Songs of Blood and Sword

by Fatima Bhutto

  Public floggings, stonings and humilitating displays of torture were being carried out in Pakistan. There had never been such an overt display of the state’s capacity to commit violence towards its own people before. There couldn’t be a mass uprising to save the country’s first Prime Minister, people were too frightened.

  Murtaza and Shahnawaz addressed the question of the Pakistani people’s resistance, or lack of it, at a press conference in London before Zulfikar’s death sentence had been handed down. A journalist with a faint Australian accent asked Murtaza to comment on the lack of public support for his father, to which Murtaza replied, ‘There is little unrest. First of all, thousands of his supporters have been arrested. There have been large-scale arrests. Troops have been called in from the border regions, border patrol units have been called – the security measures are truly overwhelming, truly oppressive.’6 Shahnawaz was seated next to Murtaza at the press conference. He was wearing a dark brown suit but had not yet grown a moustache like his brother. Shah’s voice was deep and resounding and he spoke slowly, measuring his words. ‘I hope General Zia does bow down to the international pressure . . . but if he does not then I fear very grave consequences for Pakistan.’7 Neither of the brothers mentioned the idea of armed resistance, not yet.

  But it was percolating through their minds, given urgency no doubt from Zulfikar’s letter. ‘It was at one of the campaign gatherings that Murtaza first brought up the idea of guerrilla war with me,’ remembers Tariq Ali. ‘He asked me what I thought of the notion and I said to him, “Murtaza, I’m not sure this is the correct tactic, but even if it is you cannot do these things in public – everything is being watched – you can’t operate like that.” I didn’t think it would have worked and Murtaza said to me, “What else is left to save my father?” I told him, “It’s not going to do that. It won’t work. He’s surrounded.”’8

  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.

  Rawalpindi jail has long been destroyed; Zia razed it to the ground in the 1980s, wary of its potential to become a Bhutto-ist symbol. Only one of the prison’s original walls remains now, old red bricks covered with deep green ivy. The rest of Rawalpindi jail has been turned into a banal shopping mall. Situated in between the old Prime Minister’s residence and various military offices, the jail has now been renamed Jinnah Park and it is home to a McDonald’s, a Cinepax cinema and a Pappasalis pizza joint franchised from Islamabad. At the entrance of what was once Rawalpindi jail is a two-storey yellow building. The top storey is covered by a sign that reads ‘Blacks’ next to a large photograph of a women’s eyes, maybe it is a beauty parlour, I don’t know. The bottom half of the building just reads ‘Tequila City’, and it’s anyone’s guess what goes on there in alcohol-free Pakistan.

  It is here that the army killed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and then erased all traces of his blood.

  Della remembers the night before 4 April 1979 as a busy one. The Stanhope Mews house that Murtaza and Shahnawaz were living in in central London had been packed with people. The flats the Bhutto brothers lived in were always full of Pakistanis – men visiting from home and carrying letters and news, associates and supporters of the SB Committee, journalists and political activists from Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds. That night there were people sleeping in the living room and the corridors, and home-cooked Pakistani food had been communally eaten with everyone gathered to share a meal sitting on the floor. It was between six and seven in the morning when the phone rang.

  ‘Is this the Bhutto household?’ asked the voice on the other end of the telephone. Della, careful not to wake Murtaza, answered that it was. The man on the line identified himself as a BBC reporter and asked Della if she was aware that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been killed at two in the morning, Pakistani time. She was careful not to repeat what the reporter was saying; no, she answered quietly, she wasn’t aware. The BBC reporter asked to speak to Murtaza, the official family spokesperson. Della didn’t answer; she was in shock. She nudged Murtaza awake and handed him the telephone. ‘Mir, it’s for you,’ Della told him, and then to soften the blow of what he was about to hear, ‘It’s the BBC.’

  Murtaza sat up, his legs bent over the bed. He took the phone and Della moved to sit opposite him. Immediately, his hands and face started to shake. His teeth chattered. Murtaza was overcome with emotion and instantly swore revenge. ‘They have killed a hero,’ he said. ‘They will pay for this.’ Murtaza put the phone down. Della remembers that he looked like a bird about to break. She held Murtaza and tried to comfort him, rocking him in her arms and telling him to be calm, to be careful.

  They had been expecting this. Murtaza had begun to prepare himself since receiving his father’s last letter in March.

  He rose and went into the bathroom to shower and change into a white shalwar kameez, the Muslim colour of mourning in South Asia, sent especially from Pakistan for this day. By the time Murtaza went to the next room to speak to his brother, he was back in control.He went into the room alone, woke Shah and told him that their father had been killed. Murtaza handed his younger brother another white shalwar kameez and told him to wash. There were already mourners outside and the media were beginning to gather.

