Songs of Blood and Sword

by Fatima Bhutto

  ‘It was such a shame to see him at Shah’s grave. His eyes welled with tears and he had to hold himself back from weeping.’ Suhail knew both the brothers well. He was Murtaza’s friend, closer to his age, but he too had regarded Shah as a younger brother. Angrily, which is not an emotion that comes easily to Suhail, he continued, ‘She usurped Shah’s land, took his Naudero house as her own, not leaving it for his daughter Sassi, and stood for elections on the NA 207 seat that their father had wanted for Shah.’ Was it not convenient then, I asked, for her to tend to his burial site? Suhail shrugged. ‘Papa called the manager of the mazaar then and there – he was an old man who took care of basic things. He told him to fix the shaheed ’s grave properly and expected that when he next returned Shah would have a decent resting place.’ And it was done, finally, nine years after Shah had been interred in Garhi Khuda Bux.

  After the emotional visit to the family mazaar Murtaza spent several days receiving condolences for his father and brother at Al Murtaza. In Sindh, condolences are paid religiously, no matter how many years since the bereavement has passed, and with Murtaza finally home, people flocked from across the province and beyond – from Quetta in Balochistan, from Gujranwala in Punjab, and Gilgit in the Frontier to meet Murtaza and offer their respects.

  Benazir and her cronies were now backed against a wall. Murtaza’s threat was manageable for them when he was behind bars and access to him and his ability to speak to the people were restricted. Now that he was free, he was unstoppable. They did their best to subvert him as much as they could. The courts were ordered to hold his passport so that he was forbidden from leaving the country, a sort of reverse punishment for his return. He was constantly made to travel across Pakistan to appear at court hearings that continued against him in the various provinces, and his workers were routinely rounded up, arrested and viciously beaten.

  In Karachi, Papa’s movements were watched by the Intelligence service, who parked outside 70 Clifton in a dilapidated beige car with brown leather interior and followed him everywhere he went. But even they were no match for Papa’s sense of humour. Once, en route to a wedding, we got lost on the road. Papa stopped the Intelligence vehicle and asked them for directions.

  Murtaza continued to travel across Pakistan. People wanted to meet him, to hear him speak, to see if they was any hope to be placed in this newcomer or whether he was another elite feudal landowner who had no political connection with the ordinary masses. Murtaza spoke bravely and openly against the government and their dismal economic record and violent stance on law and order. And people were listening. It seemed as if Murtaza was the only politician speaking against the status quo instead of lining up to join it.

  Unable to answer Murtaza’s political criticisms of her regime, Benazir played the gender/sibling card, turning the political into the personal and the principled into the trivial. Speaking to the New York Times in the aftermath of the shooting at her brother’s house in Larkana and responding to the allegations that her police force had illegally barricaded the house and shot at her mother, Benazir sniffed, ‘Once my father died, I knew the day would come when, like all feudal families, they’d lock up the daughter so that the son takes over.’6 She sulked further, saying that it was the ‘fear of male prejudice that prompted her marriage. She married “for a home” she said.’7 It should be noted that feudal families intent on locking up their daughters don’t send them to Radcliffe and Oxford.

  When questioned about the gender card, Murtaza answered directly. ‘I have never asked to be the chairman of the party. I neither wanted to be the chairman of the party nor the Chief Minister of Sindh (as constantly alleged by Benazir). I have simply demanded elections in the party at all levels. Is that an unreasonable demand?’8

  There is a lot of pain for me when I write about my aunt during this period. I stopped seeing her after the 5 January shootings. I wanted nothing to do with her; I was so shaken and completely horrified by what she had done. I lived in a city with crumbling roads, flooded with filthy rainwater during monsoon season because there was not even a rudimentary sewage system. Her corruption was evident, it was all around us. I was disappointed. I was taken to see her, forcibly, once or twice. Inevitably they were photo opportunities. I would be made to have lunch with my aunt at the Sheraton Hotel, taken by my grandmother Joonam, who was somewhat stuck in between her two children, where there would be a contingent of cameramen to take our pictures. ‘Bhutto family feud a sham,’ the papers would scream, and my photograph with my aunt would be the proof.

  I had gone with Joonam to Wadi’s house in Karachi in the first few months after our arrival, when everyone seemed intent on pretending that things were normal and there there was nothing strange about visiting your aunt who has just chucked your father in jail. We were sitting in Wadi’s bedroom, her on the bed and us all around her. Joonam was uneasy. She was doing her best to pretend too, but she was distressed over the way Papa’s return had been handled by the government. Joonam didn’t like the way her children were so easily pitted against each other. ‘I don’t like the way you’re fighting,’ she said to Wadi. ‘It’s bad for your father’s legacy.’ Zardari had been sitting in an armchair in the room, silently, until then. ‘As if there was a legacy,’ he sneered loudly, filling up the room all of a sudden.

