refused to bow to Pakistani pressure and was later killed in his quest for Baloch national sovereignty.
The mode of operations had been set. The second conflict between the province and the state of Pakistan took place a mere ten years later in response to General Ayub’s One Unit centralization policy.
Balochistan was not going to go quietly into Pakistan’s fold. The third struggle – they were averaging one per decade – happened in the early 1960s as the Pakistani Army began to build garrisons for its troops in Balochistan. Militants, insurgents belonging to various tribes, took up arms and attacked the state’s army.
General Yahya quelled the violence by erasing the One Unit structure and signed a ceasefire with the various warring factions. But the Baloch, formally and forcefully brought into Pakistan, were not held peacefully for long.
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‘Pakistan is a colony,’ Khair Bux Marri, the head of the Marri tribe, insisted to me when I went to speak with him at his Karachi home. I was met at the gate by burly men with large shalwars and Kalashnikovs hanging from their shoulders. The Bhuttos are not particular favourites of Sardar Marri, but the elder tribesman met my request for an interview graciously, received me courteously and offered me orange juice as we spoke.
‘Very few countries are independent,’ he continued, ‘but Pakistan has been an imperial colony from the British to the Americans now. How can a colony have an independent attitude? Pakistan accepts the dominant position of imperialism. They chose to call this country Pakistan, land of the pure, because they believed the Koran is here, as if all other nations are pagan. To call it Pakistan is a grave mistake. It is na-pakistan, land of the impure.’
I asked Marri how it was that the Baloch found themselves perpetually pitted against the state.
‘There’s a saying in Balochi,’ he explained, speaking so quietly I had to keep edging closer towards him, this tribal chieftan who famously loathed my family, so that I might hear him. ‘A man comes into a railway compartment and he sits in a corner as if he is there out of other people’s generosity. You can tell him to move back in the carriage until he has nowhere else to go. But when pushed to the wall, he will draw his dagger. At that point, he’ll either kill you or he’ll die.’
In 1972, the Baloch found themselves pushed against the wall once more. They had voted alongside the Awami League and were further isolated when East Pakistan broke away from the union. Members from a range of political parties in the province grouped together to form the National Awami or People’s Party, NAP, and pitted themselves as a bloc against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government. Various Baloch leaders demanded more representation in the federal government and began to formulate a secessionist plan of their own.
The following year a large consignment of arms was found at the Iraqi embassy in Islamabad. The weapons, police alleged, were en route to the Marris of Balochistan. Zulfikar reacted quickly; he called the actions of the Marri insurgents treasonous and dismissed the provincial Baloch government. The issue behind closed doors was admittedly larger; there was pressure from the Shah of Iran, who believed that the ethnic Baloch on his side of the border were arming themselves against Pahlavi rule. Worried at the prospect of an armed revolt, the Shah asked Pakistan to intervene.
The army was sent into Balochistan once more. Zulfikar was not the first premier to take excessive measures against the Baloch, but he shouldn’t have acted in conformity with his predecessors, all insecurely prone to excessive violence against the Baloch people.
Khair Bux Marri, the same man who served me orange juice, put together the Baloch People’s Liberation Front, BPLF, and began a guerrilla war against Zulfikar’s government and his troops. Estimates, shrouded as they are, put Pakistani losses at around 3,000 with close to 10,000 Baloch separatists killed.
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Marri was jailed on Zulfikar’s orders. Many tribesmen were. Their dissent was silenced forcefully and they have never forgiven him for it.
Yousef Masti Khan, another Baloch politician my father’s age, also agreed to speak to me about the role Zulfikar played in Balochistan and was less old-fashioned and reticent about his views. He too had been arrested in 1974.
Masti Khan was kept in barracks across from the passport offices in Saddar, Karachi, for fifteen days before he was moved by the army to a jail in Quetta. He was a young activist, a small player in provincial politics, and his father, Akbar Masti Khan, was an old friend of Zulfikar’s. They used to argue about his policies.
After the younger Khan was released, his father was called by his old friend, the Prime Minister, and offered a contract to build a highway across the province.
‘I told my father, if you do it, I will leave here and take up arms in the mountains,’ Yousef Masti Khan told me, speaking animatedly. ‘My father said, I can’t just refuse Zulfikar, he’s very vindictive.’
Eventually, according to Yousef, his father went to see Zulfikar. He knew he couldn’t take the deal and had to find a way out. He reached the official residence of the Prime Minister in Rawalpindi and found Zulfikar sitting on the staircase in his pyjamas, smoking a cigar. They talked for a while about old times, shooting the breeze as if things were normal, until finally Zulfikar asked him how things were in the province.
‘Do you want to hear the answer for a Prime Minister or for a friend?’ Akbar Masti Khan asked him. Zulfikar told his friend to speak openly. ‘Why are you killing people in Balochistan?’ he asked him. Zulfikar spoke about the violence, about the attacks on the state by the insurgents, about the sabotage. I don’t want violence, he said, but what can I do?
‘Withdraw the army,’ insisted his friend. With that Zulfikar hung his head. ‘I can’t,’ he replied. It was a familiar refrain. He had, like all those before him, no power against the army when he was engaged in a war against his own people.
The moment that Zulfikar began to fight Pakistanis, treasonous ones or not, he began to distance himself from his power base, from the source of his ultimate strength, and then the army, finally back in business, began to turn against him.
Akbar Masti Khan was also arrested. And the army remained in Balochistan till the end of the decade.
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I asked Sardar Marri about the operation carried out in the 1970s. He demurred. ‘You are his granddaughter, it wouldn’t be proper,’ he said politely. I was surprised by Marri’s formality with me. I assured him that I was there to listen to him, to hear whatever he had to say.
‘I have within me great fire against the PPP,’ he cautioned. I insisted that I would not take anything he had to say personally. I am not my grandfather’s keeper, I said with a laugh, please speak freely. He shrugged. I had asked for it.
‘Bhutto was no different from Hitler,’ Sardar Marri began. ‘Before the operation he initiated, death only touched certain areas of the province. Then it affected all of Balochistan. The violence was expanded. Before our resistance had been traditional, tribal. Then it became more nationalistic.’
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25
‘The feudalists betrayed him. They infiltrated the party and then used its apparatuses against the people and because he had become insecure by that point, because these feudalists distanced him from the people, Zulfikar let them,’ Miraj explained to me in Urdu.
‘I walked out of a meeting in 1972 when we were discussing the union protest in Landhi, Karachi. The workers were striking and causing disruptions and Zulfikar said to us, “I assure you the strength of the street will be crushed by the strength of the state.” So I walked out.
He called me later and said I’d broken protocol. I told him why I left, why I broke party protocol. “It’s the situation, Miraj!” Zulfikar replied, justifying what he had said. But the police, under the orders of the Chief Minister, had fired on the workers. The workers, the people, before this shooting believed that everything had changed with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, they believed they had come to power and this terrified the industrialists. So, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto placated them.’
For Miraj, a lifelong Marxist so committed to the idea of a new Pakistan he still refuses to speak in English, this U-turn was unacceptable. Though he was one of Zulfikar’s closest associates, Miraj left the party.
‘I told him, you’re being taken over by Intelligence. They’re alienating you from your strength. J. A. Rahim was pushed out, Dr Mubashir Hasan was pushed out, so was I – all the founding members, all of us the most radical elements. Intelligence would send him reports saying we were plotting to kill him and as he got weaker, he became more paranoid.’ The year after he left, Miraj was arrested.
J. A. Rahim one of the writers of the party manifesto, was brutally punished for his dissension. Dr Mubashir Hasan, the Finance Minister at whose house the PPP was founded, resigned from his ministry post, but stayed – one of the few – with Zulfikar.
All of the men who gave their youth and their commitment to the party with Zulfikar that afternoon in Lahore were, one by one, sent to jail.
‘He was not a prophet,’ Miraj, now frail and ill, told me. ‘He was a great man and a great leader, but in our culture we have a tendency to make prophets out of men.’
The conclusion of Zulfikar’s power was near, and in his weakness he didn’t even see it coming.
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26
Losing his solid footing, Zulfikar became nervous and started to appease the opposition at home, hoping the turnaround would placate his traditional enemies. He amended the 1973 constitution several times, enhancing his own powers by allowing the federal government to ban political parties and curbing the power of the courts so that, under the third amendment, ‘no order could be made prohibiting detention or granting bail to a person so detained’.
Imagining his position secure, Zulfikar curried favour with the religious parties, small in number but powerful in terms of their fear factor, by amending the constitution to define the parameters of who was a Muslim.
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27
Abdul Waheed Katpar, one of the founding members of the PPP, remembers this period as one of intense paranoia for Zulfikar. ‘He thought the army would kill him. He called them the Khakis.
When the big zamindar in the party began to destabilize the party’s image with their public feuding, Zulfikar told them, “Your fighting won’t destroy me, the army will not spare me now – don’t think they will spare you either.”’
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28
In 1976, when the butcher of Bengal, General Tikka Khan, retired from the army, Zulfikar replaced him with General Zia ul Haq ‘over the heads of five senior generals’, promoting him to Chief of Army Staff purely because Zulfikar believed him to be a meek, subservient man.
Zia swore his undying loyalty to the Prime Minister on a Koran and bowed feverishly whenever Zulfikar walked into a room.
Zia was a ‘cunning man’, remembered Katpar, ‘always acting over-courteous with Bhutto. He was very ambitious and that made him very cruel.’
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29
Zulfikar had called his army chief [Zia] to the Prime Minister’s office for a word. Zia arrived on time, early even, and was taken into the office, where he sat down nervously, shaking his feet and twitching his legs. He had begun to smoke, a habit he indulged in to calm his nerves, when the Prime Minister walked in. Zia, various family members would exclaim, jumped up deferentially and shoved the lit cigarette into his pocket. It began to burn through the fabric of his jacker. Smoke came billowing out of Zia’s uniformed military jacket, but he was so anxious around Zulfikar that he was too embarrassed to admit he had been smoking – hardly a crime – and too polite to put out the fire.
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30
He was assigned an advisor in the government department to guide him through the process of writing his undergraduate thesis – the only problem, Murtaza wrote in his letters home, was that his advisor, a big name in the department, was also infamously known at the time as the ‘butcher of Vietnam’. His name was Samuel Huntington.
Samuel ‘clash of civilizations’ Huntington was then known for his advisory role in Vietnam. Huntington advocated the herding of villagers into clusters away from the Vietcong, not appreciating that it made it much easier for the US army to bomb civilians in their separated enclaves.
When I travelled to Cambridge in the spring of 2006, I found Huntington a frail old man. He wore a woolly navy sweater in April and drank Coca-Cola from a Starbucks espresso cup. He shrunk into his brown leather armchair as we spoke and seemed to be so much smaller than his frightening legend suggests.
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31
As an understanding between the PPP and a newly formed alliance of opposition parties was reaching its culmination, General Zia declared martial law. He closed down the country on the night of 4 July 1977 and appointed himself chief martial law administrator. Elections would be held in ninety days, he promised on television, adding that the Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was under ‘protective custody’.
Zulfikar was released several weeks later.
He immediately set off on a political campaign across the country, rallying crowds and attacking the military’s attempt to discredit him and seize power. As millions of people came out to hear him, whatever political credit Zulfikar had lost during his time in power had been regained. He was unstoppable.
General Zia realized that Zulfikar would not lose the election, no matter when it was held. ‘It’s either him or me,’ the General is said to have prophesized. ‘Two men, one coffin.’
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01
After several arrests and releases the military government placed a ‘conspiracy to murder’ charge against Zulfikar, accusing him of attempting to murder a political opponent, Ahmed Raza Kasuri.
Three years earlier, gunmen had fired at Kasuri’s car, killing his father. At the time Kasuri – a former member of the PPP – blamed the government.
A tribunal was called to investigate the matter and rejected the allegations, after which Kasuri rejoined the People’s Party – the party he claimed had attacked him and killed his father. The claims, sensational and provocative, were factually weak. But a man, even a Prime Minister, could be hanged for murder.
Kasuri cooperated with the military and charges were filed against Zulfikar. They finally had him in their sights.
Upon opening the window Gudu saw that the walls of the house were being scaled by men in uniform. ‘I panicked’ he recalled. ‘I ran to Mir and told him what I had seen. He was as calm as ever. He told me to calm down and then we went to tell his father.’ By the time they reached Zulfikar, an army officer was standing in front of him.
Gudu remembers the soldier apologizing to the Prime Minister. ‘Sorry, sahib’, he said before escorting him to the car waiting outside.
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02
Murtaza and Shahnawaz flew to Beirut to meet the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat. A Palestinian friend from college arranged the meeting for Murtaza and his brother, and for his part Arafat confidently told the Bhutto brothers that their father’s life would be spared.
He recounted a story of running into General Zia at Mecca while both men were performing the Hajj. Arafat told the brothers that he asked General Zia in front of the Kaaba to spare Bhutto’s life and that the General had promised clemency.
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03
It was still early in General Zia ul Haq’s dictatorial rule. He promised to hold elections after ninety days in July 1977 but swiftly reneged on his promise on the grounds that he felt it more prudent to start an ‘accountability’ process in regard to politicians first, a vetting process that led to the filing of the White Papers against Bhutto.
The veneer of Zia’s power seemed thin. Murtaza believed that General Zia would not kill his father.
A messenger came to London with the news that Zulfikar’s health had worsened. He had lost a lot of weight and had asked to see a dentist; his teeth were rotting.
I remember my father telling me that Zulfikar used to find shards of glass in his prison food and that his gums would be cut as he ate, mixing his blood with the prison gruel.
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04
Rawalpindi, situated in the Potwar Plateau, is a short distance from Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. It is, and always has been, a garrison city.
Home to the Raj’s British forces and since independence the Pakistani Army, Rawalpindi sits higher up than the land surrounding it, instantly cooler and breezier, but it has a sinister reputation, at least among politicians.
It was once the home of the exiled nineteenth-century Afghan king Shuja Shah.
It is where the man Mohammad Ali Jinnah had appointed as Pakistani’s first Prime Minister, Liaqat Ali Khan, was assassinated, and it is where the army had taken Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to die.
Almost thirty years after his murder, his eldest child, Benazir, would also lose her life in Rawalpindi. I’ve never liked the place. It’s a desolate, eerie town.
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05
Nisar Khuro was brought into the People’s Party after Zulfikar’s death by his daughter Benazir, and was made head of the Sindh branch of the party. Khuro remains an integral part of the PPP till this day, currently serving Benazir’s and her husband’s PPP as the speaker of the Sindh Assembly.
Nisar Khuro, a member of the Khuro feudal family from Larkana had been agitating for Zulfikar’s imprisonment and murder; Abdul Waheed Katpar, one of the PPP’s founding members and another Larkana native, recalls Khuro chanting, ‘First hang Bhutto then try him!’ at gatherings around the city.
