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.’8 The referendum produced a ludicrously inflated 98 per cent9 approval rating for the President and his policies. The MRD, afraid of upsetting the religious parties, did not campaign against the Islamization programme but decided simply to boycott the vote, a pointless exercise.
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’.
By the time the new government took power, Zia allowed the head of the MRD and newly appointed chairperson of the PPP, Benazir, to return to Pakistan from self-imposed exile in the UK. Benazir had taken a leave of absence from Pakistan. Her brothers, living in Kabul, disagreed with her choice. They weren’t given the option of taking sabbaticals and re-energizing, but she had taken their father’s death badly and had suffered ear infections under house arrest so they acquiesced and said nothing when she went to London. There was, however, a tremendous amount of friction over Benazir and her position at the centre of the MRD’s and PPP’s politics. Her takeover of her father’s party was not subject to a party vote but was carried out unilaterally by Benazir herself, with her bereaved mother Nusrat as the symbolic head of the party. Nana, Della’s sister, told me over dinner in Mykonos that she understood there was tension over Benazir’s ambition, even at this early stage. ‘There was friction between Mir and her. 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.”’10
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. 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.
By the time I was born, my father and uncle had decided to leave Kabul and the process of packing up had started. In the summer of 1982 it had become clear that the Bhutto brothers could no longer remain in Afghanistan. The fallout from the hijacking and the independence Murtaza and Shahnawaz exercised in marrying locals and expanding their activities meant that they lost the support of their hosts.
‘We noticed that the Afghan authorities had started hindering our communications with Pakistan,’ Suhail concludes, ‘which was the very reason we were in Afghanistan to begin with – to be close to Pakistan. Our travel papers were being held up by official delays, we were living in an official government residence, being guarded by their security, using their driver, and things had become tense. We told them, “Your own situation has become difficult, so we’ll go and return when things settle down.” They were upset because we were choosing to leave and they understood that we were doing so on a protest note.’12 But there was no animosity in their farewell. Nooristani, who had chiefly dealt with Murtaza, was sad to see him and Shah go but didn’t try to stop them.
The hundred or so people who had joined the brothers in Kabul began to pack up their lives and prepare to be resettled under the protection of a new state. It was decided that Libya would be the next port of call. ‘In those days, Libya was a hub for political dissidents,’ Suhail remembers. ‘Palestinians, Bangladeshis, Filipinos, you name it – any spot in the world that suffered some kind of conflict or the other had nationals living in Tripoli.’13 Murtaza travelled first to Libya to speak with President Gaddafi, who had been an ally to the Bhutto family during Zulfikar’s arrest. Suhail accompanied him on the trip and together they decided that while Murtaza and his family would settle in Damascus, Suhail and Shahnawaz would look after the organization in Tripoli.
Shahnawaz would look after the base as he had done in Afghanistan; he had become the most comfortable with the work. He had built a rapport with the many men who came to find a place in the struggle against the dictatorship back home and busied himself training the young cadres in military and security techniques. Murtaza, as the elder brother and the head of the organization, was the diplomat. He had spent his years writing, negotiating and trying to influence Pakistan’s standing in the world through various projects – including the documentary that he had started while living in London. Suhail opted to stay with Shahnawaz, who moved to Tripoli with his wife shortly after their daughter Sassi was born. By January 1983, Suhail’s wife Kamar and two sons, Bilal and Ali, had joined him in Libya. They would, however, barely last three months in northern Africa.
‘It was the worst experience,’ Suhail says. ‘Kabul was a lively city, frankly speaking, but everything in Libya was upside down.’14 He wobbles his hand as if to illuminate how topsy-turvy life in Libya felt. ‘The leadership, Gaddafi, was very sympathetic to us, very kind and very welcoming, but there was no structure in place, it was too sensitive.’ With their families, Shah and Suhail lived in separate villas at the Shati Andalous Hotel near the sea. When I tell Suhail that their new digs sound picturesque, imagining the Libya I’ve seen in travel magazines, he sighs and smiles. ‘Communication with the outside world was completely cut off, there were no newspapers because of the government’s strict censorship, we couldn’t understand anything on TV since it was all in Arabic. We were totally in the dark, we felt stranded. It was too bureaucratic.’ He pauses and then adds, as an afterthought, ‘It was also a dry country.’