  Murtaza, normally so at ease in front of the press, didn’t want to go outside. ‘What am I supposed to say?’ he asked Della, his head in his hands. ‘Not what you said on the phone,’ she advised him softly. ‘You have to be careful, your mother is still in Pakistan.’9 Followed by Shahnawaz, Murtaza went out to face the press. The cameras were already rolling as Murtaza opened the door. The brothers looked tired and defeated. Murtaza cleared his throat and began to speak. ‘I don’t want to say much. I came just to tell you that of course it’s a personal tragedy. They tried to break our father, they tortured him for two years, they couldn’t do that. They tried to ruin his political name and now they have killed him. We have nothing to be ashamed of. They have buried a martyr today.’10

  The military buried Zulfikar before announcing the news of his execution. His family never saw his body. There is no proof, medical or otherwise, that he was hanged as the military junta claimed he was. The family have long believed that he was tortured and killed. Bobby Kennedy Jr remembers what a shock the assassination was for Murtaza. ‘It was devastating, it really challenged his faith in government, his country – in all the things he believed in.’11

  In Pakistan the news of Bhutto’s killing was met with an outpouring of grief, despite the strict measures the army had put in place to prevent a public show of mourning. Men set themselves on fire in Zulfikar’s constituency of Larkana and the roads across the provinces were full of cars, driving in a spontaneous procession to the Bhutto ancestral home of Garhi Khuda Bux to pay their respects at the Prime Minister’s freshly dug grave.

  There were, however, people who celebrated. 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!’12 at gatherings around the city. ‘And when they killed Bhutto sahib, Khuro distributed sweets, mithai, around the city – it is well known,’13 Katpar says, clenching his teeth. The story is painful for him to recall. Nisar Khuro was brought into the People’s Party af
ter 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.

  Later that morning, the mews house was once again filled with people, this time crowding in to offer their condolences. Margaret Thatcher, not yet Prime Minister but well on her way, came to see Murtaza and Shahnawaz, and gave them a letter to pass on to Nusrat. Various MPs and supporters of the Save Bhutto Committee made up an endless stream of mourners. The anger, partnered with people’s grief and shock, was palpable. ‘If the United States had said, let’s be blunt, if they had come out and said this is wrong and we don’t want you to execute Bhutto, the junta wouldn’t have done it,’14 Tariq Ali says, summing up the feeling among the Pakistani community. Henry Kissinger had made good on his promise: a horrible example was made of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

  ‘Murtaza was clearly in a traumatic state,’ remembers Tariq. ‘On Murtaza’s face emotions showed very clearly. When his father was finally executed, the grief was visible.’15 Shahnawaz was furious. The youngest child of the family, he had become incandescent with rage. Della remembers the police knocking on the door of the mews house a few days after Zulfikar’s execution. There had been a bomb threat phoned into the Pakistani embassy and the police had traced the call to the house. In those days, there wasn’t really the technology to figure these things out, but the police had the means. Shahnawaz answered the door. He had made the call. There was no actual bomb threat, no means to carry out any such attack, but he was young and he was angry and he wanted the embassy to feel afraid, to feel that their actions in Pakistan had consequences. The police took Shah to the station; Murtaza insisted on going with him, and he was eventually let go. The police understood that he made the call under immense stress; his father had just been killed.

  The Save Bhutto Committee organized a namaz-e-janaza, a Muslim prayer for the dead, in Hyde Park. Thousands of people came, wearing white, to offer the Islamic rites for the dead. ‘There were lots of us who were incredibly upset,’ recalled Tariq Ali. ‘I remember speaking with Murtaza and Shah and Murtaza saying to me, “Well, that’s it now.” His grief had given way to anger. “We have to fight them till the end. There’s no other way left. It’s the only language these people understand.” He was so enraged; there was a real anger that his father had been executed, that the world had watched it happen and that he couldn’t do anything to stop it.’16

  Della postponed her trip back to Athens to remain with Mir. He was destroyed by his father’s execution. For forty days, the traditional Muslim mourning period, Murtaza slept on the floor of the flat, with no blankets or pillows. ‘I want to remember,’ he would tell Della when she asked why he insisted on sleeping so uncomfortably when what he needed to do was rest properly and gather his strength. Her sisters, Nana and Vou, fussed over Murtaza and Shahnawaz too, trying to make sure they were eating and getting through the day. Nana also asked Murtaza why he insisted on sleeping on the cold floor. ‘I want to feel the same as he did,’ he told her. When he and Shahnawaz went to see President Hafez al Assad in Syria one month later, Murtaza was still sleeping on the hard floor.

  After two years of fighting to save their father’s life through diplomatic and media channels and losing the battle to an armed and violent state, Murtaza and Shahnawaz began a different kind of campaigning. Spurred on by their father’s letter and the increased brutality being waged against the democratic process in Pakistan, the two brothers, who as young men had both idolized Che Guevara and the resistance movements of Latin America and Africa, began to organize a more dangerous defiance of the Zia regime. Suhail, who would leave behind his family and his life in Pakistan to join Murtaza and Shahnawaz, sums up the feeling that drove them to the idea of armed struggle: ‘When a constitution is abrogated, when the legal and political agreement to live together is cut, and you’re running a country through the barrel of a gun, it becomes every citizen’s duty to fight against this.’17 Tariq Ali, who watched the campaign closely, concurs. ‘The failure to win diplomatic support from governments around the world played a big part in convincing Murtaza that the only option was armed struggle.’18 He had tried everything – printing newspapers, speaking to journalists, holding press conferences, protesting outside embassies, speaking to foreign ministers and legal advisors the world over, and none of it had worked. None of it had managed to save Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s life.