‘And when they killed Bhutto sahib, Khuro distributed sweets, mithai, around the city – it is well known,’
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06
The people of Pakistan, whom the PLA seems to be fighting for, are an even stranger breed of people. Their ‘war’ for ‘independence’ was ‘won’ by them one year before they had wanted it. Independence was forced on them; they were begged to become independent and free… The Pakistani Army effectively reflects the valour and determination of the people it lives off.
1) When a soldier fell on his backside he suffered brain damage.
2) It believes in equality: it constitutes 00.06 per cent of the population but consumes between 70 and 80 per cent of its wealth
The official spokesman of the PLA, Wolf, feels he can take on the Pakistani Army any time in an intellectual confrontation. We have advised him to refrain from challenging them as it will only provoke the heroic Pakistani Army into committing mass suicide. This is a very predictable reflex in the character of our brave army. They are also world-famous for surrendering heroically.
A very shrewd British statesman once remarked, ‘War is too serious a business to be left to the soldiers.’ How true.
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07
During the day the brothers [Mir and Shahnawaz] worked at drafting a manifesto for their movement, whose name they changed to Al Zulfikar, the name of the two-pronged sword carried by the Shiite Imam Ali, who was known to be a fearless warrior and a brave leader, and of course there was the connection with their father, who took his name from the Imam’s sword: Zulfikar Ali, the sword of Ali.
Since their move to Kabul and their declaration that they were going to fight the military regime until the democratic constitution of 1973 was restored, the regime began to portray them as terrorists.
In Pakistan, ever since Zulfikar’s imprisonment there had been a concerted smear campaign against the Bhutto family. The junta printed stories of Zulfikar’s ‘un-Islamic’ nature, calling him a communist and an atheist. They ran photographs of Nusrat and her daughters – their heads superimposed on bodies of women cavorting in swimsuits or knocking back drinks at raucous parties.
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08
As soon as General Zia reneged on his promise to hold elections in October 1979, the junta instituted blanket press censorship. Six daily newspapers were permanently shut down – Musawat, which Murtaza carried on printing and distributing from London, Tameer, Hawat, Aafaaq, Sahafat and Sadaqat.
The weekly Mustaqbul and monthly Dhanak were also closed.
Martial Law Regulation No. 19 was enacted and gave the government the right to censor matters deemed ‘prejudicial to Islamic ideology’, Pakistan’s security, and ‘morality and maintenance of public order’.
Local and international media outlets, including the BBC, were subject to twice-daily checks by the junta censor, who alone had the power to decide what would and would not be reported. What was considered offensive to ‘Islamic ideology’, a pet cause of the fundamentalist General, was often absurd and arbitrary – one over-eager TV producer went as far as censoring Popeye’s girlfriend Olive Oyl out of the cartoon because she wore a skirt.
Women anchors on Pakistan state television, PTV, were required to wear a hijab before being allowed on air. Mehtab Rashdi, a newscaster, was the first woman to quit in response to the mandatory hijab edict.
The reporting of any item that made the military regime look bad was considered ‘anti-state’.
Hussain Naqi, the Lahore bureau chief of the Pakistan Press Institute, lost his job in 1984 when he reported that the US President had stated during a press conference that Pakistan wasn’t a democracy.
In 1978, the editors of the Urdu dailies the Urdu Digest, the Sun and the PPP’s Musawat were arrested and sentenced to one year of rigorous imprisonment and ten public lashes for ‘publishing derogatory remarks against Zia’. They were later pardoned and released but the message was clear.
Disobedience to the state was unacceptable. Siddiqueh Hidayatullah, a teacher who was at the start of her career at Kinnaird College in Lahore, witnessed the frenzy around the city’s first public flogging and described the spectacle for me.
‘The lashing was being held on a large chowrangi or roundabout on Jail Road, right there in the open, in the middle of a busy street. People came in what looked like the thousands to watch, some were called from the nearby bazaars and others must have just turned up to have a look. Some men even climbed trees to have a decent view. It was sick. There was such a tamasha, or commotion, created around the floggings so that all of us would know how ferocious the regime was.’
The turning point came in May 1978 when four newsmen were publicly flogged for their dissidence.
journalists began to invite arrest by staging highly visible sitins, hunger strikes and rallies and by printing material critical of the government. In the two months after the floggings took place, 150 journalists were arrested.
Zia justified his regime’s unforgiving treatment of the press by declaring, ‘I have no respect for these newspapers and journalists who blindly use the stick of the pen to harm national interests.’
Nine Urdu dailies in Muzzafarabad were shut down by a local magistrate’s decree in 1979 as they refused to cease printing material critical of the government.
Ten journalists in Lahore lost their jobs in 1983 for taking part in a civil disobedience campaign protesting the extensive government repression, and as further punishment were banned from working in the media for the duration of Zia’s rule. Second, the press, which has never been braver since, fought against martial law through covert resistance, or as the government called it ‘deviant behaviour’.
Instead of filling their papers with large swathes of meaningless items, the newspapers began to leave the spaces blank.
When the largest English daily newspaper, Dawn – an establishment mouthpiece – printed almost an entire newspaper of empty columns, the government threatened it with permanent closure.
When blank columns in newspapers were forbidden, journalists like Mazhar Abbas, who wrote for the Daily Star, began resisting the censor’s pen more caustically.
‘In the blank spaces we would print a picture of a donkey or a dog and print news of Zia speaking or his ministers speaking underneath the pictures. So, they realized then that something fishy was going on, Then they said you had to inform the censorship board specifically of what news you would use to fill the blank spaces!’
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09
The lawyers’ resistance was a clear reaction against the junta’s co-opting of the judiciary and its interference in the state’s legal affairs.
The infamous Doctrine of Necessity, which claims that ‘that which otherwise is not lawful, necessity makes lawful’, had been used retroactively by Pakistan’s courts to justify every period of martial law imposed by the army, and was also used to condone Zia’s seizure of power.
By 1979 those judges who had demonstrated their lack of enthusiasm for the military in government had been swiftly sacked and replaced.
The power of the civil courts had been clipped and Sharia courts and military tribunals were created to do the bidding of the regime.
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10
Zina bil jabr is a variant taken to mean rape; however, under the junta’s new definition, consent was not the issue, but intercourse. A woman could be convicted by law after being raped because, willingly or not, she had had intercourse out of wedlock.
Under the Hudood laws, rape victims were prosecuted alongside their rapists for engaging in zina bil jabr.
In 1983, Lal Mai from Liaqatabad became the first woman to be publicly flogged on adultery charges under the Ordinances.
Reports indicated that 8,000 men witnessed Mai receive her fifteen lashes. It’s unclear whether the spectators at Mai’s punishment were brought to the scene by the police and made to watch her public torture, as happened in Afghanistan under the Taliban, or whether they were there out of morbid curiosity. But they were there, in their thousands.
Prior to the implementation of the Hudood Ordinances, Pakistan’s penal code did not label fornication a crime, but rather had provisions for dealing with the crime of marital rape and viewed rape itself as a crime where the rapist, not the victim, was the sole party to be indicted under law.
Moreover, zina laws under the Hudood Ordinances stipulated that an individual could be ‘found guilty with or without the consent of the other party’, which meant that women, as a result of medical evidence, were more likely to be convicted under the Ordinances than men. A simple examination could prove that a woman had recently had sex, or that she was no longer a virgin, but men’s innocence rested simply on their word.
No section of society was safe from the army’s interference in the early 1980s. Besides insinuating itself politically and legally into all corners of daily life, the army began to meddle in the running of Pakistan’s economy. If the army could not set the price of goods in the economic market, those goods would simply disappear.
If the army could not take a cut out of black market profits, those vendors would be arrested and often flogged.
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11
Urban professionals and intellectuals also played a substantial role in resisting martial law. The medical profession, otherwise neutral, took a unique and unprecedented stand against the junta.
The Hudood Ordinances ordered that thieves be punished by amputation of the hands, and as the sole group qualified to mete out the punishment doctors refused to comply.
Ghulam Ali from Okara was convicted of stealing a clock from his local mosque and sentenced to have his right hand removed; yet not a single doctor in all of Pakistan could be found to carry out the amputation, whereas we know that in countries where similar punishments are prescribed against theft, such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, amputations were and are still carried out with the aid of the local medical communities. The courts had no choice but to convert Ghulam Ali’s sentence to six years of rigorous imprisonment instead.
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12
Not all PPP members, it is worth noting, sacrificed themselves in the fight against the junta. The party’s current Prime Minister, Yousef Raza Gilani – who bears more than a passing resemblance to Saddam Hussain – spent his time not in jail but serving on the dictator’s majlis e shoora or religious parliamentary council, rubbing shoulders with General Zia’s protégé Nawaz Sharif.
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13
After the hijacking, Al Zulfikar made its most daring attempt at confronting the regime. A group of three people attacked Zia’s plane as it took off from Chaklala air base in Rawalpindi. They were armed with a Samsix heat-seeking missile and narrowly missed hitting the aircraft as it gained height.
On board the plane, the pilot and passengers were aware of the attempt on their lives. Sharing the flight with General Zia was Ghulam Ishaq Khan, the then chairman of the senate – and the man from whom Benazir would take her oath as Prime Minister to his presidency in 1988 – and Mahmood Haroon, whose signature featured prominently on Zulfikar’s death warrant, and who in another absurd placing would be appointed by Benazir as the governor of Sindh under her first government.
It seems unthinkable that of the three junta leaders on board the aeroplane, Benazir would work with two of them, negotiating with but narrowly missing her chance to work with the third. The three men managed to escape, but the Samsix attack intensified the regime’s fury towards the Bhutto brothers and their Kabul-based organization.
‘It was the most daring, direct attempt we made,’ Suhail tells me.
Suhail says that eighty-four charges of treason were made against Murtaza and Shahnawaz by the junta, all carrying the death penalty.
(I remember the number of charges being higher, in the nineties somewhere. Other people place them in the mid-hundreds.)
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14
Tribals from Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt were sent to Kabul to assassinate the brothers.
For Zulfikar to have placed his sons, his heirs, in direct danger was maddeningly irresponsible. For him to have ended his children’s chance of a peaceful, safe, ordinary life was vengeful; it would destroy his sons.
Zulfikar should have known that. But they were wrong to have followed him too. There are signs, a changing of course over time, that suggest they understood that.
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15
Unlike Gandhi’s acts of civil disobedience, the MRD drive in 1983 was not entirely peaceful. There were strikes and shut-downs, but they were accompanied by significant acts of violence.
Agitation in Larkana, Sukkar, Jacobabad and Khairpur in Sindh was so fierce that the Governor of Sindh was forced to admit that in the first three weeks of the unrest the government had 1,999 people arrested, 189 killed and 126 injured.
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16
In December 1984, Zia held a referendum on his Islamization programme, linking the referendum to his right to remain in power. The question placed before the voters was insideously worded: ‘If you agree that Islamic laws be brought in in conformity with the Koran, then say YES. If the results of the referendum are positive it will mean that you approve of General Zia ul Haq continuing as President for another five years.’
The referendum produced a ludicrously inflated 98 per cent approval rating for the President and his policies.
With the ‘support’ of the people behind him, Zia called for elections in early 1985, which in turn created the plausible façade of a new civilian order and effectively legitimized the General’s rule. The MRD boycotted the elections and put itself out of the running.
It had failed to dislodge the dictator and had pushed Zia in the right direction – he had taken it up on its suggestion and had begun to ‘democratize’.
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17
‘There was friction between Mir and her [Benazir]. He loved her; he stepped aside for her. He said to us once, “She wants to be the political heir, so OK, I’ll move aside.”’
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18
Unwittingly, by constantly insisting on the importance of democratic government, but not tackling the abuses of the military regime or the incompatibility of the armed forces and an egalitarian system of rule, the MRD had given Zia the tools to strengthen his hold on power and neutralise the opposition to his junta. Democracy, after all, has always just been a word, a catch-phrase or election slogan – not a style of governance – in Pakistan.
The advisors to the new Prime Minister, Junejo, had in fact, pushed him to allow Benazir back into the country telling him and General Zia that ‘Benazir was more a threat to the MRD than to the government’.11 The advisors proved to be right.
By 1985 the MRD was politically deflated; not only had it failed to unify the varied resistance movements, but it had broken them.
The fuel that ran the resistance movement in Pakistan had run out, compromised by the political incompetence of the MRD.
Journalists were tired of fighting a regime that showed no signs of weakening, aided as it was by American money and support.
Students gave up their stone throwing and went back to classes, eager to earn degrees that would get them out of Pakistan.
Writers who had made their names through subversive plays and articles had bills to pay.
The same was true for Al Zulfikar. It existed, but only in spirit.
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19
They entered the apartment and found Shah’s [Shahnawaz Bhutto] body lying face down on the living-room floor, between the sofa and the coffee table.
‘When I saw him,’ Murtaza would later say, ‘I knew he was dead.’ Shah had blue marks on his chest and his face had already begun to turn a blue-ish black. He was wearing the trousers he had on from the previous evening, but no shirt. He was dead.
The police arrived and immediately began to inspect the flat. Murtaza looked for the poison in all the rooms, but found nothing. He searched the kitchen cupboards, careful not to move anything. A doctor, who came hours too late to save Shah, was standing in the kitchen when Murtaza opened the rubbish bin and found under several tissues a small glass bottle labelled ‘PENTREXIDE’.
Murtaza always believed Zia’s government had ordered the assassination. But how they carried it out was harder to explain.
And then, there was another theory, the main one. I have spent my life believing that Shah’s wife, Raehana, had something to do with her husband’s death.
The autopsy placed the time of Shah’s death in the early hours of the morning, approximately nine hours passed before the family and police were called to the scene. It didn’t escape anyone’s attention that Raehana had not raised the alarm until well past the time of death. This is where things get tricky. The police statements that Raehana made still exist and her testimony shakes everything up. It is rambling and incoherent.
I have read the statements, both in French and in English. I have had them translated and retranslated. I have read them backwards and forwards and I still don’t know what to make of them.
I grew up with my family’s belief that Raehana had been involved in some way. She hadn’t called for help in time. She hadn’t reacted fast enough. She had a rocky relationship with her husband. She’d thrown Murtaza out of the apartment the night before. There had always been distrust and dislike. In Raehana’s police testimony, there is a suggestion that she did not help Shah as he lay dying, but a clear assertion that she did not kill him.
Raehana was detained and spent time in jail in Nice [France]. She was questioned over a period of several months and then released. She then left France and flew to California to be with her family who were already looking after Sassi. It was the last time any of us saw her.
I remember that Papa was always unsure of what had really happened. But by then it was too late.