It’s strange to me that Libya would seem such an unattractive choice after living in war-torn Kabul, but Shah and Suhail couldn’t stand living there. ‘They ran a strange economy,’ Suhail continued, keen to convince me how miserable they had been in Tripoli. ‘You couldn’t always find staples like eggs or cigarettes in the market. When, once in a blue moon, they’d turn up at the supermarket you’d see people walking out with eight or ten cartons of eggs at a time. It was really strange.’ But they had changed too, these young men. They had seen their dreams of a Che Guevara-style resistance movement fail, they had seen their efforts, romantic but misguided, used against them. They had been swallowed up by negative public opinion. Years earlier they had been lauded as heroic young men trying to fight the abrogation of a constitution and now they had become simplified – they were called terrorists, derided as landless fighters. ‘We don’t want a medal for what we did,’ Suhail says, ‘but we were at the frontline of resistance to Zia. We weren’t lobbying State Department officials in Washington or attending luncheons in London. We spent our lives struggling.’15
Eventually, it was decided that Shah and Suhail would join Murtaza in Syria. All three men had families now. They were no longer rebels alone in the hills. They had schools to consider and nappies to change. They spent a sleepy two years in Syria attending to the banalities of family life. 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 g
et 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.
The brothers raised their families and did their best to pursue normal lives as the guests of President Hafez al Assad, the lion of Damascus. But, towards the end of 1984, the tedium of life as a wandering exile began to affect Shahnawaz. He started to feel frustrated. He was only twenty-six years old and had a young wife and a two-year-old daughter. He had always been the most free-spirited member of the family. It couldn’t have been easy for Shah to adapt to living as a political refugee in a claustrophobic South Asian enclave, three families stuck on top of one another. It probably wasn’t fair to him either. He considered the idea of moving, of settling in Europe for a while and giving his family a small chance of freedom. It was to France, near where Shah had studied as a college student, that he wanted to go.
‘When it came to Shah,’ Suhail says, ‘Murtaza always treated him like his beloved younger brother. He adored him. So when Shah spoke about leaving, Mir must have put his feelings aside about the danger of being in Europe to allow Shah to make the move.’16 Suhail’s voice is tight and he drags hard on his cigarette. I sense that he might not be talking for Murtaza when he speaks, obviously upset about Shah’s decision to move to France. I push. Why was it a bad choice? Why was France more dangerous than the other countries the brothers had been living in? Suhail puts out his cigarette, and looks straight at me. ‘The mistake was moving to France. Absolutely. In Afghanistan the brothers were guarded, they were protected. In Damascus too. But in France Shah was living out in the open. He was exposed. Once the brothers had made the decision to fight the junta, once they went to Afghanistan to struggle against the dictatorship, they were marked men.’17
{ 12 }
W hat happened next is still a mystery. What we do know is this: in October of 1984, Shah and his wife Raehana and daughter Sassi left Damascus and moved to the south of France. The move was a welcome change of pace for the young couple. In Kabul Raehana had been a young student from a diplomatic family with ties to the ancien régime. Her husband was a guest of the Soviet-backed communist government. They were in their early twenties, younger than I am now writing this. They had married against the wishes of Shah’s family, who were not happy that their son rush into a union so soon after his engagement to Nurseli, whom they had known and happily approved of, had been broken off. They had, by all accounts, a passionate and intense marriage. They were hindered not only by their families, but also by politics. Raehana had been a vocal mujahideen supporter, Shah an opponent. Fully ensconced in their anti-imperialist ideology, Shah and his brother believed that the United States not only had a hand in their father’s execution, but was still propping up Zia’s military junta.
France gave the couple their first opportunity to experience life on their own, away from divisive politics and away from their families. They settled into an apartment in Nice, a pleasant flat on the second floor of a building on the Avenue de Roi Albert. Shah travelled often to Syria to meet Murtaza, but kept his visits short and returned eagerly to France, where the family led as normal a life as their situation allowed.
In the summer of 1985, we met for a family reunion in Nice. It was the first time for years that the family had all been together at the same time. Nusrat came from Geneva, where she had been living in exile, Murtaza travelled from Damascus, and Benazir – along with Sanam – came from London.
The brothers were overjoyed to see each other – they had been virtually inseparable since their father was executed and they relished the opportunity to be together again. Murtaza and Shah shared jokes from their childhood, a popular tease being Shah’s insistence during the family’s state visit to China on posing with his arm bent at the elbow and folded across his midriff, imitating Chou En-lai, who was forced to hold his arm that way due to an old war wound. We moved into Shah’s flat and planned to be in Nice for the month of July.
When we arrived, Murtaza noticed that Shah had put his name outside the building, on the intercom board. It troubled him that Shah had used his real name and he reproached him for it – you mustn’t advertise your location, this is France, Murtaza told his brother. There was no protection provided by the government in Nice, no local officials were charged with minding the safety of the Bhutto brothers. But it seemed a small lapse and the summer began happily.