  Everyone went quiet, even Wadi. No one ever spoke about Zulfikar like that, dismissively, vulgarly. Not in the family, not ever. Joonam seemed shell-shocked, but more than that, she looked deeply pained.

  At home, I told Mummy what I’d heard. She swore in Arabic. I didn’t know how to tell Papa, so I didn’t. He didn’t need the extra ammo in any case.

  When he gave speeches or interviews, Papa often called Zardari a chor, a thief. He coined the term ‘Asif baba and the chalees chor’, ‘Asif Baba and the forty thieves’ which became an instant hit (it remains part of the popular parlance to this day, I’m proud to note). When Papa was out of jail and infinitely more exposed, Joonam would nudge him when he started on like that. ‘Stop, please!’ she’d beg him. ‘They’re tyrants, they’ll hurt you.’

  ‘There’s no question, Begum Sahiba was firmly with Mir’, Suhail says to me over dinner in Karachi. ‘But you must remember, Nusrat was the spirit of the PPP after ZAB was arrested in ’77. Zia wanted to split the party and your grandmother played a very large role in keeping it together initially. She stood on trucks to give speeches, led rallies across the country, was beaten by the police and arrested – she was the life force of the PPP in those dark days. But as soon as Mir came back, Benazir ousted her mother from her honorary party post. She was terrified that her mother might try to overturn her decisions and welcome Mir into the party fold.’

  I don’t understand my family, I tell Suhail. Are you sure they were Rajput warriors? They sound like wild beasts sometimes. Suhail clucks his tongue at me and laughs. ‘Yes, it’s strange,’ he admits ‘but your grandmother never gave up on one child for the other, she was genuinely stuck between them. She wanted Mir to have a chance to fulfil his role, as Benazir had, and that put her in a very difficult position when it came to her daughter.’9

  When I stopped accepting her invitations and finagled ways out of being forced into seeing her, Wadi tried to bribe me. One day, towards the end of sixth grade, I returned home from school to be told the Prime Minister urgently needed to speak to me. ‘Pack your bags, Fati,’ Wadi said excitedly on the phone. ‘I’m taking you to South Africa for Nelson Mandela’s inauguration. We leave in an hour.’ She knew Mandela was a hero of mine, she knew I was desperate to meet him. It wasn’t lunch at the Sheraton, she figured, there was no way I could refuse. But I did, even though I badly wanted to go. My father was still in jail at the time. ‘I’m not going with you while you’re imprisoning my father,’ I said. She was furious. I was the family’s first grandchild and my father treated me like a little grown-up. I got away with a lot and felt I had the right to speak my mind. I often did and it further distanced me from my aunt. The more I w
rite, the more time that passes, the more my aunt becomes unrecognizable to me.

  Papa and I in Geneva. He had broken his arm and I insisted on being fitted with a cast too, which I wore until his came off

  Our own informal portraits with Papa joking around while I posed stiffly and seriously

  Murtaza and Della in Greece at the start of their relationship in the late 1970s

  Mummy and I outside my school in Damascus

  With Wadi in Larkana during my first

  trip to Pakistan – I was seven years old

  Holding my newborn baby brother, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto jr, in Damascus

  Ghinwa and Murtaza before they were married. I was the photographer

  At a wedding during my first trip to Larkana I was ceremoniously seated on Ameer Begum’slap, my grandfather’s first wife, who was chatting away pleasantly with my Joonam. Surprisingly, I am the only one who looks uncomfortable

  A portrait of Ghinwa and Murtaza taken in court

  Murtaza and Zulfi, also photographed during a court recess

  Asif and Benazir at their Mendhi wedding celebration held at 70 Clifton, 1987

  Murtaza speaking to a gathering in the North West Frontier Province in 1994

  Murtaza on a train journey from Karachi to the interior of Sindh after his release from jail, 1994. Suhail Sethi sits next to him

  Murtaza’s train journey to Larkana was met with crowds at nearly every station. He spoke at each and every stop

  Nusrat and Ghinwa visiting the hospital bed of Shahid Rind at Larkana Civil hospital 6 January,1994. Rind was shot by the police in the 5 January police attack on Al Murtaza and later died from his injuries

  The six men who were killed alongside Murtaza:

  Sattar Rajpar, Rahim Brohi, Sajjad Haider with his son Shahnawaz, Wajahat Jokhio, Ashiq Jatoi with his daughter Sabeen and Yar Mohammed Baloch

  One of the accused policemen, Wajid Durrani, saluting Benazir as she arrives at Mideast on the night of 20 September, 1996

  Gulf News front page, Sunday 22 September, 1996, showing the helicopter carrying Murtaza’s body as it was being held down by mourners

  Ghinwa leaving Mideast after Murtaza’s murder

  The last Bhuttos: me, Sassi and Zulfi in Garhi Khuda Bux in 2008 as Sassi visits her father Shahnawaz’s grave for the first time. Mir Ali, our brother, is to the left of us.

