As a tall blonde English girl amid a sea of Pakistani men, I stood out and was handed the microphone.
‘Why have you changed your mind about holding party-based elections as you said when you announced them?’ I asked.
‘I did not say that,’ he said.
He was lying. ‘Yes, you did,’ I replied indignantly.
A gasp ran through the Pakistani journalists, and people either side tugged at me to sit down.
But General Zia smiled. I was wearing turquoise and yellow shalwar kameez, the traditional local dress of long tunic and baggy trousers, and he politely thanked me for respecting his country’s culture. Then he added: ‘Young lady, if you have more questions I suggest you see my military secretary afterwards to arrange an appointment.’
It was an invitation I had no intention of passing up. At the end of the press conference I went straight to Brigadier Salik and gave him my name and number. A few weeks later I found myself driving through the gates of the white-walled Army House in Rawalpindi and being led up a path through lush green lawns and beds of pink roses over which sprinklers played.
Inside, General Zia served me tea and smiled disarmingly. His eyes were deep-set and dark-ringed like a panda’s; he had a twirly ringmaster’s moustache; his lips were thin and his teeth big. I wondered if he had smiled as tightly when he ordered the hanging of Benazir’s father along the road in Rawalpindi jail.
We talked for over an hour about everything from Afghanistan (he said he ‘longed for the day’ he could pray in a Kabul mosque) to the state dinner he had attended at the Élysée in Paris wearing a long black tunic and President Mitterrand had told him to take off his coat. ‘I had to tell him I had nothing on underneath,’ he said.
Again he denied that he had ever said he would hold party-based elections. Flourishing a copy of The Economist, he read a quote from a British political scientist who had said parties were not representative. ‘Besides, what we have here are not parties,’ he said with obvious distaste. ‘They are just pressure groups. To allow them to run things would jeopardise the democratic process.’
The interview had gone well and I had some good lines, particularly his belief that the US felt they no longer needed him now the Russians were leaving Afghanistan. I drove back in haste to my cheap hotel room in G/7 (Islamabad was divided in Orwellian manner into sectors of numbers and letters starting at Zero Point). But when I switched on my recorder, the tape was blank. In my efforts to concentrate I had pressed the Play button but not Record.
What could I do? I had taken no notes. There was nothing else for it. Being a dictatorship, they too had recorded the interview. I picked up the receiver and dialled Brigadier Salik.
‘There’s a bit of a problem with my recording of the interview,’ I said. ‘I think the air conditioning has obscured some of the President’s words.’
‘Which bits?’ he asked.
‘Well, rather a lot.’
I’m sure he guessed, but shortly afterwards a man in uniform arrived bearing a copy of their transcript and a box of sweet-smelling mangoes. Ever since then I have been paranoid about tape recorders.
Less than three weeks later, on 17 August, I was back in Peshawar sitting with my friend Amjad, youngest of the Arbab sons, watching the sun go down. I had been supposed to be heading into Afghanistan that day with Abdul Haq’s mujahideen but the trip kept getting delayed because they were waiting for ammunition. We were finally due to leave at midnight. The trip to the outskirts of Kabul would be the longest and riskiest I had done and I was nervous. I asked Amjad if he had some Russian vodka.
He had none but reluctantly agreed to drive up the road to Barra smugglers’ market. Within a few minutes he was back, empty-handed.
‘You won’t believe this,’ he said, ‘but Tariq’s just told me that Zia’s plane has crashed with him and all the top military aboard. They think Zia’s dead.’
‘Come on, if you don’t want to go and get the vodka you can think of a better excuse than that,’ I replied.
Then Amjad’s brother Tariq, who was Mayor of Peshawar, walked in, and I realised he was serious.
I rushed into the living room and began trying to dial the international operator on their father’s old Bakelite telephone. There was no direct dialling in those days. My index finger rotated the dial again and again, only to keep getting the busy tone.