Too much time, too much anger, too much sadness had passed. He blamed himself for not being there that night to protect his younger brother. That always stayed with him.
Papa lost weight. He lost his smile and his ability to joke and laugh. Joonam [Nusrat Bhutto] too, I remember, took the death like a weight upon her heart. She was never the same again.
Why had Raehana been let go if she was involved? By all accounts she was not kept long as a suspect. She had been released and allowed to leave the country, surely not standard procedure for a murder suspect. But then who was responsible? I asked. And the answer, the possibility of who was to blame, at least indirectly in terms of benefiting from Shah’s death, was nothing I had ever imagined before. It was scandalous, mind-blowing.
But I knew, from experience, that anything is possible in the Bhutto family.
‘I wanted to make a big scandal about Shah’s murder,’ Vergès said, ‘but Benazir was against it. She didn’t want to fight the CIA and the Pakistani Intelligence service, who your father was always convinced were behind his brother’s death.’
Why not? I asked, genuinely curious. Vergès laughed again and made a face at me that I understood. Because she worked with them. Because her power was always based on their approval.
Months before her death, reports now claim, Benazir contacted Blackwater, America’s mercenary contractors, to provide the security for what would be her last election campaign. They declined. But my father, I asked, what did he think? ‘He was convinced and was prepared to make a stir, but his sister, she stopped it.’ Nobody believed it was suicide, Vergès confirmed, it just wasn’t a possibility.
I was sitting on the edge of my finely woven antique chair so Vergès could hear me clearly and I lowered my voice, uselessly, to ask the unthinkable, remembering what Sassi had told me months before: why did Benazir leave the case so skewed by refusing to fight it all the way? Did she have something to gain by not pursuing it? My hands were shaking so hard I could barely write. ‘It’s not impossible,’ Vergès replied cautiously.
‘It’s clear that when Mir and Shah decided to take this action,’ Vergès said, referring to AZO, ‘that Benazir would not approve. She was on another track – one with Western cooperation, especially with the USA. They were both against it, fighting it openly. I am not surprised that it would benefit her for one brother to be disposed of before the other.’
‘Imagine, to be killed by your own sister,’ he muttered
‘In her mind, what her two brothers were doing wasn’t helping her,’ Vergès calmly speculated. ‘Among the two brothers, the strongest brother was Mir. Perhaps it was necessary to get Shah out of the way because he was the weaker one.’
‘When did Benazir become Prime Minister?’ Vergès asked, returning to our topic. ‘Three years later,’ I replied. He nodded his head and said nothing.
‘She never opened an investigation into her brother’s murder,’ I said out loud, thinking back to what Sassi had told me earlier. ‘Ahh well,’ Vergès sighed, leaning back in his chair, ‘perhaps she already knew.’
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20
I remember wearing a woolly coat in those days, and learning new words. I learned the word divorce early; I knew what it meant and it sounded very grown-up to me. It is hard for me to disconnect my feelings about Fowzia [Fatima’s biological mother] from the woman I encountered as a teenager and adult. I am scared, frightened even, of my biological mother.
As a child I remember her moods, her unpredictable temperament, how beautiful she was and how much care she took of her hair, the dark kohl she would line her eyes with, how aware she was of her beauty. She would let me drink tea with her, sugary and diluted with milk, in the afternoons – I think that was our time together. But that’s it. That’s as far as my memories extend. Papa gave me my baths, read my bedtime stories, cut my hair, dressed me, and bought me boots that looked like his own polished shoes. I was a tomboy, as if to distance myself from Fowzia (I used to cut her lipsticks with scissors to trim their pointy, pyramid-like tips), and was a walking, talking devotee of my father.
When I finally saw Fowzia in Mr Dewolf ’s office, I wasn’t comforted. ‘Your father kidnapped you,’ she snarled once she had given me a huge cellophane-wrapped gift basket. It was less than six months after his murder. ‘I could have taken you back, you know?’
The drama of a ten-year-old divorce was being played out in front of Mr Dewolf, whom I had asked to stay in the meeting room with us. ‘I knew people in the American military. They offered to bring you back for me, by helicopter. Your father could have done nothing to stop them,’ Fowzia continued. ‘But I didn’t, for your sake.’
That week, after I baulked and refused to see her, Fowzia gave press conferences about my ‘kidnapping’ and my brainwashing at the hands of my evil ‘stepmother’ from Bilawal House, Benazir and Zardari’s Karachi home.
She called Mummy a maid whom Papa hadn’t loved but had married to take care of his child. She called Zulfi my ‘half-brother’, and said I was just like her. Fowzia wrote open letters to me in all the English language newspapers and filed a case for my custody in the Pakistani courts.
The school librarian, a kind British woman, took the newspapers off their racks every morning and hid them from me so I wouldn’t see Fowzia’s latest salvo as I did my homework in the library. I employed a lawyer and told Fowzia that I didn’t want to be with her, that I would never leave my family for her, a virtual stranger.
‘You’ll forget about them in two weeks,’ she assured me and gave me on bottle of vanilla-scented nailpolish. I am, I suppose, in some recesses of my 27-year-old being, still afraid of Fowzia.
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21
At night, before we slept, Papa [Mir] would kneel down and search under the bed. I asked him once what he was looking for and he told me he was just checking, making sure there was nothing that might hurt us under there. I assumed he meant a bomb. Or a man with a weapon.I never felt brave enough to look, but always felt a wave of relief once Papa had completed the routine search.
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22
The rumour circulating at the time was that a box of mangoes had been packed with explosives and placed on board Pak One. People whispered that it was fruit that had finally taken the dictator down.
There were, according to Epstein, ‘no outcries for vengeance, no efforts at counter coups, no real effort to find the assassins. In Pakistan, Zia and Rehman’s names disappeared within days from television, newspapers and other media.’
The Pakistan Air Force Board of Inquiry said the ‘most probable cause’ of the crash was ‘sabotage’ but stopped short of taking the investigation further.7 In fact a thorough investigation was never carried out. It was standard procedure; once the assassination had been carried out, no records were kept, no archives made. Nothing. Violence was the easiest means of disposing of yet another Pakistani politician, however odious he may have been.
The United States National Archives has some 250 pages of documents on the incident, but they remain classified to this day.
==========
23
The General [Zia] had taken the step of announcing elections for 1988, fully emboldened in his new role as the seemingly ‘democratic’ head of an authoritarian government. He had even begun to conduct secondparty negotiations with Benazir, who was not going to be left out of the power stakes by boycotting the elections like she had done in 1985. It was Benazir’s tremendous luck, something she had always benefited from, that Zia was killed before the elections took place. She had been preparing to be Prime Minister to his President.
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24
Murtaza had spoken to his sister about the party’s decision to engage in power-sharing negotiations with the junta. He had disagreed with her fundamentally on this issue. I remember the conversation. ‘What do you mean “take part”?’ Papa [Mir] said, almost shouting. ‘You’re willing to be Zia’s Prime Minister?’
Benazir was less calm, but she too had the air of someone used to beating her opponents. ‘I have a plan,’ she said. Papa was enraged. I got worried, I had never seen my father so upset. He started speaking angrily, talking about the dead, about their father, their brother, the many who lost their lives under Zia and the many more who were still suffering.
Papa was angry now and he was fighting with the sister he called Pinky, who was about to capitulate to power for the first of many times.
‘I can’t keep sitting on the outside,’ she said. ‘We have to be in government. It’s my chance. I’m not losing it. We can’t keep living like this.’ She mentioned money, making it, and Papa exploded.
He [Mir] refused to have anything to do with the party’s election campaign. He didn’t advise his mother or sister, he didn’t put forward any candidates, didn’t pledge his support. They spoke once more, Murtaza and Benazir, about the 1988 elections. He was upset that she had given her new husband, Asif Zardari, the party ticket to stand from Lyari, the heart of the People’s Party Power base in Karachi.
‘It’s for the workers, it’s their area, Pinky, how can you put him there?’ he asked her. She became cross and the conversation was over.
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25
‘She [Benazir] considered Yasser Arafat,’ Mummy recalls, unable to stop a smile from spreading across her face. ‘She thought he might be a suitable match.’
Karachi folklore says that it was Zia’s secretary, Roedad Khan, who suggested to Asif’s [Zardari] mother that he send a proposal to Benazir the year she was arranging her marriage and that Asif’s mother took the idea to Manna, Zulfikar’s sister and only living sibling, who did the rest of the damage. Dr Sikandar Jatoi of Larkana, the Bhuttos’ hometown, snarls at the mention of Zardari’s name, ‘He was a vulgar street boy. Before marriage, who knew him? No one.’
Benazir’s new husband, Asif Zardari, was key in the shaping of this new coterie through his role in giving out election tickets for the 1988 elections. He allocated these tickets to his school friends and loyal sidekicks or as Talbot puts it ‘opportunist entrants to the party’, effectively sidelining old party loyalists.
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26
When the news came that Zia had died in a plane crash, Papa and I were at a family friend’s house. My grandmother, Joonam [Nusrat], called our apartment and Aunty Ghinwa picked up the phone. Joonam was hysterical and had barely asked for her son before blurting out, ‘He’s dead, my God, Zia’s dead.’ Ghinwa frantically dialled Murtaza’s friend’s number and shrieked into the receiver that she had to speak to Mir. When his friends passed him the phone he listened quietly. His friends watched him, saw his neck turn red and worried that something awful had happened, that some other misfortune had befallen the family. Then Murtaza screamed. Ghinwa heard him drop the phone. He rushed back home, me rushing along with him, all of us ecstatic that it was over. Eleven years of fear and violence were over.
Zia was dead.
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27
The run-up to the 1988 elections started on the wrong foot. Benazir chose not to enter into electoral alliances with the other parties that made up the MRD – a mistake that resulted in her having to cope with a hostile coalition once in government – because she wanted to be free of the MRD’s 1986 Declaration of Provincial Autonomy.
The declaration called for limits to be placed on the centre’s power in four areas: currency, communications, defence and foreign policy. The declaration went a step further towards democratizing politics by placing ‘strict limits on the dissolution of provincial governments by the centre’.
She alienated many of the Pakistan People’s Party’s inner circle. Founding members and old guard, including her uncle, Mumtaz Bhutto, and Hafeez Pirzada, the author of the 1973 constitution, were among many who left the party under Benazir’s leadership.
Dr Ghulam Hussain, a founding member, and one of the prisoners released in the aftermath of the PIA hijacking, found no place for himself under the new Benazir/Zardari reshaping of the PPP. Hussain had served as the party’s Secretary-General under Zulfikar, a role that cost him five years in jail during martial law.
‘Zia sent three generals to me in jail,’ Dr Hussain tells me at his house in Islamabad, ‘and they asked me to resign from my Secretary-General position in writing, offering me a ministership in the new regime. Otherwise, should I refuse, they warned, they would prosecute me for treason. They accused me of leading a shooting at Liaqat Bagh in Rawalpindi. Imagine! There was no trial, no conviction, I was simply arrested and put in jail. I told them, I’ll stay with Bhutto come what may. They made good their threats once we were brought before a judge, to scare us into understanding our position as prisoners without rights and I caused a scene. I said to the judge,
“You are scared of Zia. I am scared of God, not this small man.”
I was led out of the courtroom shouting Zia hatao! ’ – Remove Zia!’ ‘Benazir, who couldn’t read Urdu – she had to write her speeches in English – bypassed me and gave the PPP ticket in Jhelum to Chaudry Aftaf, who was from the Pakistan Muslim League – Zia’s party! – because he was a jagirdar, a man so powerful as a feudal master that he owned serfs. This same man, who violated all the party’s principles ideologically, had also sat in Zia’s Majlis e Shoora! I didn’t even learn about my demotion from Benazir. I read about it in the press the next day.’
‘By 1985 we had grown disillusioned with Benazir’, he starts, speaking to me in a mixture of Urdu and English.
‘The party had been taken over. A part of it by capitalist rich industrialists with zero political understanding, another part of it by friends of the Chairperson and her husband, another by jagirdar, another by feudals or zamindar, and those workers who had merited leadership positions because of their understanding of the party’s ideology, because of their sacrifices, their loyalty, their immersion in the communities they represented – we were pushed out. Benazir was catering to those other factions for power. We lost our right to speak.’
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28
The party’s [PPP] decision to negotiate with the army and to work with Zia’s protégés in the lead-up to the elections [1988] carried with it the end of the PPP as its workers knew it.
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29
‘The differences between Mr Bhutto’s party and Benazir’s only grew,’ Shahnawaz continued. ‘It became like a war – us old workers against these businessmen who had erased the party’s founding ideology. It was a war about soch, about thought.’ Mauli agrees.
‘She was the opposite of what Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been. He made the party what it was by giving tickets to the small, the poor. But working with Benazir, we were thrown aside and watched waderas’ – a mixture of the land-cultivating zamindar and peasantexploiting jagirdar – ‘receive ticket after ticket. It was no longer about merit, it had become about power and favours.’
‘When Benazir came back from self-imposed exile in 1986 after her brother’s murder we joined her because she promised to take Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s programmes forward. We stayed with her because she promised us no more Bhuttos would be killed, that they would be protected by the strength of the party. Even then, however, people asked us, “Why are you struggling for her?” and our answer was always the same. Our struggle didn’t begin with her, it started a long time ago.’
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30
The deal Benazir brokered with the military elite sealed her fate, even after Zia was removed from the equation. The army ensured that the PPP would not sweep the 1988 polls, keeping Benazir on a tight leash. The party took ninety-two out of 207 national assembly seats – numbers which meant Benazir would have no power in parliament to roll back or reverse any of Zia’s laws, leaving the dictator’s legacy firmly in place.
==========
Nisar Khuro was brought into the People’s Party after Zulfikar’s death by his daughter Benazir, and was made head of the Sindh branch of the party. Khuro remains an integral part of the PPP till this day, currently serving Benazir’s and her husband’s PPP as the speaker of the Sindh Assembly.
Nisar Khuro, a member of the Khuro feudal family from Larkana had been agitating for Zulfikar’s imprisonment and murder; Abdul Waheed Katpar, one of the PPP’s founding members and another Larkana native, recalls Khuro chanting, ‘First hang Bhutto then try him!’ at gatherings around the city.
‘And when they killed Bhutto sahib, Khuro distributed sweets, mithai, around the city – it is well known,’
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07
The people of Pakistan, whom the PLA seems to be fighting for, are an even stranger breed of people. Their ‘war’ for ‘independence’ was ‘won’ by them one year before they had wanted it. Independence was forced on them; they were begged to become independent and free… The Pakistani Army effectively reflects the valour and determination of the people it lives off.
1) When a soldier fell on his backside he suffered brain damage.
