Songs of Blood and Sword

by Fatima Bhutto

  Undaunted, she eventually reached Shah by phone. He was surprised. If Della could find him by blind-calling hotels in random countries, their secretive lifestyle wasn’t so secretive after all. Murtaza wasn’t with him, but Shah told Della he’d relay the message. A few days later Shah called her back and told her Murtaza had called him from Abu Dhabi, asked Shah to speak to Della and assure her that he was fine, asked her to be patient and promised that he would write soon and explain everything.

  On 24 February there was a serious earthquake in Greece. A lot of damage had been caused and Greeks sat in front of their TV screens watching the news of the disaster unfold. As Della watched, another headline caught her attention. A PIA aeroplane had been hijacked. The hijackers were claiming that they were part of a militant movement based in Afghanistan, to where the plane was being diverted. Della listened carefully, making sure she heard everything the newsreader was saying. It couldn’t be, she thought. It can’t be. Murtaza and Shahnawaz Bhutto, the news said, had ordered the Pakistani plane to be hijacked; the men on board claimed they were acting on the orders of Al Zulfikar.

  The phone rang in Palace Number 2 sometime in the early evening, around 5.30. Murtaza picked up the phone and the caller asked to speak to Mir Murtaza Bhutto. It was a somewhat strange call, as their number wasn’t public – it wasn’t in the Kabul phone book and most of the government officials who called Murtaza were friendly enough with him for him to know their secretaries by name. However, he still assumed the call was from some government office or other. ‘Salamullah Tipu wants to speak to you,’ said the caller. The name was familiar, but not especially so. ‘Who is Salamullah Tipu?’ Murtaza, now annoyed, asked as politely as he could. ‘He’s hijacked a plane. I’m calling from the Kabul airport control tower. He’s in the aeroplane now and asked to be put through to you.’

  That was how Murtaza came to know that a plane had been hijacked in his name. But it was not the first time he had heard of Tipu.

  None of the interviews I did on the hijacking were easy to arrange. Suhail and I tried to speak in 70 Clifton, but I think the chandeliers still have ears there. I moved us to the garden, where we sat under a champa tree speaking in whispers, hunched over our chairs under the watchful gaze of our neighbours, the Russian consul’s residence and the Iranian consulate. It still didn’t feel safe enough, even in such friendly company. The hijacking had been a sword hanging over my father’s head, ready to drop at any time. It was important for me to get as much information as I could on the incident. The official case against my father and uncle, absolving them of any involvement, was quietly concluded in 2003 and has left, for me at least, a gaping hole of unanswered questions. Who had arranged the hijacking? Who pulled the plane out of the sky? It was too easy to end the case once the Bhutto brothers had been taken care of and removed from the picture. I took Suhail to a trendy coffee shop in Karachi’s busy Zamzama shopping area. Here again we adopted our hunched poses and whispered over overpriced hot lattes. I thought it absurd that we were sitting among teenagers comparing mobile phones and desi yuppies gossiping in corporate-speak, discussing the details of a junta-backed hijacking. Suhail was indulgent with me and my constantly paranoid shifting; he’s always been a surrogate father of sorts. He was present at my birth and at my brother Zulfi’s, and was there when as a family we adopted Mir Ali, a month-old baby boy from a Karachi orphanage. Suhail travels to Karachi for all our birthdays, even mine and I’m nearing thirty.

  A group of men had come to Kabul from Karachi three months earlier. Salamullah Tipu was one of them. He had a reputation in Karachi, known among students for his violence in university politics. He had fought with the student wing of the religious Jamaat Islami party and had been involved in a shooting incident at Karachi University as a result of a power struggle within the party.

  Tipu was a good-looking man, Suhail remembers. He had been in the army once, briefly. It had been his childhood dream to join up and he had been selected by the armed forces as soon as he was old enough. But Tipu left claiming that he had been shunted out during training for personal reasons he would never go into. ‘The story was unclear, a little foggy, that and the fact that he had come to us – it cancelled him out for us,’13 says Suhail, struggling to put the pieces of that first meeting together.