  In May 1979, Murtaza flew to Damascus, accompanied by Shahnawaz, to seek President’s Hafez al Assad’s support. The President had long been a close friend of their father’s and had offered the brothers asylum in his country. Murtaza didn’t tell Della why he was travelling to Damascus, but she sensed that something was different. ‘He changed after his father’s execution,’ she remembers. ‘He became very serious. Before he was a student, the son of the Prime Minister – he went to nightclubs, to beaches, he liked the best of things, clothes, food, and then he just stops. He goes to places like Syria, Libya, Afghanistan. He stopped smiling, laughing, Mir was putting himself in training. He was torturing himself.’19

  By telephone Murtaza asked Della to come and meet him in Kabul, where he would be heading after Syria. By the summer of 1979, Murtaza and Della were no longer two lobbyists, commiserating with each other and trading war stories; they were seriously in love and committed to each other. Murtaza had given Della a simple ring from a jeweller on Sloane Street and asked her to marry him. She couldn’t. She was already married. With her husband, General Roufogalis, still in prison in Greece, Della told Murtaza that she couldn’t think about it then. Maybe later. Maybe.

  Della flew out to Kabul on 12 June. Murtaza was waiting for her at the airport. The government had given him a small villa and he was beginning to get his new life in order. The villa, near Chicken Street, so called on account of the butcher’s shops nearby, was simply furnished, and propped up against the walls of the bedrooms Della found newly unpacked automatic weapons. She tried to contain her shock and Murtaza, who had previously stacked the floors of his bedroom with books, laughed it off. ‘They’re just toys,’ he said. ‘Nice toys,’ Della replied. ‘I don’t think he realized at the start how dangerous the task was,’ Della tells me thirty-one years later. ‘How large it was. It was very obvious what he gave up to do this. Even with my husband and his situation, I couldn’t have done it. It shocked me, but I admired him for it. How is he going to live like this every day? He was driven by the will of his father, that’s indisputable.’20

  After a dinner of Kabuli naan and lamb, Della raised the subject of the weapons again and why Murtaza was in this strange country alone. She told him plainly that she thought the way he and Shah had chosen to avenge their father’s death was wrong. Murtaza bristled. ‘You can’t understand, they hanged my father. You do not know how that hurts.’ He told her that he had flown from the Middle East with the weapons, the lone passenger on a plane full of arms. She couldn’t reconcile this image of Murtaza with the one she had known only two months earlier. They tried to spend a few pleasant days in Kabul – Murtaza took her to buy shalwar kameezes, which Della wore indecently by tucking the long tunics into the trousers, thinking them more fashionable that way, but exposing the one part of the suit meant to be hidden – the crotch. She told me that she spoke to Murtaza’s dog, an Alsatian called Wolf, in Greek and walked around in her untucked baggy shalwar kameez, stumbling over guns.

  A week later, Della left for Athens, stopping in Karachi to deliver letters Murtaza had given her for Nusrat and his sister Benazir. It was the first time that Della had visited Pakistan; upon arriving at 70 Clifton she was taken straight to see Nusrat. They embraced, looking closely at each other. This was the first and only time that they would meet. Nusrat is a slightly shorter, brunette version of Della – their resemblance is striking. Both women have regal and defined cheekbones, long elegant noses and perfect ballerina-like posture. Nusrat ne
rvously asked about her son and Della handed over Murtaza’s envelope, trying to answer all her questions. At one point in their hushed conversation, Nusrat held Della’s hand as she was speaking and moved her across the room, out of the light of the chandelier they had been standing under. ‘The house has ears,’ Nusrat said, pointing overhead. Della was sweaty and dirty from the trip and was desperate for a shower and a change of clothes, but Nusrat insisted she meet Benazir first to give her the letter her brother had sent for her. But Benazir was not there to receive Della. After some time, Della got tired of waiting and asked to be taken to Benazir.

  She was taken through to 71 Clifton, the adjoining house and office, and entered a room to find Benazir sitting at a table, typing. She didn’t look up; she didn’t even acknowledge the blonde stranger in front of her. ‘I wait so long that it begins to bother me. What is she trying to prove?’ Della writes in her memoirs.21 ‘I’ve come all this way from Afghanistan with news from her brothers, whom she hasn’t seen for over two years, and she doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to hear it.’ Della was eventually given an audience with Benazir, seven years her junior. It was long enough only to exchange names and for Della to hand over Murtaza’s letter. She acted like a political heir, Della recalls, remembering Murtaza telling her that Benazir had always wanted to lead the political charge after their father and explaining that he loved his sister enough to step aside for her. It was a tense visit; Nusrat would only speak to Della in whispers, certain that the entire house was bugged – while Benazir wouldn’t speak to her at all. Della left the next morning for Athens.