Songs of Blood and Sword

by Fatima Bhutto

  The PPP had won with only a slight majority. Murtaza called his sister and pleaded with her, ‘Pinky, don’t accept these results.’ She ignored him, overjoyed that she was so close to power, close enough to touch it. Nusrat also advised her daughter to reject the results. It will make you stronger, she told her. Benazir made a public show of her irritation at the suggestion by leaving her mother in Islamabad and travelling to Larkana by herself, remaining there until her decision had been announced. She said yes to all the army’s conditions.

  ‘That day,’ remembers Ghinwa, ‘the phone was ringing off the hook with people calling to offer Mir mabruk, congratulations. He was gracious on the phone, but he was so disheartened. He was supposed to pick you up from school – you were in first grade – and he came to me and said, “Will you go pick Fati up instead?” I asked him why and he replied, “People are going to be coming up and congratulating me. This isn’t a victory. I don’t want to go.”’

  Papa and I had grown with my school, the Damascus Community School. We had followed it from a basement in Mezzeh to its refurbished campus in Abu Roumaneh. Papa had come to read to my class every year from pre-nursery onwards; he was the funniest storyteller and would make faces and voices to match every character in whatever book he was assigned to read that year. The teachers enjoyed his performances as much as we children did. The teachers and parents had become a proxy family for us, especially before Ghinwa came into our lives. But Murtaza couldn’t face them that day.

  It took Zia’s number two, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, a week to invite Benazir to become Prime Minister. The insult infuriated Murtaza even more. The army’s conditions, the stalling, the rigging, it was too much. He called his sister again. ‘They’re tying your hands,’ he told her. ‘You’re going to be weak. Refuse their conditions, Don’t take the government, sit in the opposition, Pinky. You’ll be in a phenomenal position. Don’t bow down to these bastards.’ But those around the future Prime Minister told her not to listen. ‘We can’t afford to sit in the opposition, Mir,’ she told her brother on the phone. ‘If people don’t feel they’re getting something from the party they’ll leave us.’ It was untrue. The party had nothing but loyal workers. It was the interlopers, the new moneyed recruits, who would have fled but they were a gamble Benazir was already unwilling to risk.

  In the summer of 1988 Murtaza asked Ghinwa to marry him. We had both fallen in love with her. I put aside my normally controlling possessiveness about Papa to let Aunty Ghinwa in, setting forth some conditions. Papa was very considerate, buying us both Valentine’s Day presents and bringing me a small bouquet of flowers for every large one he gave Ghinwa, but I had an issue with semantics that had to be urgently rectified. Driving along Mezzeh one afternoon, I asked Papa why he called her ‘Darling’. I didn’t appreciate not being included in this strange affection he was showing to someone besides me. ‘It’s because I love her,’ he said, realizing at once that he’d put his foor in it. ‘What about me ? ’ I asked. We reached a compromise. He could call Aunty Ghinwa ‘Darling’ if he called me ‘Dear’ in the same sentence. As soon as Papa signed on to my terms I forgot all about it.

  ‘It was my twenty-sixth birthday,’ Mummy tells me. ‘I knew Mir was going to give me an engagement ring. We’d talked about marriage and settling down and I just felt he was going to ask me to marry him on my birthday. He wanted to keep it a surprise, I thought, so I waited patiently for the day to come. That day we were at the Sheraton having lunch with some friends and in the middle of a conversation, Mir turned to me and said, very casually, ‘By the way, what do you want for your birthday?” I wanted to burst into tears then and there. But he just stared at me with a poker face and said, “What? What did I say?” He didn’t even laugh! I felt my face turning red.’

  Mummy wears her engagement ring sporadically now. She wears it when she can bear the memories it brings; today she doesn’t have it on. Her fingers are bare and she wrings them as she talks. ‘I think he was afraid I wouldn’t say yes. He had to hear it directly from me, so I told him I thought he was going to propose to me. And he let out a gale of laughter and said, “Well, why didn’t you just say so?”’ The next day they returned to the Sheraton and picked out rings together at Muwafak’s jewellery store, which also doubled as my post box since security precautions didn’t allow me to use our home address for my mail.

