Songs of Blood and Sword

by Fatima Bhutto

  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.’6 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.8 Officially, Al Zulfikar, inactive in the years since Shahnawaz’s murder, was disbanded. I know my father would have loved knowing that AZO was among the many groups whose names popped up in regard to General Zia’s plane crash, but their symbolic resistance to the dictator’s tyranny had ended. Hope, as usual, did not prevail for long.

  The General 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.

  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 said, almost shouting. ‘You’re willing to be Zia’s Prime Minister?’

  I was young, only six years old. We were in Geneva, spending time together as a family early in the summer. Papa was a passionate man, but he was always in control of his emotions. He never yelled, never swore, never overreacted. He always displayed the cool assurance of someone used to winning the argument in the end. We were at lunch eating pizza. The atmosphere grew dark and tense very quickly. 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. I began to close my eyes and to block out what Papa was saying. I heard him speak of himself as dead. I heard him and shut him out. I stood behind his chair, holding on to the frame, and tried to hug him.

  I could never bear to hear my father speak of not being there. Sometimes he would say, ‘When I die . . .’ and I would get angry and fight with him. ‘But everyone dies at some point!’ he would say, laughing to make the issue sound uncomplicated and natural, but I always hated hearing him talk like that. 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 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.

  To say Asif Zardari had a chequered past is something of a polite understatement. Benazir was in her early thirties before she began to consider marriage proposals, the first woman in her family to opt for a traditional arranged marriage. She didn’t think it proper that she, who worked daily with men and was about to ascend to the land’s highest post, remain single. And it might be damaging for her reputation. Mummy remembers one conversation in Damascus when Benazir was bemoaning her lack of options – who would marry her, a strong, powerful woman, and agree to take the back seat in the Prime Minister’s busy public life? Alternatively, who was strong enough to hold their own next to her? ‘She considered Yasser Arafat,’ Mummy recalls, unable to stop a smile from spreading across her face. ‘She thought he might be a suitable match.’9 Karachi folklore says that it was Zia’s secretary, Roedad Khan, who suggested to Asif’s 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.’10

  Suhail is more diplomatic. ‘His father, Hakim Zardari, contested the 1970 elections from Nawabshah’ – a centuries-old town since renamed Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto by order of President Zardari – ‘and joined the PPP. There are rumours, stories that Mr Bhutto didn’t like the man – that he humiliated him and even had him thrashed on occasion – I won’t go into them, but they exist. In Mr Bhutto’s lifetime Hakim left the PPP – or was thrown out, depending on who you believe – and switched sides, joining the National Awami Party, an anti-Bhutto party at the time, as head of the Sindh chapter.’ Suhail, a deliberate and cautious man, clears his throat before continuing. ‘The NAP was part of the alliance that hounded your grandfather and supported the Zia coup by publicly chanting slogans like “Hang Bhutto not once but a hundred times” and “Double the noose around Bhutto’s neck.”’ Hakim was with the NAP at that time and in a prominent position in Sindh. Did he take part in those chants and protests against Zulfikar? I don’t know. The ‘Hang Bhutto a hundred times’ is attributed to him, Suhail reckoned.‘Of course!’ screamed Dr Sikandar. ‘Hakim was famous for such slogans.’ Mumtaz Bhutto, Zulfikar’s cousin and Chief Minister of Sindh, and keeper of all stories Sindhi, told me he didn’t know which story was true and which wasn’t, ‘but the fact of the matter is, Zulfi certainly didn’t like him. He had no time whatsoever for Zardari.’11 In any case, Hakim Zardari later switched parties again, becoming what is called a lota in derogatory politicese. I remember Papa used to call him ‘Hakoo the Dacu’ – thief – in his public meetings, a taunt that riled Zardari to no end. But what about Asif, I asked Suhail, what was he known for in the days before he became Mr Benazir Bhutto? ‘Oh, he was unknown,’ Suhail replied casually, ‘though he did have a reputation in Karachi circles as a gatecrasher.’12

  That summer, I remember my father saying something to me about returning to Pakistan. He always spoke of home, always spoke of the return, but this time he added, almost as an afterthought, ‘Don’t tell Wadi, OK?’ I promised Papa I wouldn’t say a word. The chasm had already opened.

  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, 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.