  ‘He wasn’t a member of our organization, he didn’t come through the PPP cadres; he’d come to Kabul through common contacts. Our headquarters were visited by many Pakistani activists, tribal leaders, nationalists, leftists – they’d often call on Murtaza to discuss the situation in Pakistan or to bring news from home.’ Tipu seemed smart, he was aware of the problems the people were facing under Zia’s regime, but something about him didn’t click. There was something edgy about him, something rough. He’d come from a violent background within both his family and his community. ‘But he came to us,’ Suhail repeats, ‘and that aroused our suspicion.’

  The visiting group consisted of two men besides Tipu; one was his cousin and the other was his friend. It was the age of hijackings – made famous by the Palestinians, desperate to call attention to their plight. Leila Khalid, who proudly proclaimed hijacking as her occupation, became a guerrilla symbol of Palestinian frustration overnight. Hijackings, then seen as media-savvy operations, had captured the world’s notice.

  Tipu suggested to Murtaza that the newly formed Al Zulfikar follow the lead of other liberation groups and hijack a Pakistani airliner. Suhail remembers his pitch. ‘You know, there was tyranny in Pakistan. There was no judicial remedy to the excesses of the junta. Tipu really caught on to that and talked about how people there were bubbling with fear. He talked about the fact that so many political workers were in prisons and that they had no recourse to the courts. He was right; the lawyers were divided between supporting and aiding the regime and those who were cracked down upon because they were vocally opposed to it. He spoke about hijacking an aeroplane to negotiate the release of prisoners.’

  Murtaza turned him down. It was not the first time that someone had suggested hijacking an airliner, imagining it would strike a blow at the military regime in Pakistan. A month before Tipu and his friends turned up in Kabul, a group of young men from Rawalpindi had come and said the same thing. Murtaza had turned them down too.

  He rejected Tipu’s offer, remembers Suhail, on the grounds that ‘we were fighting a military coterie which had usurped power from the people. Our fight was not against national institutions, like PIA, or against civilians.’ But Tipu was disappointed his passionate pleas had been refused. After that first encounter, he got in touch again and tried once more to push his idea. Tipu was refused, more sternly this time. ‘Mir was taken completely off guard when he got the call that night,’ says Suhail, shaking his head and toying with his unlit cigarette.

  The PIA plane was scheduled to fly from Karachi to Peshawar and had been taken over in mid-air by three men. Tipu led the group and ordered the pilot to divert the plane to the Middle East, not taking into consideration that it was only prepared for a short-haul flight. There wasn’t enough fuel to take them that far. The hijackers then demanded that the plane be flown to Kabul; it was the closest landing point – a brief journey by air over the border from Peshawar. The Afghan authorities saw the hijacking as a rare opportunity to improve their relations with Pakistan and, strangely enough, the Bhutto brothers. As soon as the plane landed, the Afghan authorities called Palace Number 2 and asked Murtaza to intercede.

  ‘We were going through a rough patch in our relationship with the Afghans at the time,’ Suhail recalls. ‘They had started trying to interfere with Murtaza’s running of the organization, basically trying to work on the Pakistanis who were coming over to join us in the hopes of having some insider information on what we were getting up to. Murtaza was very upset; he was on the verge of leaving Kabul.

  He wasn’t willing to be compromised. And then this hijacking happened.’ The call came from Dr Najibullah, the notorious head of the Intelligence services. He
told Suhail he was coming over to the house to talk about the situation. The PIA station chief in Kabul also called Murtaza. ‘He knew us, and he called and said you people should help solve this stand-off – there are women and children on board the aircraft.’

  Dr Najibullah turned up at the house, aware of the tension between his government and their guests. ‘He spoke English and Urdu perfectly,’ Suhail says, laughing, ‘but that night he insisted on speaking in Pushto and having me translate for Mir. Mir’s initial impulse was to help end the hostage crisis so he put aside the friction between us and the government and said he was ready to do whatever was necessary to solve the issue peacefully.’

  Together, Murtaza and Suhail were taken to Kabul airport, driven there by Captain Baba, the oddly named head of the national Ariana Airlines. When they reached the airport the authorities gave them two blue coats to put on, the sort worn by airport engineers, then drove them towards the tarmac where the plane was standing. ‘Talk to them,’ pleaded Captain Baba, ‘tell them to end this, they’ll listen to you.’