  A word should be said about the Sheraton Hotel, base of operations for my family during our lives in Damascus. We ate there; in the summer we swam in the pool from sunrise till sunset; I had my birthday parties, lavishly planned and orchestrated by my father, in the hotel ballroom – though my friends and I would always end up playing in the basement bathroom, leaving the adults upstairs. When the Sheraton opened a pizzeria, Luigi’s, Papa insisted on taking me to pick up pizzas in my pyjamas and slippers when he got cravings late at night. It was, for lack of other public spaces, our own little world. After he had been killed, I went to Luigi’s for lunch. The waiters gathered around my table and cried. Papa had been their friend and there are memories of him all over that hotel.

  Murtaza and Ghinwa came home to tell me the news of their engagement and found me bored, jumping on my bed. With each jump I made a noise, a monotonous yea yeaa yeaa sound, seeing how far my voice travelled with every bounce. Papa couldn’t hold the news in; he blurted it out in one breath ‘Fatiauntyghinwaandiaregettingmarried.’ I heard him and bounced harder, turning my bored yeas into loud and shrill yays. I was thrilled. I missed her whenever she wasn’t with us. I knew Papa did too.

  They married, on 21 March 1989. The preparations for the wedding went off without a hitch, except for one. Two weeks before the big day Aunty Ghinwa went to her hairdresser, at the Sheraton it goes without saying, and chopped off her beautiful long hair. Her hair was now the same length as Murtaza’s. When Papa saw her for the first time after the cut, unveiled over lunch at the Sheraton the same day, he almost didn’t recognize her. The wedding was going to be a small affair; Joonam came from Karachi and Teta Kafia and Jiddo Abboud represented Aunty Ghinwa’s family, along with Kholoud, one of her three older sisters, whom I called Aunty Lulu. I was the unofficial matron of honour. ‘You thought it was your wedding,’ Mummy says, telling me what I already knew. ‘We both got new dresses, mine was white and yours light blue with lace. I took you to buy gloves and pretty clips for your hair. And you wouldn’t let us sit together. You were always in between us in every photograph.’ They signed their marriage papers, according to Islamic custom, in our dining room. I carried a camera in one hand and my diary, a pink journal with Minnie Mouse on the cover holding a sign that read, ‘I love you’, a gift from Papa, as if it were a bouquet.

  I had titled each page with some sort of first grade code – I had just learned how to write – and occasionally invited Papa to contribute thoughts to my diary. Under the page quizzically headed E.M. he had drawn a picture in pencil of a mouse and me. ‘It was the night before Christmas,’ Papa wrote, ‘not a creature was stirring, not even a Fatima or a mouse. Anyway, what is the difference?’ On the day of the wedding I wrote two entries. The first read, ‘Papa is good, he loves me a lot oh and he loves you to.’ There followed some drawings of hearts and horses and then, ‘Today Papa and Ghinwa got married and it is a Special Day For me. Now I call Ghinwa MoM and I still call Papa Papa.’ I was seven years old.

  After the mullah approved the marriage papers, Joonam sat me down and explained to me that now Aunty Ghinwa was my mother and that I should stop calling her aunty. I mulled over whether to go with ‘mother’, which was new and exciting to me since I’d never really bonded with my biological mother (too old-fashioned, said Joonam) or to go with ‘mom,’ which is what my friends all called their mothers, but finally decided to go with ‘mummy’, which sounded the nicest. It was also what Papa called Joonam. ‘Since then it’s been an unending call,’ my mother says, imitating me, ‘Mummymummymummmy . . .’ This, embarrassingly, is true.

  Because is was a special oc
casion, Mummy was allowed to have a page in my diary too, which she filled in several days later, writing, ‘Now I am a very happy person because I am a mother of a beautiful child called Fatima. Fatima, my child, is very sweet and very cute. It is true. Sometimes she doesn’t listen but this is only because she still doesn’t know and doesn’t mean to be mean.’ I don’t remember what she was referring to, I must have been ignoring her at the time.

  Ten days later, my parents hosted a wedding reception for thirty friends at the Sheraton. Mummy wore an off-white sari that Papa had given her as a wedding present. I had just had my tonsils removed and sat grumbling at home with Aunty Lulu, missing the party.

  At the end of August that year, Mummy and I travelled to Pakistan together. It was her first visit and my second. Coming back to Karachi with Mummy made it feel more like home, but it was a difficult trip for her. ‘Mir never thought he’d live in exile, no, never,’ Mummy says, shaking her head adamantly. ‘He always thought of going back, though to me it didn’t seem possible. Every time I wanted to change something in the flat, Mir would say, “No, don’t do it, it’s not ours. We’ll be going back home soon.” He was always preparing to return.’