2) It believes in equality: it constitutes 00.06 per cent of the population but consumes between 70 and 80 per cent of its wealth
The official spokesman of the PLA, Wolf, feels he can take on the Pakistani Army any time in an intellectual confrontation. We have advised him to refrain from challenging them as it will only provoke the heroic Pakistani Army into committing mass suicide. This is a very predictable reflex in the character of our brave army. They are also world-famous for surrendering heroically.
A very shrewd British statesman once remarked, ‘War is too serious a business to be left to the soldiers.’ How true.
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08
During the day the brothers [Mir and Shahnawaz] worked at drafting a manifesto for their movement, whose name they changed to Al Zulfikar, the name of the two-pronged sword carried by the Shiite Imam Ali, who was known to be a fearless warrior and a brave leader, and of course there was the connection with their father, who took his name from the Imam’s sword: Zulfikar Ali, the sword of Ali.
Since their move to Kabul and their declaration that they were going to fight the military regime until the democratic constitution of 1973 was restored, the regime began to portray them as terrorists.
In Pakistan, ever since Zulfikar’s imprisonment there had been a concerted smear campaign against the Bhutto family. The junta printed stories of Zulfikar’s ‘un-Islamic’ nature, calling him a communist and an atheist. They ran photographs of Nusrat and her daughters – their heads superimposed on bodies of women cavorting in swimsuits or knocking back drinks at raucous parties.
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09
As soon as General Zia reneged on his promise to hold elections in October 1979, the junta instituted blanket press censorship. Six daily newspapers were permanently shut down – Musawat, which Murtaza carried on printing and distributing from London, Tameer, Hawat, Aafaaq, Sahafat and Sadaqat.
The weekly Mustaqbul and monthly Dhanak were also closed.
Martial Law Regulation No. 19 was enacted and gave the government the right to censor matters deemed ‘prejudicial to Islamic ideology’, Pakistan’s security, and ‘morality and maintenance of public order’.
Local and international media outlets, including the BBC, were subject to twice-daily checks by the junta censor, who alone had the power to decide what would and would not be reported. What was considered offensive to ‘Islamic ideology’, a pet cause of the fundamentalist General, was often absurd and arbitrary – one over-eager TV producer went as far as censoring Popeye’s girlfriend Olive Oyl out of the cartoon because she wore a skirt.
Women anchors on Pakistan state television, PTV, were required to wear a hijab before being allowed on air. Mehtab Rashdi, a newscaster, was the first woman to quit in response to the mandatory hijab edict.
The reporting of any item that made the military regime look bad was considered ‘anti-state’.
Hussain Naqi, the Lahore bureau chief of the Pakistan Press Institute, lost his job in 1984 when he reported that the US President had stated during a press conference that Pakistan wasn’t a democracy.
In 1978, the editors of the Urdu dailies the Urdu Digest, the Sun and the PPP’s Musawat were arrested and sentenced to one year of rigorous imprisonment and ten public lashes for ‘publishing derogatory remarks against Zia’. They were later pardoned and released but the message was clear.
Disobedience to the state was unacceptable. Siddiqueh Hidayatullah, a teacher who was at the start of her career at Kinnaird College in Lahore, witnessed the frenzy around the city’s first public flogging and described the spectacle for me.
‘The lashing was being held on a large chowrangi or roundabout on Jail Road, right there in the open, in the middle of a busy street. People came in what looked like the thousands to watch, some were called from the nearby bazaars and others must have just turned up to have a look. Some men even climbed trees to have a decent view. It was sick. There was such a tamasha, or commotion, created around the floggings so that all of us would know how ferocious the regime was.’
The turning point came in May 1978 when four newsmen were publicly flogged for their dissidence.
journalists began to invite arrest by staging highly visible sitins, hunger strikes and rallies and by printing material critical of the government. In the two months after the floggings took place, 150 journalists were arrested.
Zia justified his regime’s unforgiving treatment of the press by declaring, ‘I have no respect for these newspapers and journalists who blindly use the stick of the pen to harm national interests.’
Nine Urdu dailies in Muzzafarabad were shut down by a local magistrate’s decree in 1979 as they refused to cease printing material critical of the government.
Ten journalists in Lahore lost their jobs in 1983 for taking part in a civil disobedience campaign protesting the extensive government repression, and as further punishment were banned from working in the media for the duration of Zia’s rule. Second, the press, which has never been braver since, fought against martial law through covert resistance, or as the government called it ‘deviant behaviour’.
Instead of filling their papers with large swathes of meaningless items, the newspapers began to leave the spaces blank.
When the largest English daily newspaper, Dawn – an establishment mouthpiece – printed almost an entire newspaper of empty columns, the government threatened it with permanent closure.
When blank columns in newspapers were forbidden, journalists like Mazhar Abbas, who wrote for the Daily Star, began resisting the censor’s pen more caustically.
‘In the blank spaces we would print a picture of a donkey or a dog and print news of Zia speaking or his ministers speaking underneath the pictures. So, they realized then that something fishy was going on, Then they said you had to inform the censorship board specifically of what news you would use to fill the blank spaces!’
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10
The lawyers’ resistance was a clear reaction against the junta’s co-opting of the judiciary and its interference in the state’s legal affairs.
The infamous Doctrine of Necessity, which claims that ‘that which otherwise is not lawful, necessity makes lawful’, had been used retroactively by Pakistan’s courts to justify every period of martial law imposed by the army, and was also used to condone Zia’s seizure of power.
By 1979 those judges who had demonstrated their lack of enthusiasm for the military in government had been swiftly sacked and replaced.
The power of the civil courts had been clipped and Sharia courts and military tribunals were created to do the bidding of the regime.
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11
Zina bil jabr is a variant taken to mean rape; however, under the junta’s new definition, consent was not the issue, but intercourse. A woman could be convicted by law after being raped because, willingly or not, she had had intercourse out of wedlock.
Under the Hudood laws, rape victims were prosecuted alongside their rapists for engaging in zina bil jabr.
In 1983, Lal Mai from Liaqatabad became the first woman to be publicly flogged on adultery charges under the Ordinances.
Reports indicated that 8,000 men witnessed Mai receive her fifteen lashes. It’s unclear whether the spectators at Mai’s punishment were brought to the scene by the police and made to watch her public torture, as happened in Afghanistan under the Taliban, or whether they were there out of morbid curiosity. But they were there, in their thousands.
Prior to the implementation of the Hudood Ordinances, Pakistan’s penal code did not label fornication a crime, but rather had provisions for dealing with the crime of marital rape and viewed rape itself as a crime where the rapist, not the victim, was the sole party to be indicted under law.
Moreover, zina laws under the Hudood Ordinances stipulated that an individual could be ‘found guilty with or without the consent of the other party’, which meant that women, as a result of medical evidence, were more likely to be convicted under the Ordinances than men. A simple examination could prove that a woman had recently had sex, or that she was no longer a virgin, but men’s innocence rested simply on their word.
No section of society was safe from the army’s interference in the early 1980s. Besides insinuating itself politically and legally into all corners of daily life, the army began to meddle in the running of Pakistan’s economy. If the army could not set the price of goods in the economic market, those goods would simply disappear.
If the army could not take a cut out of black market profits, those vendors would be arrested and often flogged.
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12
Urban professionals and intellectuals also played a substantial role in resisting martial law. The medical profession, otherwise neutral, took a unique and unprecedented stand against the junta.
The Hudood Ordinances ordered that thieves be punished by amputation of the hands, and as the sole group qualified to mete out the punishment doctors refused to comply.
Ghulam Ali from Okara was convicted of stealing a clock from his local mosque and sentenced to have his right hand removed; yet not a single doctor in all of Pakistan could be found to carry out the amputation, whereas we know that in countries where similar punishments are prescribed against theft, such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, amputations were and are still carried out with the aid of the local medical communities. The courts had no choice but to convert Ghulam Ali’s sentence to six years of rigorous imprisonment instead.
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13
Not all PPP members, it is worth noting, sacrificed themselves in the fight against the junta. The party’s current Prime Minister, Yousef Raza Gilani – who bears more than a passing resemblance to Saddam Hussain – spent his time not in jail but serving on the dictator’s majlis e shoora or religious parliamentary council, rubbing shoulders with General Zia’s protégé Nawaz Sharif.
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14
After the hijacking, Al Zulfikar made its most daring attempt at confronting the regime. A group of three people attacked Zia’s plane as it took off from Chaklala air base in Rawalpindi. They were armed with a Samsix heat-seeking missile and narrowly missed hitting the aircraft as it gained height.
On board the plane, the pilot and passengers were aware of the attempt on their lives. Sharing the flight with General Zia was Ghulam Ishaq Khan, the then chairman of the senate – and the man from whom Benazir would take her oath as Prime Minister to his presidency in 1988 – and Mahmood Haroon, whose signature featured prominently on Zulfikar’s death warrant, and who in another absurd placing would be appointed by Benazir as the governor of Sindh under her first government.
It seems unthinkable that of the three junta leaders on board the aeroplane, Benazir would work with two of them, negotiating with but narrowly missing her chance to work with the third. The three men managed to escape, but the Samsix attack intensified the regime’s fury towards the Bhutto brothers and their Kabul-based organization.
‘It was the most daring, direct attempt we made,’ Suhail tells me.
Suhail says that eighty-four charges of treason were made against Murtaza and Shahnawaz by the junta, all carrying the death penalty.
(I remember the number of charges being higher, in the nineties somewhere. Other people place them in the mid-hundreds.)
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15
Tribals from Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt were sent to Kabul to assassinate the brothers.
For Zulfikar to have placed his sons, his heirs, in direct danger was maddeningly irresponsible. For him to have ended his children’s chance of a peaceful, safe, ordinary life was vengeful; it would destroy his sons.
Zulfikar should have known that. But they were wrong to have followed him too. There are signs, a changing of course over time, that suggest they understood that.
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16
Unlike Gandhi’s acts of civil disobedience, the MRD drive in 1983 was not entirely peaceful. There were strikes and shut-downs, but they were accompanied by significant acts of violence.
Agitation in Larkana, Sukkar, Jacobabad and Khairpur in Sindh was so fierce that the Governor of Sindh was forced to admit that in the first three weeks of the unrest the government had 1,999 people arrested, 189 killed and 126 injured.
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17
In December 1984, Zia held a referendum on his Islamization programme, linking the referendum to his right to remain in power. The question placed before the voters was insideously worded: ‘If you agree that Islamic laws be brought in in conformity with the Koran, then say YES. If the results of the referendum are positive it will mean that you approve of General Zia ul Haq continuing as President for another five years.’
The referendum produced a ludicrously inflated 98 per cent approval rating for the President and his policies.
With the ‘support’ of the people behind him, Zia called for elections in early 1985, which in turn created the plausible façade of a new civilian order and effectively legitimized the General’s rule. The MRD boycotted the elections and put itself out of the running.
It had failed to dislodge the dictator and had pushed Zia in the right direction – he had taken it up on its suggestion and had begun to ‘democratize’.
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18
‘There was friction between Mir and her [Benazir]. He loved her; he stepped aside for her. He said to us once, “She wants to be the political heir, so OK, I’ll move aside.”’
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19
Unwittingly, by constantly insisting on the importance of democratic government, but not tackling the abuses of the military regime or the incompatibility of the armed forces and an egalitarian system of rule, the MRD had given Zia the tools to strengthen his hold on power and neutralise the opposition to his junta. Democracy, after all, has always just been a word, a catch-phrase or election slogan – not a style of governance – in Pakistan.
The advisors to the new Prime Minister, Junejo, had in fact, pushed him to allow Benazir back into the country telling him and General Zia that ‘Benazir was more a threat to the MRD than to the government’.11 The advisors proved to be right.
By 1985 the MRD was politically deflated; not only had it failed to unify the varied resistance movements, but it had broken them.
The fuel that ran the resistance movement in Pakistan had run out, compromised by the political incompetence of the MRD.
Journalists were tired of fighting a regime that showed no signs of weakening, aided as it was by American money and support.
Students gave up their stone throwing and went back to classes, eager to earn degrees that would get them out of Pakistan.
Writers who had made their names through subversive plays and articles had bills to pay.
The same was true for Al Zulfikar. It existed, but only in spirit.
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20
They entered the apartment and found Shah’s [Shahnawaz Bhutto] body lying face down on the living-room floor, between the sofa and the coffee table.
‘When I saw him,’ Murtaza would later say, ‘I knew he was dead.’ Shah had blue marks on his chest and his face had already begun to turn a blue-ish black. He was wearing the trousers he had on from the previous evening, but no shirt. He was dead.
The police arrived and immediately began to inspect the flat. Murtaza looked for the poison in all the rooms, but found nothing. He searched the kitchen cupboards, careful not to move anything. A doctor, who came hours too late to save Shah, was standing in the kitchen when Murtaza opened the rubbish bin and found under several tissues a small glass bottle labelled ‘PENTREXIDE’.
Murtaza always believed Zia’s government had ordered the assassination. But how they carried it out was harder to explain.
And then, there was another theory, the main one. I have spent my life believing that Shah’s wife, Raehana, had something to do with her husband’s death.
The autopsy placed the time of Shah’s death in the early hours of the morning, approximately nine hours passed before the family and police were called to the scene. It didn’t escape anyone’s attention that Raehana had not raised the alarm until well past the time of death. This is where things get tricky. The police statements that Raehana made still exist and her testimony shakes everything up. It is rambling and incoherent.
I have read the statements, both in French and in English. I have had them translated and retranslated. I have read them backwards and forwards and I still don’t know what to make of them.
I grew up with my family’s belief that Raehana had been involved in some way. She hadn’t called for help in time. She hadn’t reacted fast enough. She had a rocky relationship with her husband. She’d thrown Murtaza out of the apartment the night before. There had always been distrust and dislike. In Raehana’s police testimony, there is a suggestion that she did not help Shah as he lay dying, but a clear assertion that she did not kill him.
Raehana was detained and spent time in jail in Nice [France]. She was questioned over a period of several months and then released. She then left France and flew to California to be with her family who were already looking after Sassi. It was the last time any of us saw her.
I remember that Papa was always unsure of what had really happened. But by then it was too late.
Too much time, too much anger, too much sadness had passed. He blamed himself for not being there that night to protect his younger brother. That always stayed with him.
Papa lost weight. He lost his smile and his ability to joke and laugh. Joonam [Nusrat Bhutto] too, I remember, took the death like a weight upon her heart. She was never the same again.
Why had Raehana been let go if she was involved? By all accounts she was not kept long as a suspect. She had been released and allowed to leave the country, surely not standard procedure for a murder suspect. But then who was responsible? I asked. And the answer, the possibility of who was to blame, at least indirectly in terms of benefiting from Shah’s death, was nothing I had ever imagined before. It was scandalous, mind-blowing.
But I knew, from experience, that anything is possible in the Bhutto family.