  ‘It was late at night by the time we reached the tarmac,’ says Suhail, ‘two or three in the morning at least.’ At that point, no harm had been done to any of the passengers and everyone was anxious that the hijacking crisis be settled quickly and peacefully. Captain Baba dropped the two men off right in front of the airliner and a message was sent asking the hijacker in charge to come down to the tarmac.

  The meeting between the three men was short, no longer than fifteen minutes. Murtaza asked Tipu to release the women and children on board. He asked that the hijackers not harm any of the passengers. ‘Mir was angry,’ Suhail recalls, ‘but he remained calm, aware of the danger everyone was in – our situation with the government, the passengers and the fallout from Zia’s thugs in Pakistan. He asked Tipu to end it. Tipu refused.’ The hijackers had already given a list of fifty-five prisoners in Zia’s jails that they were demanding be released in return for the safety of the passengers on board. ‘We can’t stop now,’ Tipu told Murtaza and Suhail. ‘The government will butcher the prisoners, whom we’ve already identified to them.’ The fifty-five prisoners were mostly PPP activists, but included known leftist activists and workers imprisoned across the country, mainly in the Punjab. While Tipu agreed to Murtaza’s demand that the women and children be freed, he told them that without any concessions from the government it would be suicide for them to end the hijacking.

  The meeting was over, Murtaza had asked for the end of the impasse and for the safety of those held hostage. There was no further discussion, no time to waste. After fifteen minutes Murtaza and Suhail left Kabul airport and Salamullah Tipu returned to the aeroplane. Several hours later, in the early hours of the morning, the women and children on board were released and taken to the Kabul Intercontinental Hotel.

  ‘The government of Pakistan sent a negotiating team to Kabul soon after we’d left to deal with the hijackers and end the siege,’ Suhail says. He sounds angry, even now, at the events that led to us, twenty-seven years later, sitting in a noisy and smoke-filled coffee shop in Karachi discussing the hijacking. ‘Watching their negotiations play out you got the feeling that the junta was perfectly OK dragging the drama of the hijacking on. They didn’t seem serious about ending the stand-off, almost as if they were stalling, as if they were trying to agitate the hijackers into a reaction so that the military government would be justified in responding to them with force.’

  During the time the junta’s negotiation team was dealing with the hijackers, still grounded in Kabul, a passenger was killed. Major Tariq Rahim was shot by the hijackers. Rahim had once been Zulfikar’s aide-de-camp and was, since Zulfikar’s execution, a serving diplomat in Iran. As the hijacking unfolded, culminating with the death of Major Rahim, the junta’s public insistence that the Bhutto brothers and PPP stalwarts were behind the operation began to be questioned. Why would the brothers kill their father’s ADC?

  Zia’s prisons were full of political prisoners and his reluctant international allies began to squirm at the clear evidence of the junta’s human rights abuses. There had to be some change, some shift in the dictator’s unrepentant violence – the prisons had to be emptied of democratic activists. But for Zia to simply release those detainees who had actively opposed him would have caused a huge loss of face, a sign of weakness in a country where weakness is not tolerated, least of all by the armed forces.

  The hijacking would prove politically expedient for the junta – political prisoners would be released and offered as proof of the regime’s clemency. All at once, the hijacking and its consequences would be a means of discrediting the popular resistance against the junta, thus providing a legitimate excuse to clamp down further on their opposition, notably the MRD movement. The Bhutto brothers would be branded terrorists, ending their ability to travel freely, and numerous charges of treason – complete with death sentences – would be brought against them. It would be a sword hanging over their heads for a very long time indeed.

  The hijacking stand-off in Kabul lasted seven days, until the Afghan government came to the conclusion that Zia’s regime wasn’t serious about negotiating an end. At that point, fearful that the Pakistanis were holding out for a serious mishap to happen in Kabul so that they could forcefully intervene, the Afghan authorities requested the hijacked plane be moved elsewhere. The hijackers asked to be flown to Syria, another country they knew had ties to the Bhutto brothers, expecting a sympathetic landing place. President Hafez al Assad of Syria, however, refused permission for the hijacked plane to land on Syrian soil. He held out until an official request came from the Pakistani government asking the Syrian government to allow the plane to land and to give safe passage to the people on board the flight.