  Murtaza had spoken to his mother about the idea of coming home, to end the exile that started with Zia and should have ended with his death. Joonam was always supportive, but there was one family member who wasn’t. Benazir baulked at the idea when Murtaza suggested coming back to Pakistan, ready to face the multitude of cases of treason Zia’s junta had brought against him and Shahnawaz. ‘Please don’t come back now, Mir,’ she had begged him, ‘it’s too hard on me.’ Benazir told her brother that Pakistan’s Intelligence, the ISI, had ‘lost his file’, that no one knew the exact number of charges the dictator had brought against him. She told her brother that her hands were tied.

  ‘After the first PPP government was formed in 1988 a lot of political dissidents who had gone abroad came back to Pakistan,’ Suhail tells me. ‘Many Sindhis who suffered persecution under Zia, Baloch too – even Khair Bux Marri returned from Afghanistan – so it was expected that Murtaza and his followers would be afforded the same treatment. We had fought for democracy too, we had struggled against Zia and yet we were singled out and not included in this process of return.’12 Suhail, along with Murtaza, had to stay abroad, in limbo. Why didn’t Papa go back? I asked him. Why didn’t you just ignore the Prime Minister’s objections and return? ‘The strength of Murtaza’s cadres were in Pakistan. He was away from them, but he didn’t want to create problems for his sister by pushing his return, he didn’t want to be blamed for rocking her boat, because he knew how much she wanted it, and I suppose, ultimately, he felt it was a weak government and it would eventually be removed.’

  When asked, in an interview with the BBC, why he hadn’t immediately returned with the advent of so-called democracy in Pakistan, Murtaza replied candidly. ‘I’m staying away. I couldn’t live with the idea that I’d be the cause of my sister losing her government.’ She would in fact do that very ably on her own.

  In Karachi, on that first trip, my mother gave her first press conference. Papa had trusted Ghinwa to speak for him. A journalist asked the question on everyone’s mind that winter of 1989: why hadn’t Murtaza returned to participate in his country’s turn towards democracy? Mummy answered honestly: ‘He wants to. But his sister has asked him not to come back now.’ Benazir would not forget her sisterin-law’s frank remark.

  It was shortly after our return to Damascus that Mummy found out she was pregnant. My parents told me together. They seemed nervous, again. I had been an only child, and a pushy one at that, for so long. ‘Fati,’ Papa started, gulping air, before launching into his single breath breaking news tyle,‘Mummyandiaregoingtohaveababy.’ I was thrilled. I started screaming and jumping up and down, this time on the marble floor. I just hoped it wouldn’t be a girl.

  Zulfikar Ali Bhutto junior was born on 1 August 1990, ten days late. I was at my friend Paula’s house when Papa raced over to pick me up and take me to the hospital. Papa was early and I was annoyed. I had two more hours left of playtime and he didn’t say why he had come early to pick me up. Papa honked from the car downstairs like a madman. When I didn’t respond, he ran to the intercom, calling that I should get my things and come down. Papa wasn’t normally so anxious; I thought he was playing a trick on me.

  A few weeks earlier he had burst into my bedroom on a Saturday morning shouting for me to get up. ‘Fati! Fati! Fati! ’ he yelled ‘Come quickly! ’ I rubbed my eyes and looked at the clock on my bedside table. It was only 7.30 in the morning. ‘What is it?’ I asked, sitting up groggily. ‘Hurry up, Get up. Get up!’ he yelled and ran out the door. I slung my legs out of bed and dragged myself out of my room. The minute I went through the door Papa dumped a bucket of water on me. He had a laugh that sounded so mischievous when he was playing pranks it was hard not to laugh along. I burst into fits of giggles and we stood there in the wet hallway, me drenched in water and him holding an empty red bucket.

  But this time there was no prank. I sat in the car, having taken my time to get downstairs, and we zoomed off to the Chami Hospital in the centre of town. We saw Zulfi for the first time together. He was dry and scaly, from having hung around in the womb well past his due date, and bright pink. Joonam came to Damascus to be with us for the birth. Benazir, in an attempt to patch things up with her mother and keep her in the right sphere of influence, so to speak, made Nusrat a federal minister. Joonam didn’t sacrifice her life for the job, understanding perhaps why it had been given to her, and left her post to spend a month with us in Syria. Joonam was with us in Damascus when Benazir’s government fell. Our new life as a family was blissfully complete.