Our families spent afternoons on the beach, lounging in the sun. Shah, ever the athlete, would go jet-skiing or waterskiing, waving to us on the shore and fooling around with funny gestures – he could do anything. He was twenty-six years old and at the peak of his physical strength. I remember him waterskiing behind a perilously fast boat, lifting one hand behind his head and giggling when everyone gasped, but keeping his balance. He was the life of the family, the cherished youngest child and second son. He had a spirit that was upbeat, no matter the situation, a personality that always managed to shine in company.
Sassi and I were both three years old, I the elder by three months. We took particular delight in standing on the balcony of Shah’s secondfloor flat and pouring cartons of juice into the ground-floor flat’s swimming pool, running away in hysterics when its owner came blazing out of the apartment, cursing us in French for having turned her pool into a cocktail of orange and apple juice. The balcony was our territory, it was where we often sat, on a small rocking horse that had been put out there, presumably to distract us from the pool. We wore 1980s sunglasses in neon colours that made us feel like rock stars and we shared a bracelet, a pink and white bangle, that we passed back and forth depending on whose turn it was to wear. We looked, double cousins as we were, strangely similar. We both wore our hair in shoulder-length bobs, heavily fringed. My hair was dark brown, Sassi’s light brown. But we were almost twins, as we saw it anyway.
I used to grab on to Uncle Shah’s leg when he passed by, to annoy Sassi, and scream, ‘My Papa,’ knowing that she was too gentle to claw at my father and do the same. When Sassi would sniffle I would run back to my father’s leg, hang on to it and declare, ‘My Papa too.’ Sassi claims I used to bite her cheeks, but I don’t remember that. I adored her and thought of her as my own. We were surrounded by grownups and were aware, with whatever limited understanding we possessed as children, that things around us were dangerous. We knew we had a grandfather who had been killed. We knew we didn’t live in our own country, a far-away place we only heard the adults talk about. We knew that things weren’t as they should be and so we stuck together and created a small make-believe world that entertained and fascinated us.
In the evenings, the family would eat out at restaurants, pulling tables together to accommodate our numbers, and the conversation and food would roll on late into the night. Inevitably, Murtaza and Shah would steal away and go for a drink at the Carlton Hotel, taking advantage of the freedom that the south of France afforded them, coming home in the small hours of the morning.
On 17 July, we spent the day swimming at the Port La Galère. A barbecue was planned for the evening and Shah and Raehana stayed at the flat getting food ready for dinner. Papa took Sassi and me to the beach and we spent most of the day splashing around in the water and enjoying ourselves. At the flat, Raehana sent Shah to the grocery to pick up some basics; we were going to eat out on the beach and there were going to be a lot of mouths to feed. He returned with drinks and disposable cutlery, then watched TV and smoked a cigar while we got ready for the night ahead.
There were several of us there that night on the beach at La Napoule. Shah and Murtaza drove around town picking up various members of the family and dropping them off at the beach. By 9.30 the party was complete and the revelry began. Joonam, as I now called my grandmother Nusrat, brought salad and yoghurt and cucumbers in the Iranian style. Someone else brought ice-cream for dessert. The grill was fired up and Shah began to cook the chops and meat brochettes over the open fire. I remember him squeezing lemon onto the meat and
laughing when the juice got in his eye. He continued to cook, wary of the flying lemon juice, squinting theatrically for the pictures someone took as he barbecued. I remember the beach was empty that night, except for our rowdy family. I also remember that there was graffiti spray-painted on the wall near the cars. Papa told me later that Joonam had been lively that night, bringing herself out of the depression she had suffered from ever since Zulfikar was killed. She spoke in Farsi to her relatives and in English to the rest of the family and, at some point out of nowhere, said that she hoped she would die before her children; she couldn’t imagine the pain of losing one more loved one.
The barbeque lasted till around 11 p.m., when Murtaza and Shahnawaz got into separate cars to drive their relatives home. I was with my father. I don’t know where Sassi was. When Shahnawaz and Raehana reached Avenue de Roi Albert they were both angry; they’d had an argument on the way. Shah wanted to carry on to the casino in town and Raehana didn’t, she wanted to go to the Whiskey a Go Go nightclub.
By the time they reached the lobby of the apartment block, things had become ugly. Papa asked what was going on and Raehana told him to mind his own business. He reacted angrily and expected Shah to step in to calm his wife down. But by then words were being exchanged between my father and Raehana and Shah was caught in the middle. Raehana asked my father and her sister to pack their bags and get out of her house. Papa swore angrily, he had been insulted.He stormed into the apartment to pack our things. I remember the row. I remember wishing that everyone would stop screaming, I remember being scared and tired. Within a few minutes our clothes had been thrown into our suitcases and we drove over to Joonam’s flat in a nearby neighbourhood.
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