‘I wanted to make a big scandal about Shah’s murder,’ Vergès said, ‘but Benazir was against it. She didn’t want to fight the CIA and the Pakistani Intelligence service, who your father was always convinced were behind his brother’s death.’
Why not? I asked, genuinely curious. Vergès laughed again and made a face at me that I understood. Because she worked with them. Because her power was always based on their approval.
Months before her death, reports now claim, Benazir contacted Blackwater, America’s mercenary contractors, to provide the security for what would be her last election campaign. They declined. But my father, I asked, what did he think? ‘He was convinced and was prepared to make a stir, but his sister, she stopped it.’ Nobody believed it was suicide, Vergès confirmed, it just wasn’t a possibility.
I was sitting on the edge of my finely woven antique chair so Vergès could hear me clearly and I lowered my voice, uselessly, to ask the unthinkable, remembering what Sassi had told me months before: why did Benazir leave the case so skewed by refusing to fight it all the way? Did she have something to gain by not pursuing it? My hands were shaking so hard I could barely write. ‘It’s not impossible,’ Vergès replied cautiously.
‘It’s clear that when Mir and Shah decided to take this action,’ Vergès said, referring to AZO, ‘that Benazir would not approve. She was on another track – one with Western cooperation, especially with the USA. They were both against it, fighting it openly. I am not surprised that it would benefit her for one brother to be disposed of before the other.’
‘Imagine, to be killed by your own sister,’ he muttered
‘In her mind, what her two brothers were doing wasn’t helping her,’ Vergès calmly speculated. ‘Among the two brothers, the strongest brother was Mir. Perhaps it was necessary to get Shah out of the way because he was the weaker one.’
‘When did Benazir become Prime Minister?’ Vergès asked, returning to our topic. ‘Three years later,’ I replied. He nodded his head and said nothing.
‘She never opened an investigation into her brother’s murder,’ I said out loud, thinking back to what Sassi had told me earlier. ‘Ahh well,’ Vergès sighed, leaning back in his chair, ‘perhaps she already knew.’
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21
I remember wearing a woolly coat in those days, and learning new words. I learned the word divorce early; I knew what it meant and it sounded very grown-up to me. It is hard for me to disconnect my feelings about Fowzia [Fatima’s biological mother] from the woman I encountered as a teenager and adult. I am scared, frightened even, of my biological mother.
As a child I remember her moods, her unpredictable temperament, how beautiful she was and how much care she took of her hair, the dark kohl she would line her eyes with, how aware she was of her beauty. She would let me drink tea with her, sugary and diluted with milk, in the afternoons – I think that was our time together. But that’s it. That’s as far as my memories extend. Papa gave me my baths, read my bedtime stories, cut my hair, dressed me, and bought me boots that looked like his own polished shoes. I was a tomboy, as if to distance myself from Fowzia (I used to cut her lipsticks with scissors to trim their pointy, pyramid-like tips), and was a walking, talking devotee of my father.
When I finally saw Fowzia in Mr Dewolf ’s office, I wasn’t comforted. ‘Your father kidnapped you,’ she snarled once she had given me a huge cellophane-wrapped gift basket. It was less than six months after his murder. ‘I could have taken you back, you know?’
The drama of a ten-year-old divorce was being played out in front of Mr Dewolf, whom I had asked to stay in the meeting room with us. ‘I knew people in the American military. They offered to bring you back for me, by helicopter. Your father could have done nothing to stop them,’ Fowzia continued. ‘But I didn’t, for your sake.’
That week, after I baulked and refused to see her, Fowzia gave press conferences about my ‘kidnapping’ and my brainwashing at the hands of my evil ‘stepmother’ from Bilawal House, Benazir and Zardari’s Karachi home.
She called Mummy a maid whom Papa hadn’t loved but had married to take care of his child. She called Zulfi my ‘half-brother’, and said I was just like her. Fowzia wrote open letters to me in all the English language newspapers and filed a case for my custody in the Pakistani courts.
The school librarian, a kind British woman, took the newspapers off their racks every morning and hid them from me so I wouldn’t see Fowzia’s latest salvo as I did my homework in the library. I employed a lawyer and told Fowzia that I didn’t want to be with her, that I would never leave my family for her, a virtual stranger.
‘You’ll forget about them in two weeks,’ she assured me and gave me on bottle of vanilla-scented nailpolish. I am, I suppose, in some recesses of my 27-year-old being, still afraid of Fowzia.
==========
22
At night, before we slept, Papa [Mir] would kneel down and search under the bed. I asked him once what he was looking for and he told me he was just checking, making sure there was nothing that might hurt us under there. I assumed he meant a bomb. Or a man with a weapon.I never felt brave enough to look, but always felt a wave of relief once Papa had completed the routine search.
==========
23
The rumour circulating at the time was that a box of mangoes had been packed with explosives and placed on board Pak One. People whispered that it was fruit that had finally taken the dictator down.
There were, according to Epstein, ‘no outcries for vengeance, no efforts at counter coups, no real effort to find the assassins. In Pakistan, Zia and Rehman’s names disappeared within days from television, newspapers and other media.’
The Pakistan Air Force Board of Inquiry said the ‘most probable cause’ of the crash was ‘sabotage’ but stopped short of taking the investigation further.7 In fact a thorough investigation was never carried out. It was standard procedure; once the assassination had been carried out, no records were kept, no archives made. Nothing. Violence was the easiest means of disposing of yet another Pakistani politician, however odious he may have been.
The United States National Archives has some 250 pages of documents on the incident, but they remain classified to this day.
==========
24
The General [Zia] had taken the step of announcing elections for 1988, fully emboldened in his new role as the seemingly ‘democratic’ head of an authoritarian government. He had even begun to conduct secondparty negotiations with Benazir, who was not going to be left out of the power stakes by boycotting the elections like she had done in 1985. It was Benazir’s tremendous luck, something she had always benefited from, that Zia was killed before the elections took place. She had been preparing to be Prime Minister to his President.
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25
Murtaza had spoken to his sister about the party’s decision to engage in power-sharing negotiations with the junta. He had disagreed with her fundamentally on this issue. I remember the conversation. ‘What do you mean “take part”?’ Papa [Mir] said, almost shouting. ‘You’re willing to be Zia’s Prime Minister?’
Benazir was less calm, but she too had the air of someone used to beating her opponents. ‘I have a plan,’ she said. Papa was enraged. I got worried, I had never seen my father so upset. He started speaking angrily, talking about the dead, about their father, their brother, the many who lost their lives under Zia and the many more who were still suffering.
Papa was angry now and he was fighting with the sister he called Pinky, who was about to capitulate to power for the first of many times.
‘I can’t keep sitting on the outside,’ she said. ‘We have to be in government. It’s my chance. I’m not losing it. We can’t keep living like this.’ She mentioned money, making it, and Papa exploded.
He [Mir] refused to have anything to do with the party’s election campaign. He didn’t advise his mother or sister, he didn’t put forward any candidates, didn’t pledge his support. They spoke once more, Murtaza and Benazir, about the 1988 elections. He was upset that she had given her new husband, Asif Zardari, the party ticket to stand from Lyari, the heart of the People’s Party Power base in Karachi.
‘It’s for the workers, it’s their area, Pinky, how can you put him there?’ he asked her. She became cross and the conversation was over.
==========
26
‘She [Benazir] considered Yasser Arafat,’ Mummy recalls, unable to stop a smile from spreading across her face. ‘She thought he might be a suitable match.’
Karachi folklore says that it was Zia’s secretary, Roedad Khan, who suggested to Asif’s [Zardari] mother that he send a proposal to Benazir the year she was arranging her marriage and that Asif’s mother took the idea to Manna, Zulfikar’s sister and only living sibling, who did the rest of the damage. Dr Sikandar Jatoi of Larkana, the Bhuttos’ hometown, snarls at the mention of Zardari’s name, ‘He was a vulgar street boy. Before marriage, who knew him? No one.’
Benazir’s new husband, Asif Zardari, was key in the shaping of this new coterie through his role in giving out election tickets for the 1988 elections. He allocated these tickets to his school friends and loyal sidekicks or as Talbot puts it ‘opportunist entrants to the party’, effectively sidelining old party loyalists.
==========
27
When the news came that Zia had died in a plane crash, Papa and I were at a family friend’s house. My grandmother, Joonam [Nusrat], called our apartment and Aunty Ghinwa picked up the phone. Joonam was hysterical and had barely asked for her son before blurting out, ‘He’s dead, my God, Zia’s dead.’ Ghinwa frantically dialled Murtaza’s friend’s number and shrieked into the receiver that she had to speak to Mir. When his friends passed him the phone he listened quietly. His friends watched him, saw his neck turn red and worried that something awful had happened, that some other misfortune had befallen the family. Then Murtaza screamed. Ghinwa heard him drop the phone. He rushed back home, me rushing along with him, all of us ecstatic that it was over. Eleven years of fear and violence were over.
Zia was dead.
==========
28
The run-up to the 1988 elections started on the wrong foot. Benazir chose not to enter into electoral alliances with the other parties that made up the MRD – a mistake that resulted in her having to cope with a hostile coalition once in government – because she wanted to be free of the MRD’s 1986 Declaration of Provincial Autonomy.
The declaration called for limits to be placed on the centre’s power in four areas: currency, communications, defence and foreign policy. The declaration went a step further towards democratizing politics by placing ‘strict limits on the dissolution of provincial governments by the centre’.
She alienated many of the Pakistan People’s Party’s inner circle. Founding members and old guard, including her uncle, Mumtaz Bhutto, and Hafeez Pirzada, the author of the 1973 constitution, were among many who left the party under Benazir’s leadership.
Dr Ghulam Hussain, a founding member, and one of the prisoners released in the aftermath of the PIA hijacking, found no place for himself under the new Benazir/Zardari reshaping of the PPP. Hussain had served as the party’s Secretary-General under Zulfikar, a role that cost him five years in jail during martial law.
‘Zia sent three generals to me in jail,’ Dr Hussain tells me at his house in Islamabad, ‘and they asked me to resign from my Secretary-General position in writing, offering me a ministership in the new regime. Otherwise, should I refuse, they warned, they would prosecute me for treason. They accused me of leading a shooting at Liaqat Bagh in Rawalpindi. Imagine! There was no trial, no conviction, I was simply arrested and put in jail. I told them, I’ll stay with Bhutto come what may. They made good their threats once we were brought before a judge, to scare us into understanding our position as prisoners without rights and I caused a scene. I said to the judge,
“You are scared of Zia. I am scared of God, not this small man.”
I was led out of the courtroom shouting Zia hatao! ’ – Remove Zia!’ ‘Benazir, who couldn’t read Urdu – she had to write her speeches in English – bypassed me and gave the PPP ticket in Jhelum to Chaudry Aftaf, who was from the Pakistan Muslim League – Zia’s party! – because he was a jagirdar, a man so powerful as a feudal master that he owned serfs. This same man, who violated all the party’s principles ideologically, had also sat in Zia’s Majlis e Shoora! I didn’t even learn about my demotion from Benazir. I read about it in the press the next day.’
‘By 1985 we had grown disillusioned with Benazir’, he starts, speaking to me in a mixture of Urdu and English.
‘The party had been taken over. A part of it by capitalist rich industrialists with zero political understanding, another part of it by friends of the Chairperson and her husband, another by jagirdar, another by feudals or zamindar, and those workers who had merited leadership positions because of their understanding of the party’s ideology, because of their sacrifices, their loyalty, their immersion in the communities they represented – we were pushed out. Benazir was catering to those other factions for power. We lost our right to speak.’
==========
29
The party’s [PPP] decision to negotiate with the army and to work with Zia’s protégés in the lead-up to the elections [1988] carried with it the end of the PPP as its workers knew it.
==========
30
‘The differences between Mr Bhutto’s party and Benazir’s only grew,’ Shahnawaz continued. ‘It became like a war – us old workers against these businessmen who had erased the party’s founding ideology. It was a war about soch, about thought.’ Mauli agrees.
‘She was the opposite of what Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been. He made the party what it was by giving tickets to the small, the poor. But working with Benazir, we were thrown aside and watched waderas’ – a mixture of the land-cultivating zamindar and peasantexploiting jagirdar – ‘receive ticket after ticket. It was no longer about merit, it had become about power and favours.’
‘When Benazir came back from self-imposed exile in 1986 after her brother’s murder we joined her because she promised to take Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s programmes forward. We stayed with her because she promised us no more Bhuttos would be killed, that they would be protected by the strength of the party. Even then, however, people asked us, “Why are you struggling for her?” and our answer was always the same. Our struggle didn’t begin with her, it started a long time ago.’
==========
31 May
The deal Benazir brokered with the military elite sealed her fate, even after Zia was removed from the equation. The army ensured that the PPP would not sweep the 1988 polls, keeping Benazir on a tight leash. The party took ninety-two out of 207 national assembly seats – numbers which meant Benazir would have no power in parliament to roll back or reverse any of Zia’s laws, leaving the dictator’s legacy firmly in place.
Benazir accepted the army’s conditions. The defence budget was to remain ‘sacrosanct’, the army was to hold the ultimate veto in security and foreign policy matters, and IMF loan conditions and stipulations were to be reaffirmed and left untouched.
Zia’s Foreign Minister, Yakub Ali Khan, remained in place to deal with the army’s special spots like Afghanistan and Kashmir, and Zia’s one-time favourite and Chairman of the Senate, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, was promoted to serve as Benazir’s President.
==========
01 June
The PPP had won with only a slight majority. Murtaza called his sister and pleaded with her, ‘Pinky, don’t accept these results.’ She ignored him, overjoyed that she was so close to power, close enough to touch it. Nusrat also advised her daughter to reject the results. It will make you stronger, she told her. Benazir made a public show of her irritation at the suggestion by leaving her mother in Islamabad and travelling to Larkana by herself, remaining there until her decision had been announced. She said yes to all the army’s conditions.
==========
02
It took Zia’s number two, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, a week to invite Benazir to become Prime Minister. The insult infuriated Murtaza even more. The army’s conditions, the stalling, the rigging, it was too much.
He [Mir] called his sister again. ‘They’re tying your hands,’ he told her. ‘You’re going to be weak. Refuse their conditions, Don’t take the government, sit in the opposition, Pinky. You’ll be in a phenomenal position. Don’t bow down to these bastards.’ But those around the future Prime Minister told her not to listen.
‘We can’t afford to sit in the opposition, Mir,’ she told her brother on the phone. ‘If people don’t feel they’re getting something from the party they’ll leave us.’ It was untrue. The party had nothing but loyal workers. It was the interlopers, the new moneyed recruits, who would have fled but they were a gamble Benazir was already unwilling to risk.