  Benazir’s government ended with a whimper, not a bang. The ethnic and sectarian violence that would cloud her second term in power, with allegations of widespread human rights abuses, had its roots in her party’s first term in office. 1989 saw tensions between ethnic Muhajirs, those who had crossed over from India at the time of Partition, and Sindhis come to a head with ‘an escalation of unexplained shooting incidents in Karachi’.13 Even the Sindhi Prime Minister herself was forced to admit that the spiralling violence in her home province was out of control, calling it a ‘mini-insurgency’.14

  In a letter to his mother, Murtaza raised the concerns that had been creating ripples of anger in the party. ‘On the telephone I threatened to write a long letter,’ Murtaza started. ‘However, I will try my best to keep it short. I am sorry that the content is a bit grim, but I believe it is at least worth a mention. In Clifton recently two dedicated PSF [Pakistan Students Federation, the student wing of the PPP] boys were killed by police under the guise of ‘anti dacoit operations’. Other staunch party loyalists who were active and/or imprisoned during Zia’s years are now back in prison. We are receiving word that many are now being tortured again.’ Murtaza spends the next page listing the names of those suffering at the hands of Benazir’s police system; the list goes from Hyderabad to Thatta to Karachi and onto various other cities in the province. The grievances then continued: ‘Kausar Ali Shah [not yet a PPP parliamentarian] who in Kabul conspired with the Afghan rebels to have Shah and me killed, has been made Managing Director of the National Construction Company. Saifullah Khalid meanwhile continues to face abuse and humiliation because despite having his body and mind broken in torture camps, he refused to implicate you or Pinky in Zia’s false cases. I hear Pinky says he is “burnt” and “must be disposed of”, at least agree to see his father and try to help his brothers.’

  Murtaza’s letter is written in red ink, not the kind he used normally but it adds a measure of urgency.

  Two other boys, from Punjab, Javed Iqbal15 and Mohd Yousef were horribly tortured during Zia’s years. Till the end they said ‘We are Bhuttoists and will remain so no matter what you do to us.’ In 1983 a team of army psychologists interviewed them to determine how the PPP could so effectively ‘brainwash’ its cadres that under the
severest torture they did not break. These two ‘case studies’ of loyalty to Bhutto Shaheed are still in prison in Lahore. Isn’t that a shame? I am sure you have many other problems to confront but I also believe we have a moral obligation to redress these ones too.16

  Murtaza ended the letter with love to his mother and sister and on the back of the page he taped a clipping from a Pakistani newspaper reporting on the silencing of the independent press by Benazir’s government’s, adding, ‘P.S. I thought you may like to see this.’

  Meanwhile Benazir and the coterie that surrounded her were busy making as much out of Pakistan as they could. There was no room for matters of domestic politics. The PPP had been fully opened to the remnants of Zia’s regime. Mahmood Haroon, whose signature was on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s death warrant, was appointed the Governor of Sindh; Nisar Khuro, who publicly demanded that Zulfikar be ‘hanged first and tried later’, was made the head of the party in Sindh, and various other floaters from Zia’s cabinet and inner circle had been given party tickets.

  Benazir reversed many of her father’s programmes, easily and openly. She asked the Commonwealth to allow Pakistan back, oblivious to Zulfikar’s principled decision in leaving the British-run organization; she scrapped the ceilings on land holdings set in place by Zulfikar’s land reforms, thereby safeguarding the feudal system her father had been taking steps to roll back; and she began the process of privatizing the industries that her father had nationalized and made sure that the lion’s share was never far from her hands. The Naudero sugar mill built by Zulfikar for the people was privatized by Benazir and bought by Anwar Majid, a businessman and Zardari’s frontman for many years. The Shadadkot textile mill, also part of Zulfikar’s people-owned Sindh-based industries, was snapped up by Nadir Magsi, a member of Benazir’s PPP, the party that had built and nationalized these very mills for the province’s poor. The list of mills bought by the first couple’s stand-ins is long and embarrassing; suffice it to say the list continues to grow to this very day. Zardari’s crooked business chums along with petty small-time thieves he happened to know also found space for themselves within the inner sanctum of the PPP. It was said that they made millions, money taken under the table, and that kickbacks were ceremoniously given back to the first couple, earning Zardari the nickname Mr Ten Per Cent.