  Once it reached Syria, the hijacked plane sat on the Damascus airport tarmac for another few days. The whole crisis lasted around twelve days. ‘It was one of the longest hijacking crises in history, I think,’ Suhail tells me carefully. Eventually fifty-four out of the original list of fifty-five prisoners were released in Pakistan and flown to Syria according to the hijackers’ demands and the passengers and airliner were finally released. The prisoners and three hijackers were kept at the Damascus Airport Hotel and allowed to apply for asylum, facilitated by the United Nations. Dr Ghulam Hussain was one of the released prisoners. He had been the Secretary-General of the PPP and had refused to leave the party and join Zia’s cabinet. For his defiance, he was charged with more than a dozen murders and thrown in jail. Dr Hussain is an elderly man; he looks like Santa Claus, with his clipped white beard and glowing white hair, and is a prolific poet and writer.

  ‘The hijackers weren’t PPP people,’ Dr Hussain told me in his home in Islamabad. ‘The whole thing was manoeuvred by General Zia! He wanted an explosion in front of the world that would destroy the Bhutto boys.’14

  Dr Hussain is a gregarious man, he laughs loudly and talks in a melodic lilt. He wears thin glasses with gold frames and orthopaedic footwear. He has a strong, deep voice that’s interrupted with shrill giggles at memories past. He is also a passionate orator. I’ve seen him at political rallies, watched how the crowd listens to him in silence, hanging on his every word. He calls me sahiba, or madam, but calls my father and uncle ‘boys’.

  Talking to him now, listening to his exuberant manner of answering a question with riddles and poems and laughter, I wonder how he survived Zia’s jails; he was held in eight prisons, regularly shifted and threatened with torture. ‘Every time they shifted me,’ Dr Hussain tells me proudly, ‘I would shout loudly jiye Bhutto, long live Bhutto!’ In jail he was deprived of newspapers and books, but was allowed to keep his medical equipment and paper to write on. Dr Hussain had a routine; each time they moved him, he would create a garden in the small patch of dirt outside his cell. He learned how to cook ‘very well actually’ and wrote two diaries for his children, hoping they would be a substitute for his fatherly advice which was being missed at home.

  ‘The brain is an
organ, na?’ he says in a jolly tone. ‘You have to use it or lose it!’

  Dr Hussain spent his time at the Damascus Airport Hotel, which lasted almost a year, writing poetry, a habit he had picked up in jail. ‘The regime was going to use it, the violence of the hijacking, to balance the violence they had committed against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. But unfortunately for them President Carter had another hostage crisis, in Iran, to deal with and Zia’s attempt was pushed to one side.’ Eventually Dr Hussain was granted asylum in Sweden.

  Undaunted, the junta went into overdrive, using any angle it could to pin responsibility for the hijacking on Murtaza and Shahnawaz. Benazir made the mistake of making jubilant phone calls, excited by the prospect of a blow against the junta. ‘We did it!’ she bragged to friends and colleagues alike ‘We finally got them!’ Almost immediately, the police turned up and arrested her and Nusrat on charges of orchestrating the hijacking. Benazir hadn’t spoken to her brothers, she had no idea of the danger they were in. Her phone call compromised her and Nusrat, but it sealed her brothers’ fate. ‘Sessions judge’s report on hijacking concluding it was an individual act,’ Benazir wrote in an undated entry in one of her large dusty registers. ‘Regime calls it PPP hijacking before hijackers even reveal details – March 2 or 3 ’81 . . . PCO order passed so that constitutional justice not available to us for fabricated case. Zia admits PCO passed to “eliminate” elements responsible for hijacking.’ Benazir displays a surprising knowledge of the law as she weighs up the danger against the family caused by her spontaneous braggadocio and the aftermath of their arrest. ‘Broadcast by BBC that Begum Sahiba and myself to be tried for hijacking. This is before any charges have been made against us formally and before we have even been questioned by relevant agencies to see if their investigation shows a prima facie case or not.’ In the end, no case was filed against Benazir; only her brothers were indicted.