==========
03
‘Please don’t come back now, Mir,’ she had begged him, ‘it’s too hard on me.’ Benazir told her brother that Pakistan’s Intelligence, the ISI, had ‘lost his file’, that no one knew the exact number of charges the dictator had brought against him. She told her brother that her hands were tied.
==========
04
In Karachi, on that first trip, my mother gave her first press conference. Papa had trusted Ghinwa to speak for him. A journalist asked the question on everyone’s mind that winter of 1989: why hadn’t Murtaza returned to participate in his country’s turn towards democracy? Mummy answered honestly: ‘He wants to. But his sister has asked him not to come back now.’
Benazir would not forget her sisterin-law’s frank remark.
==========
05
The PPP had been fully opened to the remnants of Zia’s regime. Mahmood Haroon, whose signature was on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s death warrant, was appointed the Governor of Sindh; Nisar Khuro, who publicly demanded that Zulfikar be ‘hanged first and tried later’, was made the head of the party in Sindh, and various other floaters from Zia’s cabinet and inner circle had been given party tickets.
Benazir reversed many of her father’s programmes, easily and openly. She asked the Commonwealth to allow Pakistan back, oblivious to Zulfikar’s principled decision in leaving the British-run organization; she scrapped the ceilings on land holdings set in place by Zulfikar’s land reforms, thereby safeguarding the feudal system her father had been taking steps to roll back; and she began the process of privatizing the industries that her father had nationalized and made sure that the lion’s share was never far from her hands.
==========
06
Zardari’s crooked business chums along with petty small-time thieves he happened to know also found space for themselves within the inner sanctum of the PPP. It was said that they made millions, money taken under the table, and that kickbacks were ceremoniously given back to the first couple, earning Zardari the nickname Mr Ten Perent.
==========
07
Internationally, the government carried on Zia’s policies unamended. The Afghan adventure continued, aided and abetted by the Intelligence agencies, as did Pakistan’s nuclear programme.
Iqbal Akhund, one of Benazir’s foreign affairs advisors and a career diplomat who watched Benazir’s government first hand, summed up the PPP’s foreign policy perfectly: ‘On Afghanistan, Kashmir and India the government was faced with very complex and thorny issues but the decision making in all these had been taken over by the army and the intelligence agencies in Zia’s time, and there, in the ultimate analysis, it remained.’
==========
08
Benazir did not suspend the Hudood Ordinances, that called for women who commit adultery or engage in premarital sex to be put to death; nor did she enhance women’s rights in any official way. In a two-year period, the Pakistan People’s Party government led by Benazir did not introduce any meaningful legislation. Nothing was changed, no institutions strengthened.
==========
09
Dr Ghulam Hussain was summoned to meet his former political student, who was, in late 1990, in a good mood. ‘She asked me what I thought the difference had been between her government and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s,’ he says. ‘I told her, “Leave it.” But she insisted, she was feeling quite jolly. So I told her.
“In front of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto we party workers were afraid to lie – we were punished for it greatly. In front of you,” I said, “we are afraid to tell the truth.”’
‘“But Benazir sahiba,” I told her,’ Dr Hussain says, having now forgone his tears for anger, his voice rising, ‘“You think you can buy credibility? You can’t! How much will it cost?”’ Dr Hussain doesn’t mince his words, but still, I’m amazed that he spoke to her like that. That she tolerated his questioning of her leadership. It was never easy to do, but Dr Hussain’s seniority afforded him his right to speak, and he continued, before the doors were closed on him for good.
‘“In my village,”’ Dr Hussain shouts, as if with my notebook and pen before him I suddenly represent Benazir, ‘“there used to be no electricity, no schools.” I told her, “If you were born in my village, you wouldn’t have got past primary school. We earned this right to criticize and we fought to speak openly. You only inherited it.”’
==========
10
Maulabux, one of those political workers, speaks forcefully when I mention this idea of the prodigal son returning home. ‘In our culture, the asl waris, or true heir, was Mir baba.’ The assumption was that Benazir’s brothers were not in Pakistan during the time that Benazir built her political career under Zia because it was too dangerous for them to remain in their country.
Zulfikar had sent his sons out of the country specifically because he saw them as the inheritors of his throne.
‘The unsaid understanding,’ Mauli continues, ‘was that whatever Benazir did at that time she did as a representative of her family, not as Benazir the individual, but as Benazir the child of Bhuttos.’
Mauli understands how this must sound, this trying to explain to me that we are our families, nothing more defined, nothing more unique than that. He’s also talking to another eldest child, a daughter ironically. ‘Look,’ he starts again, measuring his words, ‘it’s the same in Baloch culture, in Pathan culture – even in Western cultures, isn’t it? – it’s the eldest son’s role, duty even, to take over the father’s work whether it is farming, business or politics.’ Mauli stops. ‘Bibi,’ he says, ‘Bhutto ka waris Bhutto hai.’ ‘Bhutto’s heir is a Bhutto’.
Benazir had become a Zardari. It’s a not so subtle reminder to me too, though Mauli is taking pains to make sure I don’t take his explanation to heart – I’m single after all; there’s no reason to take it personally, not yet at least.
==========
20
‘In the twenty months of his sister’s rule, Mir maintained his silence’ Suhail reminds me. ‘Even though he saw and disagreed with what was going on. He took a very political and democratic path: he decided to contest elections. He didn’t return and demand his title. He set himself up for a fight. How many people, you tell me, have contested elections from abroad and won?’ Suhail asks, raising his eyebrows. He’s right, I only know of one.
In the summer of 1993, Murtaza made up his mind. He was going home. He called Ghinwa, who had taken Zulfi to Oklahoma for the summer to visit her elder sister, Racha, and told her to come back home; he was going to contest the election.
Ghinwa cut her trip short and flew home.
I was away with my grandmother, Joonam, and was also put on a flight and bundled home. Murtaza spoke to his mother, who still held – and not for much longer – an honorary chairpersonship in the party. Murtaza asked Nusrat for the application forms to file for election tickets. But it was Benazir, the active Chairperson, who along with her husband had the task of choosing the party’s candidates. Benazir spoke to her brother directly. She refused him a ticket straight out and offered him some advice: if he was serious about coming back to Pakistan then he ought to leave Syria, a rogue state in her estimation, and settle in London for a few years, long enough to expunge any taint of socialism, and then they could talk about him running on a party ticket, maybe in an election or two.
Benazir was a consummate bully; she had got her own way for too long.
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21
No, he [Mir] finally insisted to his sister, I’ll contest this election. Murtaza asked for nine tickets – all of which were eventually handed out to Zardari and his cronies. Benazir pushed back and rejected his request. ‘I can’t give you and your people nine seats,’ she said and offered him a provincial seat in some backwoods constituency. None of us at the time could imagine why Benazir was so frightened of her younger brother.
It was at the end of 1993 that Benazir ousted her mother, who had spent the better part of the year campaigning for Murtaza, from her largely ceremonial post as honorary Chairperson and installed herself as Chairperson for Life, an actual title.
‘Nine seats in all of Pakistan,’ my mother says to me later as we stand in our kitchen and discuss our past and the book I’m writing that is making us relive it chapter by chapter. ‘It is how she sidelined him since taking over the party. She virtually eliminated Murtaza – he had become a burden to her. There was simply no space for him.’
Eventually, the seat that Murtaza had asked for as his first choice – PS 204, the Bhutto home seat of Larkana, where Zulfikar built the family home that would become Murtaza’s residence – was given to a newcomer called Munawar Abbassi. Locals knew him as the landlord who had bestowed an ajrak, a Sindhi sign of hospitality, around General Zia’s neck the first time he visited Larkana.
==========
22
Murtaza decided to run as an independent and began to prepare for the race of his life. It must be said, because it cannot be left out, that nothing in Pakistan moves without the pull and sway of the Intelligence service.
While Benazir corralled family members like Sanam, and distant friends and acquaintances, to dissuade Murtaza from returning home, the Intelligence – it’s easy to see now, in hindsight – made some calls of its own to assess how serious the rift in the Bhutto family was. How far they reached and what influence they sought to have, I don’t know, but a public feud opened a space for those who wished to work against the family.
In Benazir’s mind, her decisions always had the blessing of the all-powerful political establishment; this case was no different. In any event, the political establishment couldn’t have influenced Murtaza either way; that was their fundamental misunderstanding. If Papa won a seat in parliament, we were packing our bags. If he didn’t, we were staying put in our Damascus home. That was our family deal.
After sixteen years of exile, of being kept quiet, Murtaza had been propelled into the limelight as the heir apparent of the PPP.
==========
23
The newspapers and reports from Pakistan would not let us forget it. A story three days earlier had claimed that Benazir’s government was holding ‘in readiness non-bailable warrants of arrest for Murtaza on arrival’,
That Papa would be arrested was something we took for granted. He had packed several magazines – Newsweek and The Economist and Vanity Fair, his favourite – to read in jail. He had pen and paper to write letters – which he promised he would have someone fax across to me – and books to keep him company. He was so relaxed about jail, for my sake I’m sure, he made it seem like nothing more frightening than a spa weekend away and even joked that he planned to lose a few pounds while incarcerated.
He embraced his mother and was led away by the police and taken to Landhi Jail in North Karachi. It would be his home for the next eight months.
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24
Murtaza was taken to the Sindh Assembly to swear his oath and when he rose to speak for the first time in parliament, the Daily Nation newspaper noted that ‘the hall of the Sindh Assembly was in a state of pin-drop silence when a new voice intended to introduce itself in the House for the first time, the voice of Mir Murtaza Bhutto, jailed brother of the Prime Minister.’
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25
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s birthday falls on 5 January and has been celebrated, since his death, at the family’s ancestral graveyard at Garhi Khuda Bux, near Larkana. In 1994, 5 January coincided with Murtaza’s second month in jail. He had last seen Zulfikar in 1977 when he and Shahnawaz were sent into exile by their father.
Murtaza had never been to his father’s grave to offer the customary prayers of Muslim mourning. He wrote a letter to the Sindh Home Ministry asking to be paroled for three days so that he could travel to Larkana to mark his father’s birthday and pray at his grave. His request was swiftly turned down.
The Eid parole was one thing, everyone in the country celebrated Eid. But there were only two Bhutto heirs in Pakistan for 5 January.
On the morning of 5 January 1994, the police, led by a Karachi based officer named Wajid Durrani, and acting under the orders of the Prime Minister, cordoned off our Al Murtaza house. The Bhutto house was locked down. The state was determined that no one should leave the house, not even Zulfikar’s widow, the Prime Minister’s own mother, who had never been stopped from travelling to her husband’s grave, not even under General Zia’s junta.
Joonam was distraught. No one had ever fired upon Bhutto’s house. Not under Ayub Khan’s dictatorship, not under Yahya Khan’s martial law, not under Zia ul Haq’s repression. She had been imprisoned, denied the right to trial and had even been beaten, but Nusrat Bhutto had never been shot at before.
She spoke to the media, to the BBC, to Indian and Pakistani journalists who were at the scene. She said to the New York Times that only two days earlier Benazir had offered to drive her mother to the mazaar on the 5th, so desperate was she that Nusrat be seen with her and not with Murtaza’s workers. ‘Instead, she sent people to tear-gas and to shoot.’ Joonam continued angrily, ‘She talks a lot about democracy, but she’s become a little dictator. I can’t forgive her.’
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26
There was confusion, even in Karachi, over just how many cases Zia’s regime had brought against the Bhutto brothers. It was even said in the press that the total number of charges against Murtaza and Shahnawaz was higher than the ninety-odd that we knew of, that the junta had placed a total of 178 charges against the two men.
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27
Rumour has it that on the day that he was preparing to read the bail decision to the court, 5 June, Junejo was interrupted several times by a court clerk who kept handing him slips of paper informing him that an urgent phone call was waiting for him in his chambers. He ignored the messages and continued with his proceedings, reading the order pronouncing Murtaza’s bail.
What is certainly not rumour, however, is that the very next day Justice Ali Ahmed Junejo was sacked from his job by the government. Later, Junejo spoke openly of his belief that it was his decision to grant Murtaza Bhutto bail that cost him his job but that he felt he had done his legal duty and that justice had been served.
When Papa’s release orders were finally signed the next day, close to twenty-fours hours after his bail had been granted, we heard that Benazir had been rung up by the army, by someone with enough epaulettes to order the Prime Minister around. ‘Stop making a hero out of him,’ the army man reprimanded Benazir. ‘Let him go, quickly.’ Whatever else he said, it shook the Prime Minister.
Papa received his release papers on 6 June.
Eventually, Joonam [Nusrat Bhutto] picked up the phone and called Benazir. Mummy and I sat in Joonam’s bedroom as she made the call. ‘Why aren’t you releasing Mir?’ Joonam asked, her voice tight and strained with nerves. ‘We have more cases against him, Mummy,’ the Prime Minister replied. She was not feeling chatty. She didn’t elaborate on where these cases came from, how the ‘missing’ ISI file against Murtaza had suddenly reappeared, and didn’t sound terribly aggrieved at the prospect of keeping her only brother in jail.
We busied ourselves getting dressed and tidying up the house. Papa hadn’t been home to 70 Clifton in seventeen years. It was the home he was born into; they were the same age.
Papa walked into the home he’d left as a young man of twenty-three. He was almost forty when he finally returned.
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28
In Karachi, Papa’s movements were watched by the Intelligence service, who parked outside 70 Clifton in a dilapidated beige car with brown leather interior and followed him everywhere he went. But even they were no match for Papa’s sense of humour. Once, en route to a wedding, we got lost on the road. Papa stopped the Intelligence vehicle and asked them for directions.
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29
Joonam didn’t like the way her children were so easily pitted against each other. ‘I don’t like the way you’re fighting,’ she said to Wadi [Benazir]. ‘It’s bad for your father’s legacy.’ Zardari had been sitting in an armchair in the room, silently, until then. ‘As if there was a legacy,’ he sneered loudly, filling up the room all of a sudden. Everyone went quiet, even Wadi.
No one ever spoke about Zulfikar like that, dismissively, vulgarly. Not in the family, not ever.
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30
‘There’s no question, Begum Sahiba [Nusrat Bhutto] was firmly with Mir’, Suhail says to me over dinner in Karachi. ‘But you must remember, Nusrat was the spirit of the PPP after ZAB was arrested in ’77. Zia wanted to split the party and your grandmother played a very large role in keeping it together initially. She stood on trucks to give speeches, led rallies across the country, was beaten by the police and arrested – she was the life force of the PPP in those dark days.
But as soon as Mir came back, Benazir ousted her mother from her honorary party post. She was terrified that her mother might try to overturn her decisions and welcome Mir into the party fold.’