  { 15 }

  T he run-up to the 1988 elections started on the wrong foot. Benazir chose not to enter int
o 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.1 The declaration went a step further towards democratizing politics by placing ‘strict limits on the dissolution of provincial governments by the centre’.2

  Benazir might have been furthering her political career by championing a personal image of democratic leadership, but according to the historian Ian Talbot she ‘displayed little interest in strengthening and democratizing her own party, while simultaneously leading the national crusade for the democratization of Pakistan’s politics’.3

  As a result, 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. A core of personal business contacts and establishment politicians who trimmed their sails to the prevailing political wind and who would soon become the new party’s power brokers swiftly replaced them. 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.4

  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.’5 The PPP’s current Prime Minister, Yousef Raza Gilani, was also a trusted member of Zia’s religious council, which rivalled parliament in its power, during the days of the Junta, Dr Hussain reminds me.

  While veteran party members were swept aside, it was the workers who felt the most betrayed. Maulabux is a stout Sheedi man, of African, Sindhi and Baloch ethnic heritage. He and his wife live in Lyari, the beating heart of the PPP in Karachi and a Bhutto stronghold for decades. ‘Dil se, from our hearts, we were with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’,6 begins Maulabux, whose friends and comrades call him Mauli, meaning ‘white radish’ in Urdu, a nickname so widespread that even he uses it now.

  ‘Our work, our sacrifices, were because of the love we had for him. Our thought, after his execution, was that no compromise with the killers of Bhutto was acceptable. The road was very difficult, of course, but we weren’t afraid of paying with arrest and with our lives.’ It’s an emotional subject for Maulabux, who reminds me as we’re speaking that we met once long ago – in Kabul when I was a baby. ‘Those of us who worked for the party during the dictatorship, we were political workers. It was a big struggle, but we were a family. If one of us was stopped, was harmed, we all rallied round. We learned politics from the senior founding members of the party. We were young then, we considered ourselves their students and we fell in love with the socialism, the egalitarianism, the principles of the PPP.’

  And they suffered. They risked arrest and flogging to pass out pamphlets for the MRD and to stage women’s meetings and protest rallies in public roundabouts and parks. When things became too difficult, they would take the bus from Karachi to Gwadar in Balochistan then sneak across the border to Iran. The Iranians, ethnically Baloch on the border, would let them through without visas and they would lie low with friends and family in Irani Balochistan. The process of going underground was expensive, and they paid out of their own pockets. ‘Mir baba thanked so many of our families and relatives across the border, personally reaching out to them by letters and phone calls, he thanked them for protecting us workers during a time of need. All of us joined Mir baba when he returned to Pakistan, there was no doubt that we would.’ Why? I asked. ‘Because,’ Mauli said, uncharacteristically growing quiet, ‘because we were still struggling.’

  Shahnawaz Baloch, a thinner, taller replica of Maulabux, steps in to speak. The mood of our conversation has changed. There is a reckoning that someone has to make. ‘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.’7

  Aftab Sherpao, who was elected a vice-president of the PPP in 1976, was yet another of the party elite who lost his voice as the party regrouped in preparation for the 1988 elections. ‘There was a vast difference between those two PPPs,’ he says. Sherpao is the consummate statesman. When we met, he had just left General Musharraf’s cabinet – he had been Pakistan’s Interior Minister during the country’s fight alongside the United States in the War on Terror, a role that placed Sherpao in danger as suicide bombers attacked him and his family, narrowly missing him several times. Some years earlier, Sherpao had founded a splinter group of the PPP, one that was openly critical of the PPP under Benazir and her husband. ‘Mr Zulfikar Bhutto was a good listener. I was a provincial minister in the NWFP at the time and used to watch him as he sat for hours and hours listening to everyone around the table before taking a final decision on any matter, regardless how large or small. She, his daughter, if she didn’t like something you said, she would cut you off. As far as political brilliance is concerned, there was no match. Yes, she had acumen, but not to the extent her father had. She got her momentum from him.’8

  The party’s decision to negotiate with the army and to work with Zia’s protégés in the lead-up to the elections carried with it the end of the PPP as its workers knew it. ‘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.’

  Why didn’t they see it coming? Why had
they been taken in by Benazir’s politics, opportunistic at best? Mauli thinks for a moment. He nods, he knows what I’m asking. ‘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.’

  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.9

  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.10 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.11

  On 2 December 1988, Benazir Bhutto took her oath and at thirty-five years old became the youngest Prime Minister in Pakistan’s history. In Damascus, Murtaza was anxiously watching the votes come in. The Pakistani embassy was calling our house with up-to-the-minute results.

  When the polls had closed, Murtaza was furious. ‘These elections are rigged,’ Ghinwa remembers him saying to her. ‘These aren’t the numbers the PPP should be getting after eleven years of martial law.’