I was in tears. It was the biggest story of my life, I was one of the only foreign correspondents in the country and I couldn’t talk to my office. It was an hour before I got through, by which time I was in no fit state to write a story. Fortunately, the growly voice at the other end was that of Stewart Dalby, who had covered Vietnam and knew all about pressure. ‘Sit down, have a drink, smoke a fag and then this is what we want from you,’ he said.
So terrified was I of never getting through again that we kept the phone line open while I scribbled out my story of the death in a mysterious plane crash. It was my first front page. Inside we ran extracts from my interview three weeks earlier, which was now his last one. I remembered Zia’s words that the US no longer had need of him. Pakistan was the land of conspiracy. Had he known something? But the American Ambassador had also been aboard.
When finally I had dictated the last word, Stewart told me that ITN had been calling, desperate for me to get in touch. He switched the call over and they explained that someone had set up a satellite dish on a roof in University Town and reckoned they could do a live broadcast, almost unknown in those days. That night I was on News at Ten just after the bongs, being interviewed by Sandy Gall and looking slightly startled.
Suddenly Pakistan was a story. Nobody knew what the army would do. Would elections go ahead or would the military once again impose martial law? I moved down to Islamabad and rented a flat near Jinnah Market.
A big story is not always a great thing for the local stringer. All the heavy-hitters arrived from London or Delhi, leaving me reduced to fixing up interviews and providing background analysis in return for lunch or dinner. One American in particular from the Los Angeles Times seemed to need more background than most. His name was Mark and he had won my affection by introducing me to Oreo cookie ice cream at the American Club. One evening, I was in the middle of a bowl of ice cream and an earnest explanation about why Benazir must be allowed to stand in the elections, when he cupped my chin in his hands and placed his finger on my lips. That night we danced to ‘I Got You Babe’ in the fairy-lit garden of the French Club and, as he kissed me, it did not seem like Pakistan at all.
I was well aware by then that most of the Delhi correspondents who covered Asia had girls in every port and spent an inordinate amount of time covering the Philippines. But Mark had a passion about his writing that was different from his seen-it-all colleagues and he kept me amused with his telexes about my plans to smuggle myself to Kabul in the back of a cabbage truck.
Zia’s funeral took place in Islamabad’s vast Saudi-funded mosque, a modernistic white spaceship of a building at the foot of the green Margalla Hills. After that most of the staff reporters drifted back to their bases and my byline began reappearing. Aside from the FT and the odd ‘Girl Goes to War’ centre spread for the Daily Express, I had started working for Time magazine. This paid well but their fact-checkers drove me mad. ‘How do you know it’s fifty-seven miles from Peshawar to Jalalabad?’ was typical of the long line of questions awaiting me at the telex office every week.
There was no shortage of stories or people to interview. At that time, Islamabad only had one luxury hotel, the Holiday Inn. I soon found that if I spent the morning in its coffee shop, someone or other I might want to grill would appear, whether politicians, Afghan resistance leaders, Iranian clerics, Chinese arms dealers or visiting delegations from Saudi intelligence. The lobby was full of men in grey shalwar kameez and dark glasses – ISI agents – watching all the comings and goings.
Pakistan was five hours ahead of the UK, so I had all afternoon to write and was usually filing in the ev
ening. Often there was ‘load-shedding’, which I had never heard of before but meant there was no electricity. I took to sitting on my front porch, tapping away at my Tandy in the light of my car headlamps.
To everyone’s surprise the new army chief General Aslam Beg announced that elections would go ahead as planned. The next few months sped by in a blur of noisy rallies. Most of the time I would be the only foreign woman there and I got used to pushing through crowds, elbows at right angles against all the groping hands.
Zia had scheduled elections for November because he knew Benazir was expecting a baby at that time so would be unable to campaign. But for once she had outwitted him. Knowing his spies would obtain her medical records, she had managed to have hers swapped and was actually due in September.