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01 July
Instead of entrusting the judiciary to tackle the criminal and political thuggery of MQM, she bypassed the courts and directed her Interior Minister, General Naserullah Babar, to teach the MQM a lesson. General Babar, a cruel man with shady Afghan connections said to be so strong that he often publicly referred to the Taliban as ‘my boys’, launched an attack on the MQM and Karachi’s Muhajirs so brutal that even its name, ‘Operation Clean-Up’, does not do justice to the level of violence the state employed.
Altaf Hussain is undoubtedly a man with a criminal past, but he is not the sole – or most credible – representative of the Muhajir community by any means. The most infamous of the methods employed by Operation Clean-Up was the notorious ‘police encounter’, extrajudicial killings disguised as shoot-outs.
Assassinations, torture, mutilation and blackmail were also popular with Karachi’s security forces charged with ‘cleaning up’ the city.
Herald Magazine revealed that Benazir had attended a political seminar in Karachi and had been angrily questioned over the ‘government’s apparent policy of eliminating suspected “terrorists” by summarily executing them’.
In response, the Prime Minister ‘praised the heroic efforts of the security forces and countered the allegations of extrajudicial killings by claiming that out of the more than 2,000 people killed last year [1995] only 55 were “terrorists” of the “Altaf Group” and that all of them were killed in real gun battles with the Rangers or the police’.
‘She could not have been more wrong,’ the article stated.7 The Prime Minister’s fuzzy logic and her fervent praise for the operation make clear her role; she was aware of what was happening on the ground. She was aware that Babar had turned Karachi into a killing field.
In 1994, 1,113 people were killed in what Herald Magazine called a ‘bloody trail’ that had turned Karachi into a ‘virtual city of death’. The city was on fire. The police acted with impunity and brazenly killed those who got in their way. No arrests were made – not legally at least; warrants were not produced in the event of detentions, those who were seized by the security forces were hardly ever taken before the courts.
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02
Naserullah Babar, the retired army general who ran the operation, spoke to the Herald, attacking it for its coverage. ‘I don’t know why you should talk all the time about people who in any case have a large number of killings to their name,’ General Babar said. ‘Every man killed in an encounter had a record of murder.’
‘Encounters’ were elaborate police set-ups that always followed the same pattern. The police or Rangers would claim to turn up at location X with the intent of arresting terrorist Y who would inevitably ‘fire’ at the police and so had to be killed on the spot rather than be taken in. It bears noting that the dead terrorist was usually shot very precisely, often in the head or the chest. They were never shot in the back, for example, which might have given credence to the claim that they were running away or trying to evade arrest.
Their bodies often bore countless bullet wounds, evidence of torture, broken bones and other signs that their attackers had mutilated them.
In 1995, Karachi’s death toll rose considerably: 2,095 people were killed under Operation Clean-Up.15 The Herald published a list of people killed by the law enforcement agencies from the official start of the operation in July 1995 to March 1996. The tally is disconcerting. Executions take place almost daily, several murders per day. The victims, all men, are described by name when known or by epithets such as ‘unknown (alleged bandit)’ or ‘so and so (MQM)’.
The Prime Minister and General Babar, who both played for sympathy by dredging up stories of how nasty the dead men had been and how much better the city was now that they were gone, rejected the moral ambiguity of the state.
‘We are all idealists when it doesn’t hurt us,’ General Babar explained in his interview, ‘but when it directly affects us, we have totally different values.’
Hasnain and Zaidi [Herald writers] went so far as to visit mortuaries to see the victims for themselves. They discovered that ‘extreme forms of torture’ had been used on many of the victims, ‘with detainees being burnt with cigarettes and iron rods, beaten, cut with razors, having their flesh gouged out and their bones broken’.
The mutilated bodies were, they said, ‘the norm rather than the exception’.
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03
Operation Clean-Up was murder sanctioned by the state. Now any and all acts of police brutality and illegality could be condoned as ‘politically necessary’.
Karachi’s police were getting away with murder. The elite Rangers squads had even more freedom, fearing no repercussions from the law. When Rangers picked someone up, since they were not registered to specific stations or neighbourhoods as the police were, there was virtually no record.
‘While the police also regularly detain people illegally,’ the Herald team wrote, ‘the mere fact that a thana [police station] is a public place makes it nominally easier to trace those arrested and usually – unless they are killed immediately – their arrest is admitted by the police in three or four days.
Rangers’ premises, on the other hand, are considered to be “security” establishments and are barred to the public.’
Tasleemul Hasan Farooqui, a former MQM councillor, was – according to the Herald investigation – ‘one of the lucky ones’ who left the Rangers custody alive. ‘He was dumped in a shopping area in Buffer Zone after being tortured, during which hot iron rods were inserted into his ear and he was slashed by knives on his back and on his inner leg.’
Farooqui had no criminal background; no allegations of ‘terrorism’ were levelled against him. He was a political worker.
After he was released, Farooqui moved his family out of Karachi. No Rangers were questioned for their role in his detention and torture.
Hasnain and Zaidi [Herald writers] witnessed a doctor at Jinnah Hospital, one of Karachi’s two main emergency hospitals known for dealing with police cases, conduct four autopsies in twenty-five minutes.
Post-mortems of police victims were conducted ‘with scant regard for the facts’. Often, victims’ bodies were not brought to medical facilities until hours after their murder, allowing the corpses to decompose and forensic evidence to be destroyed. There was often no effort to conduct proper medical examinations on the victims; ‘the MLOs (Medical Legal Officers) usually just make an incision on the chest and then sew it up to give the impression that a post-mortem has been done.’ A gruesome photograph accompanies the authors’ assertions.
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04
Close to 3,000 people would be killed on the streets of Karachi before Operation Clean-Up was declared successfully completed. These are, of course, the official numbers – they are the numbers of the body bags that had names on them, of the corpses who had relatives to identify and retrieve them for burial. There must be others, unnamed and unclaimed victims of the state’s war on their citizens. People told me there were parts of Karachi, in Korangi and places like it, where bodies were left to rot out in the open, serving as gruesome warnings.
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05
In another deal, made just weeks after Benazir took the oath as Prime Minister for the second time, her Swiss banker set up an offshore company called Capricorn Trading with Zardari as its principal owner.
‘Nine months later,’ according to the Burns article, ‘an account was opened at the Dubai offices of Citibank in the name of Capricorn Trading. The same day, a Citibank deposit slip for the account shows a deposit of $5 million paid by ARY, a Pakistani bullion trading company based in Dubai.’
Two weeks later, ARY, which at the time was known for producing gaudy gold necklace pendants in heart shapes, deposited another payment of $5 million into the account.
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06
On 15 March 1995 the streets outside our house were opened to the public. People came from across the country – from Balochistan and the Frontier and from across the interiors of Sindh and the Punjab – for a two-day workers’ convention. The topics covered in ‘New Direction’ were discussed and notes were made on what form the new party should take and what additions should be made to the draft manifesto. At the end of the convention, the Pakistan People’s Party (Shaheed Bhutto) was launched. Papa was no longer an independent candidate.
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07
My father had been shot several times. His face had been hit, his beautiful smiling face, and he had superficial wounds on his chest and arms. None of the shots in the hail of gunfire hurt him seriously. He was still alive. Ashiq [Jatoi] was sitting in the front seat pressing his palms down on the car’s horn. ‘Call an ambulance!’ witnesses heard him shout. He was yelling, screaming, ‘Murtaza Bhutto is injured! Get help!’
But none of the police responded.
Two of the police officers at the scene, Haq Nawaz Sial and Shahid Hayat, both shot themselves in the foot and leg respectively. The police were going to claim that there had been a shoot-out, but it wouldn’t look right that seven men were killed – five of them on the spot and two murdered later, while no policemen had any injuries. Forensics later showed that both men’s wounds were self-inflicted.
Furthermore, the ballistics and forensic examination proved that there had been no crossfire. The only spent ammunition came from police-issued weapons.
Haq Nawaz Sial later died mysteriously. The police insisted it was suicide, but those close to him insist that he had been killed. No investigation into his death was ever carried out.
Shahid Hayat is currently still employed in the police force, as all the others are, in high-level, government-sanctioned posts.
Asghar says that he heard my father speaking after the shooting. He heard him say, ‘They got us, Zardari and Abdullah Shah’ – the Chief Minister of Sindh – ‘finally got us…’ Asif says he heard it too. I’ve never been able to concentrate on Papa’s dying declaration. They weren’t his last words, not for me at least, they meant something larger. That he was speaking at all meant, up until that point, that Papa was OK. He was alive.
Qaisar and Asif Jatoi tell me separately they saw the police approach my father. ‘We were lying on the road,’ Qaisar tells me, confirming what other witnesses have testified in court, ‘and we saw Mir baba being taken out of the car. I saw blood on his clothes, but he was strong. He got out of the car on his own and walked.’
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08
Ghulam Hasnain, the investigative journalist who wrote the exposé on Operation Clean-Up, was at the scene of my father’s murder. He had been at the Karachi Press Club when he heard of the shooting and rushed straight over to Clifton.
‘We saw your father being led into the police car,’ he told me when we met to discuss the murder twelve years later. ‘There were two or three cops inside with him and he was sitting upright and holding on to the side of the car.’
Hasnain remembered seeing bodies lying all over the road. ‘I used to carry a leather bag with notebooks and cameras,’ he says. ‘When the police saw us, they started snatching our bags.’ Only one journalist who had come along with Hasnain managed to hide his camera and took furtive photographs when the police weren’t looking.
Hasnain, who is one of the most respected journalists in Karachi, tells me that the street lights had been turned off so the junior officers wouldn’t know who they had been summoned to kill that night. I don’t know if I believe that.
‘Shoaib Suddle’ – one of the police contingent – ‘is a criminologist,’ Hasnain says when I voice doubt about the street lights, ‘everything has a reason.’
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09
‘Mir baba was fine at that point,’ Asif Jatoi tells me later. ‘He didn’t even need to lean on anyone. The police’ – Asif remembers the group including Rai Tahir, Shukaib Qureshi and Shahid Hayat – ‘told Mir baba that they were going to take him to hospital and he walked over to the police car. He got into the open back section, where the policemen sit, and the APC drove off.
As it neared Do Talwar, it stopped. We heard a single shot. Then it drove off again.’
It was the last shot that killed my father. He had been injured, but he would have survived. He was walking and talking. It would take more than one bullet to kill Papa and the policemen made sure that the last bullet did the job. The last shot, Papa’s autopsy showed, was fired into his jaw at point-blank range. It was fired, forensics confirmed, by a gunman standing over him as he lay down in the police car.
Ashiq was still in the car after Papa had been taken away by the police.
Asif Jatoi was lying down on the road when he heard Wajid Durrani and Shukaib Qureshi speaking. They were talking freely and openly.
‘Isko khatam karna,’ one of them said. Finish him off.
According to Asif, Shukaib Qureshi then walked to the car and opened the door to the driver’s seat and took Ashiq out of the car. Shukaib Qureshi, all the survivors tell me when I speak to them separately and over the course of a year, was wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest. They tell me that he was the only one wearing such protective gear. He was prepared. It is a significant point.
Besides Zardari, Shukaib Qureshi, who was an absconder from the courts for twelve years, is the only accused to have been acquitted in the middle of an ongoing trial.
Qureshi fled Pakistan in the aftermath of the murder and moved to England, where he worked as a lawyer, first in a private law firm and later as in-house counsel for a multinational firm. He returned to Pakistan only after Zardari became President, entering the country as a fugitive and as an absconder from the law who was miraculously spared prison. He, of course, denies having anything to do with the assassination.
Ashiq [Jatoi] was led away, no one can say where. No one knows. When he was next seen he was dead, killed with a shot to the back of the head.
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10
At around 8.30, just before I would make my call to the Prime Minister’s residence in Islamabad, both my father and Ashiq had been moved and killed and Rai Tahir had made a final sweep of the bloodstained road. The police, Asif Jatoi says, kicked Yar Mohammad’s dead body in the face. They put their boots on his and Qaisar’s faces, pressing down on them and rubbing their heels in their mouths.
Approximately forty minutes had passed since the police had begun their operation.
‘We heard a voice say, “Auw jawano, kam hogaya,”’ Qaisar tells me. ‘Come, boys, our work is done’. ‘Then we were blindfolded and loaded into the police vans. We didn’t know where we were being taken.’ He pauses. ‘I’ll never get that voice out of my ears,’ Qaisar says, dropping his head. ‘We heard it again in the torture cells where the police kept us after the murder,’ Mahmood adds. They were taken to Clifton police station.
Outside the station, all the dead bodies had been lined up for identification. Qaisar was ordered to identify the bodies and says he saw Ashiq’s body among the others. No one would see the body again till after two in the morning the next day, six hours later. It was standard Operation Clean-Up; keep the bodies, destroy the evidence. The street outside our house was hosed clean; all the blood and glass was washed away.
By the time Mummy and I left the house at around 8.45, some fifteen minutes later, the police had removed all the evidence.
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11
After the police fired the fatal shot into my father’s jaw, they drove the police car the few metres over to Mideast. Only two hospitals in Karachi, Jinnah and Civil, take gunshot victims because they are police cases and therefore require official paperwork. These are well-known facts. The police, however, took my father to Mideast. It was intentional. He was not going to get the care he needed there.
They dropped Papa, his midnight-blue shalwar kameez covered in blood, outside the hospital and drove off.
Aneed tells me that he was standing there in the lobby; he says my father’s face and body were drenched in blood. ‘He had one leg flat on the stretcher and one bent, he was trying to get up,’ Aneed says, describing my Papa fighting for his life.
‘He was conscious when he arrived,’ Aneed continues. ‘He looked at me, our eyes met. He was holding his jaw and his neck with his hand and he was trying to speak, but he couldn’t. There was a lot of blood. It hit me, this was serious. You know that sense of worry you get? I got it then. To see Murtaza Bhutto, who was so large and strong physically, like that…’
‘He [Mir Murtaza Bhutto] was trying feverishly to breathe, he was gasping for air, but he couldn’t. The doctors couldn’t put the endotrachic tube in properly, to give air to his lungs, because there was so much blood in his throat. I could see that his tongue had been lacerated. We had to do a tracheotomy to pass the tube in and bypass the blood blockage so he could breathe. While this was going on, he went into cardiac arrest. We had to resuscitate him.’
‘People started asking me where my father [Ashiq Jatoi] was,’ Aneed recalls. ‘And I didn’t know. I knew they had been together that evening, so I found a Mideast worker and asked him what he had heard about the shooting. At some point I asked him what car Baba had been in – I knew there was a convoy – I didn’t know they had been in the same car. He looked worried when I asked and he told me, “Your father was driving Mir Murtaza. They were together.” Still, I thought then that things would be OK, I thought somehow that they’d both survive.’
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12
Asif Zardari was on the phone. ‘Don’t you know?’ he said casually to me. ‘Your father’s been shot.’