Her detractors were not so easily thwarted. The military intelligence put their weight behind her opponents in the Muslim League and organised them into an alliance with the main religious parties. They then airdropped leaflets showing an old photograph of Benazir’s mother in a cocktail dress dancing with Gerald Ford at the White House and referring to mother and daughter as ‘gangsters in bangles’.
The PPP emerged as the largest party but was still sixteen seats short of a majority. While the army dallied, Benazir’s lieutenants made desperate overtures, often of a financial nature, to independents and small parties to win their support.
Meanwhile their leader held court in the sitting room of Dr Niazi, the dentist who had treated her father in jail. Receiving journalists and diplomats, her words were carefully chosen to reassure the military that she would not alter policies close to their heart, as well as occasional threats of what might happen if the people’s views were ignored.
Days turned into a week, then two weeks, and editorials round the world thundered that Benazir must be allowed to form a government. On the fifteenth day, in an indication of who really pulls the strings in Pakistan, she had a meeting with General Hamid Gul, the director of ISI; tea with the US Ambassador; and dinner with the army chief. The next afternoon, official security replaced the PPP activists guarding Dr Niazi’s gate. At 35, she was going to be the first female prime minister in the Muslim world.
That night there were celebrations and fireworks at Dr Niazi’s house. In the street outside, supporters chanted, ‘Jeay Bhutto! Bhutto zindabad! Wazir-i-azam Benazir!’ – Long live Benazir, Prime Minister Benazir! Inside gathered many of the same people who had been at the wedding. It was hard to believe that it had been less than a year earlier.
Benazir looked even more pensive that night than she had at her wedding celebrations. For power did not come without compromise. To the consternation of some of her closest advisers, she had agreed the military would still control the nuclear programme and Afghan policy. Punjab, the most populated province, was under the control of her rival, Zia’s protégé Nawaz Sharif, whose family ran the country’s biggest steel industry.
These were far from being the only challenges. After years of dictatorship everyone expected jobs and patronage from those now in power. I got a sense of the feudal society she had inherited one afternoon in rural Punjab.
A beast of a contest
Financial Times, 6 May 1989
PEOPLE KILL EACH other over the best buffalo contest in Gujrat’s annual horse and cattle show. A dusty town in rural Punjab, Gujrat is better known for producing sports shoes and electric fans than for its bovine quality. Yet every year, come April, the nation’s footwear industry grinds to a halt and local teashops shudder under the weight of conspirators plotting how to sway the judges and ensure the success of their chosen candidate.
‘It’s like a mafia operation,’ grumbles Butt, a farmer who was persuaded by ‘security considerations’ to withdraw his prime beast. As in the country’s elections, lines are drawn on the basis of biradaris, or clans. Gujrat has three main biradaris – Gujas, Jats and Kashmiris – each of which fields a candidate selected by practised ‘spotters’.
As show day approaches, the peaceful fields around Gujrat are transformed from a rural haven straight out of Thomas Hardy to the scene of heinous crimes as rival groups go to extraordinary lengths to secure victory. ‘It’s a matter of honour,’ explains the editor of the local newspaper. ‘They start with trade-offs or bribes. If that fails they resort to grievously wounding the owner or his relations. In a close year it can be a fight to the death.’
A local police officer confirms that the crime rate ‘rockets’. Oddly, the beasts themselves are rarely touched, though one year a wolf was let loose upon a particularly fine specimen.
Camel dancing and best sheep contests do not evoke such emotions. ‘They are usually settled by a few wife abductions,’ says the editor dismissively. He sees the buffalo show as an incentive for development, but to the onlooker it represents the worst excesses of Pakistan’s feudal society. Leading landlords and industrialists lounge in comfy chairs on a rose-bedecked stage, protected from the scorching sun by colourful awnings. Hunched-shouldered waiters in skewed bow ties and crumpled white jackets proffer trays bearing china cups of milky tea topped with skin, and curling fish-paste sandwiches.