I dropped the phone. My body went numb and cold and my heart beat so hard it drowned out everything around me.
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13
‘There’s been an incident at 70 Clifton,’ I [Sabeen] said. ‘Do you know where they’ve taken them?’ I was polite, I had no reason not to be, I was so nervous and scared, I just wanted help. And this cop, he was young and he had a moustache, he turned to me and grunted, ‘Huh, we’ve killed them [Mir and Ashiq] already.’ Sabeen started to scream.
Dr Ghaffar Jatoi, Ashiq’s [Jatoi] brother-in-law and Mideast’s principal owner, was there. He had come as soon as he was called by his staff. ‘I had no driver,’ Dr Ghaffar recalled as I spoke to him about that night for the first time.
‘So I drove myself. The area was in total darkness. There were Rangers, police, I can’t tell you how many, it was too dark to see – the road was lit only by my car’s lights. They stopped me and said I couldn’t pass. I told them I had an emergency, and they still refused to let me go through.’ Dr Ghaffar tried two or three other routes before finally reaching Mideast. It must have taken, he estimates, half an hour to make the two-minute drive from Do Talwar to Mideast.
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14
‘No one knew where Ashiq’s body was until it reached the mortuary,’
Zahid tells me thirteen years later. It was two in the morning, six hours after Ashiq had been shot in the back of the head.
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15
Somewhere around three in the morning, while Mummy was still at the hospital waiting for the autopsy to be completed and for Papa’s body to be released so she could bring him home, the Prime Minister came to Mideast.
Benazir flew from the Prime Minister’s residence in Islamabad to Karachi. She stopped at her home and then came to the hospital barefeet – a sign, people assumed, of her grief.
She was accompanied by Wajid Durrani, one of the shooters that night who is seen saluting her in many of photographs taken of her arrival, and by Shoaib Suddle, another of the men who participated in her brother’s assassination. Abdullah Shah, the Chief Minister of Sindh, and another accused in the murder, would also be by Benazir’s side at Mideast.
Benazir, my Wadi, would say, years later in an interview broadcast days before her own death, that it was Murtaza’s own fault that he was killed. She changed the facts about his injuries, rambling incoherently, claiming he was shot in the back by his own guards, that his guards opened fire on the police, that Murtaza had a death wish.
I did not see Benazir until after Papa’s burial. Every time she tried to drive to Al Murtaza house where Papa’s funeral was held her car was attacked by Larkana locals, who pelted her car with stones and shoes.
Benazir brought a case against Mummy in the courts. Mummy had refused to go into iddat, an obscure Islamic prescription for widows, who must remain cloistered in their homes for forty days and forty nights,
‘You know why your aunt wants me to do iddat?’ Mummy, in a rare livid moment, cried. ‘So there’s no one there to file the cases against the men who killed your father. So he disappears and his murderers disappear with him.’
The iddat case against Mummy, accusing her of violating Islam, was filed by a Larkana ally of Benazir’s.
Many years later, some five at least, the man who filed the case – which was summarily thrown out by the courts – left Benazir’s PPP and came to Mummy and apologized.
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16
Benazir, since deposed from power and soon to be rejected by the 1997 electorate which brought in her then enemies the PML with a big majority, give an interview to the famous and respected Lebanese journalist Giselle Khoury. Wadi [Benazir] called Mummy a ‘bellydancer’ who came from the ‘backwoods of Lebanon’ and repeated the vulgar claims she had made in the first Sindh Council meeting after Papa’s murder, wildly insisting that Murtaza hadn’t been sleeping with his wife and had only married her as a maid to run his house and rear his children.
Mummy, so similar to Papa in style and wit, kept her cool and responded, privately of course, ‘If Benazir knew what was happening in Mir’s bedroom, how come she claims not to know what was happening outside his house on the night of 20 September?’ After Papa was killed, I never saw that old Wadi again. She was gone.
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17
The survivors [after the assissination] often saw the policemen from that night in jail. Several of them told me, independently, that Rai Tahir, Wajid Durrani and Shukaib Qureshi were constant presences. They ran the questioning, supervised their torture – which included beatings with sachoos, a Sindhi term for the leather paddles with sharpened nails that tear out the skin and flesh – and carried out intense psychological tauntings, like the mock executions.
‘They covered my eyes and tied my hands and a sepah’ – an officer – ‘said to me, “Your time is up. We’re going to kill you tonight.”’ They drove Asif around in circles for twenty minutes before laughing and throwing him back in his cell, still blindfolded and gagged.
When the wounded survivors, all blindfolded, were brought to the thana, he brought them some water, whatever small scraps of food he could find, and something to sleep on. ‘Rai Tahir beat me first,’ he says, wringing his hands in his lap as he speaks, ‘and then Zeeshan Kazmi’ – one of the most brutal policemen who served on the Operation Clean-Up taskforces and was later murdered in Karachi – ‘found out that the witnesses were being given water. He went into a rage and beat up a Punjabi constable who told him that he had not been the one to give the water to the men, that it had been me.
I was on a break, having some food at a small stall called Ali Baba near the station. Zeeshan Kazmi had me picked up, blindfolded, and brought back to the thana. He beat me, knocking out my front teeth, and asked me why I had helped them. “What are they, your fathers?” He took away my gun and suspended me without pay as further punishment.’
None of the survivors were released until Benazir’s government fell three months after Papa’s assassination.
In one of my last phone calls to her, I asked my aunt why her government had arrested all the survivors while the police were free – they had been honourably exonerated by an internal review of any wrong-doing and were back on their beats, not missing a day’s pay. ‘You’re very young, Fati,’ Wadi told me, bristling at the questioning.
‘This isn’t the movies, this is government and we have our own ways of doing things.’ She never answered my question.
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18
Several days after my father’s assassination, Ali Sonara was shifted from his secret detention centre in Karachi to another police cell in Hyderabad, three hours away. No charges had been filed against him and they wouldn’t be for several more weeks. Warrants for his arrest had not yet been produced and no judge had approved his illegal transfer out of Karachi. Sonara was kept a prisoner of the Karachi police till 2003.
One year after his release, he was killed in Lyari.
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20
On the third day of mourning, Benazir came to Al Murtaza under cover of darkness to evade the protestors who had been attacking her motorcade. She said she wanted her mother to be with her for a few days and swept Joonam [Nusrat Bhutto] out of our house. We never saw our grandmother again.
Joonam is now held incommunicado by the Zardaris in a garish house in Dubai. Benazir never allowed us to see her again, save for a brief forty-minute visit in Islamabad six months after Papa had been killed. Joonam looked ghostly, pale and haggard. She was being given medicine, I didn’t know what for. She cried when she saw Zulfi [Fatima’s brother] and me – Wadi [Benazir] said the meeting would be called off if Mummy came with us – and we clung to her when we were told our time with our father’s only family member who truly loved and was loved by us was over.
We are not permitted to speak to our ailing grandmother, not allowed to visit her and not allowed to care for her as she wastes away alone, minded by maids and strangers and various Zardari clan members.
Sanam, my father’s younger sister, entered the political fray after Papa’s death when she filed a case against Zulfi, then nine years old, Mummy and me (I had just turned eighteen) for the ownership of 70 Clifton. She comes to Pakistan every once in a while for some official presidential function or other and gives interviews against Papa, Mummy, my brother and me.
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21
Having arrested the witnesses to Papa’s murder, and not the perpetrators, Benazir’s government prohibited us from filing a criminal case against the police officers involved and instead set up a tribunal – which would have no legal authority to pass sentence – to look into Murtaza’s murder.
The tribunal, though not empowered to pass legal sentence, made several important rulings in its final report. It concluded first that Murtaza Bhutto’s death was a premeditated assassination, and that there was no shoot-out and no crossfire.
‘Who turned the lights off?’ Justice Aslam Zahid asks. ‘The police, Wajid Durrani in particular, claimed they didn’t notice the street lamps were off! But we found that it was done on purpose, because only one street, yours, had been affected and once the firing was over, the lights were turned back on.’
Secondly, the tribunal ruled that the police used an excessive amount of force and left the injured men to die in the road. ‘We named the police – Wajid Durrani, Suddle and their colleagues – as the aggressors,’ Justice Aslam Zahid continues. ‘When we compared the evidence of the injuries it is amazing that the police claim Murtaza Bhutto’s men were the aggressors when all of them are dead and only one police officer, Shahid Hayat, is hurt from a self-inflicted wound to the thigh and the other officer, Sial, had a bullet in his foot. Then after the fact, they left your father at Mideast. Mideast was not a hospital where doctors sit. They brought him there and then just left him.’
Third, the tribunal ruled that the order to assassinate Murtaza Bhutto must have come from the highest level of government.
The criminal case against the police officers Asif Zardari and Abdullah Shah was launched in 1997. It is still in the courts today, though the notion that we will ever receive justice from the corrupt and now Zardari-managed courts of Pakistan is not one I place a lot of faith in.
Judges have been constantly changed in our case – sixteen in total, one because she was a woman and the Chief Justice of Pakistan didn’t think she could bear the stress of such a case – and the accused are currently being acquitted in the middle of the ongoing trial, before all the evidence has been heard, before all the witness testimonies have been recorded and before any attempt at presenting the facts has been completed.
Justice Wajihuddin Ahmed, a former Chief Justice of Sindh like Justice Aslam Zahid and the man who bravely contested General Pervez Musharraf’s presidency in 2007, didn’t take a moment to think when I asked him if there was any hope that we would get a free and fair trial. ‘Certainly not now,’ he replied.
On 5 December 2009 Karachi’s Session Courts acquitted all the policemen accused of the assassination of Mir Murtaza Bhutto and six of his companions.
One month after the judgement was passed, former President Farooq Leghari – who sacked Benazir’s second government in the winter of 1996 – came on national television and spoke of my father’s murder. In the interview, aired on Duniya TV, a popular private channel, Leghari claimed that Zardari came to him in the late hours one night during his wife’s term and insisted that Murtaza Bhutto be eliminated.
‘It’s either him or me’ Zardari is alleged to have told the President. President Leghari, now looking frail and old beyond his years, said that both Benazir and her husband, whom he accused of gross corruption, were at the helm of the ‘massive cover-up’ after the murder. ‘He has Murtaza’s blood on his hands’ the former President said ‘and Allah knows how many others.’
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22
The closest we came to each other, Zardari and I, was at Benazir’s funeral in December 2007.
Zulfi [Mir’s son and Fatima’s brother] decided he would be present at Benazir’s burial. He was a family member, the only male alive. Someone from the family should be there to bury her, he said. The other men around the funeral were all political assistants, enablers, criminals, petty distributors and thieves. She can’t be buried by them, he reasoned.
I didn’t want him standing in the six-foot-deep pit with Zardari, with the man many believe was responsible for my father’s murder. People were saying the same sort of thing now, about this death.
In the end, Zulfi was more dignified, more gracious than I could ever have been. He placed Benazir’s body in the ground, said the fateha prayers and walked to our father’s grave.
He bent down and kissed the cloth and old rose petals that covered Papa’s grave. And then he left. Zulfi was alone that day. He was only seventeen then.
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23
One of the four murder cases pending against Zardari in the buildup to his bid for the nation’s presidency was the case of Justice Nizam’s killing. He had been president of the High Court Bar Association at the time of his death and was killed outside his home three months before Papa.
Justice Nizam had opened a case against a property deal that was being carried out in Zardari’s name. A valuable plot of land was being sold through Zardari’s frontmen, without auction. In the public interest, Justice Nizam got a stay order against the sale and readied himself for a fight in court; he was, his brother Noor Ahmed told me, ready to take the case against Zardari to the Supreme Court.
On 10 June 1996, at around two in the afternoon, Justice Nizam was on his way home for lunch. His son, Nadeem, had picked him up from the office as he often did when the family’s driver was unavailable and they drove home together. Nadeem had only recently returned home to Karachi after graduating from college abroad. As they drove towards the gates of their home, two men on a scooter drew up alongside their car. One of the men gestured to Justice Nizam and his son. Nadeem, who was driving, stopped the car and wound down his window. The men fired into the car, killing both Justice Nizam and his young son.
‘The only thing I did, on the second day after the murder,’ Noor Ahmed says, his voice still calm, ‘was this – Hakim Zardari, Asif ’s father, came to condole with me. He asked me, “How did this happen?” In my heart, which was hurting, I said everyone knows it’s your larka, your boy, who did this. I said it to him. Did he answer? No. He just kept quiet. What could he say?’
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24
Even when he had been incarcerated for the murders and myriad cases against him, Zardari hardly spent time in jail – a serious, mortally ill heart patient at the time, he had himself transferred to a luxury suite at his friend’s private hospital in Karachi. That doctor friend was rewarded with the cabinet post of Minister of Oil and Petroleum after his chum miraculously rid himself of his heart problems and ascended to the highest post in the land.
Zardari had bypassed the courts’ standard procedures to have himself absolved of my father’s murder. There was no point in appealing, he was going to be President legally or illegally. It was typical of the way he oper-ated; justice was always the first casualty.
On 20 September 2008, on the twelfth anniversary of Papa’s death, Asif Zardari took his oath as President of Pakistan.
The ceremony had been scheduled for the day before, the 19th, but had been moved on the orders of the new President, who rescheduled his big day for Saturday, Papa’s barsi. As he stood in front of parliament, which had voted him into the post almost unanimously (in the same highly democratic way that General Musharraf was ‘elected’ President), he paused in his speech and asked for a moment of silence to mark the occasion of his brother-in-law’s death.
My blood froze.
It was as if he was taunting us. But that would be nothing compared to what would follow.
On Zardari’s first Pakistan Day as President he would honour Shoaib Suddle, one of the most senior police officers present at the scene when my father was killed. Suddle was awarded Hilal-e-Imtiaz, a national medal in recognition of his services to the people of Pakistan. Shoaib Suddle was then made the head of the Federal Investigation Bureau.
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25
The Sindh Assembly, chaired by Nisar Khuro, in the middle of the state’s war against Swat and the northern territories that had made close to 3 million Pakistanis homeless, marked the death of the pop star Michael Jackson in the summer of 2009 with a minute of silence. Nothing was said (or not said with a moment of silence) for the many killed by American drones and the Pakistan Army’s bombarment of the NWFP.
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26
Amidst all this madness, all these ghosts and memories of times past, it feels like the world around me is crumbling, slowly flaking away. Sometimes, when it’s this late at night, I feel my chest swell with a familiar anxiety. I think, at these times, that I have no more place in my heart for Pakistan. I cannot love it any more. I have to get away from it for anything to make sense; nothing here ever does. But then the hours pass, and as I ready myself for sleep as the light filters in through my windows, I hear the sound of those mynah birds. And I know I could never leave.
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