As the teams of the major feudals trot past on powerful white chargers, their riders resplendent in bright silks and jewelled turbans, the lesser landlords clap limply, seemingly oblivious to the seething mass below. For the crowds, it is perhaps the year’s only entertainment, TVs being unaffordable even if they are lucky enough to have electricity, and dancing forbidden. For the area’s many bonded labourers, it is probably their only day off.
The highlight of events is tent-pegging, a game similar to jousting. As expected, the team of the biggest landlord emerges victorious, its
Herculean mounts far superior to the progressively scrawnier creatures of the smaller landlords.
As with most events in Pakistan, the show has a political dimension. Local bigwigs take the opportunity to make turgid speeches, eulogising their role in upholding Islam. Using wealth and tribal connections, Gujrat’s leading family won all four seats in the recent elections.
For the buffalo contest, the family has scored a further coup by attracting as principal guest Nawaz Sharif, the Chief Minister of Punjab, who in his role as high priest of patronage has come with a sackful of vote-winning goodies. Amid rousing cheers, Sharif doles out schools and hospitals.
An old man with the audacity to mount the stage is rewarded with a road to his village. Sharif’s popularity rises when he upgrades a police officer for his outstanding performance in an incomprehensible game of tag wrestling played by skinny men in Speedo trunks.
‘This is the politics of super-patronage,’ comments a former minister. By the end of the day, Sharif’s secretary is laden with sheaves of applications from people demanding postings, transfers and project approvals. Since its creation, Pakistan has become increasingly centralised. One needs to go to the top for everything.
Outside Sharif’s private house in Lahore, a mini-secretariat has been built to accommodate the floods of people who arrive daily asking for help in resolving domestic disputes or minor problems that seem baffling to much of Pakistan’s rural population, where literacy is less than 17 per cent.
Pakistan’s new Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, regarded by her followers as Queen Bountiful, has even greater problems. More than 60,000 applications arrive at her secretariat daily; everywhere she goes she is mobbed by supporters waving petitions demanding jobs as recompense for their sacrifices during martial law. Under eleven and a half years of dictatorship, an awful lot of people suffered for Bhutto’s People’s Party, and with the Treasury coffers empty, she can satisfy few of them.
Committed to cut non-development expenditure, Bhutto already has the biggest Cabinet in Pakistan’s history, and an entire battalion of advisers, known locally as the ‘Under-19 team’ or ‘Incompetence Incorporated’.
This is not patronage politics, however. In the new government’s terminology it is People’s Politics. When ministers ignore their govern
ment work to spend all day arranging jobs for their voters and licences for their patrons, this is not corruption or nepotism – it is People’s Government. Using the same ploy, they have renamed many of the country’s schools as People’s Schools, and thus claim to have created thousands of new schools.
Next year Gujrat’s buffalo contest may become fair and democratic – they are considering renaming it the People’s Buffalo Contest.
Pakistan might in theory have had a democratic government under Bhutto but she often complained she was ‘in office but not in power’. Real power, of course, remained with the Pakistan Army, which at any moment could bring the whole thing to an end as they had done with her father.
It had never really occurred to me before to question democracy as a system. I was impressed with the Pakistani military officers I had met, many of whom were Sandhurst-trained. It was hard not to sympathise with those who argued they were a better option than some of the leading politicians who were feudal scions, used to peasants kissing the hem of their coats, and constantly switched sides to stay in power.
I got a chance to see the Pakistan Army in action when I accompanied Benazir on an incredible journey to the Siachen Glacier. The world’s highest battlefield, it is a place so cold that the merest touch of metal on the skin produces instantaneous frostbite.
War on top of the world
Daily Express, 29 August 1989
FAR UP IN THE topmost reaches of the Himalayas, a war is raging on history’s highest battleground. It is a war few know about, between two countries supposedly at peace.
For five years the elite forces of the Indian and Pakistani armies have
battled to control the Siachen Glacier. It is the world’s most spectacular theatre of war, surrounded by icy peaks towering above 25,000 feet, including K2, the world’s second-highest mountain. Its beauty masks cruelty more lethal than gunfire.
Small Wars Permitting Page 6