  { 20 }

  M y father spent the rest of 1994 touring Pakistan. He travelled to the mountains of Balochistan, to Waziristan and Swat, across the Punjab and through the heartland of Sindh. In Lahore in August he spoke against the government’s attempts to subvert the judiciary by sacking judges who had ruled against the state and the shifting of qualified judges to lower courts to create vacancies for PPP loyalists and political appointees. Murtaza spoke about the government’s curtailing of press freedoms; printing presses belonging to newspapers, especially to the more widely read vernacular papers, were shut down if their articles came out too harshly against the government. In Lahore Murtaza spoke of the case of Amir Mateen, a journalist from a local paper, who had been attacked by ‘unknown assailants’ and beaten in response to his reporting.

  In Karachi Murtaza addressed the Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry and spoke sternly about the government’s corruption. ‘Economic crimes have to be checked effectively and tackled with an iron hand . . . loot and plunder is the order of the day and yet no one is brought to book.’1 Again in the Punjab several months later, having travelled to attend a court hearing in one of the ongoing cases the government was pursuing against him, Murtaza lambasted the foreign deals the government was engaging in as fraudulent schemes based around huge kickbacks. The Frontier Post newspaper recorded Murtaza as frustratedly explaining that in spite of a 4-billion-dollar investment from the US and 7 billion dollars coming from Hong Kong to the Pakistani energy sector, the cost per unit to Pakistani consumers would be ‘6 to 6.5 cents, whereas the international rate was 3 to 3.5 cents per unit. Electricity would be sold to consumers around double the international rates.’2

  By December the gluttonous corruption of the state gave way to another crisis; Sindh was being engulfed in ethnic violence. The ethnic Muhajir population, Urdu-speaking as opposed to the rest of the province’s Sindhi speakers, were the target of political violence. The Muhajir Quami Movement (MQM), a quasi ethno-fascist party at the time, began to riot and incite violence as a reaction to the government’s treatment of the Urdu-speaking population, who were a majority in Karachi. It was an ugly conflict that had its roots in Benazir’s first government.

  In the Sindh Assembly, Murtaza, a Sindhi, raised the issue of Karachi’s increasing ethnic strife. ‘In one breath, the Prime Minister says that the disturbances are in only 11 of our 80 police stations and in the next she comes out with “there is a mini-insurgency and guerrilla warfare in Karachi”. The government is confused and unaware of the situation. The husband of the Prime Minister referred to the killing of persons as if they were not human beings when he said “during one month only 150 persons have been killed”.’ Murtaza went on to say that providing protection to the life and property of citizens was the basic responsibility of the government.

  How can law and order be restored when postgraduate youths are begging for even menial jobs. Without eliminating the curse of unemployment how can there be peace? When there is an abnormal increase in the prices of rice, flour, ghee, sugar and other commodities up to 150 per cent, how can you expect restoration of normality . . . the salaries of the President and the Prime Minister have been increased at the cost of facilities for the labourers who have been left groaning under the unprecedented price hike.3

  Papa gave his monthly MPA salary to the Edhi Foundation every month. We didn’t know this until after his assassination.

  After Murtaza began to speak against the government’s attacks on the ethnic Muhajirs and the escalating law and order problem in Karachi, the government saw another chance to portray Murtaza as a ‘terrorist’. It did its best to spread paranoia, claiming that Murtaza was planning a partnership with Altaf Hussain, the leader of the MQM who had fled Karachi when his infamous gang-style brutality looked likely to land him in jail for the rest of his life. Hussain lives in England now, as a UK citizen, and plays a very active role in Pakistani politics.

  Murtaza had no affinity for the MQM. He deplored their use of sectarian scare tactics and abhorred their violent behaviour. He had raised his voice not because he was enamoured of the MQM, but to speak out for the Urdu-speaking Muhajir community, which was an ethnic and linguistic grouping and distinct from the MQM, a political party.

  After the government released a barrage of stories in the press attempting to discredit Murtaza by calling him a terrorist sympathizer, he responded with characteristic satire. He wrote to the Lahore-based weekly, the Friday Times:

  Sir, It is not my habit to comment on news reports through ‘letters to the editor’, nor is it my responsibility to speak on behalf of the MQM. However, I am compelled to make an exception with regards to Adnan Adil’s article ‘Altaf’s Cobras strike in Liaqatabad’. I have met Adnan Adil once and I mistook him for a normal, reasonable human being. But I have developed serious doubts on this score after reading his ‘Cobra’ story (‘story’ being a polite word). I quote from the article: ‘It is said that they (Altaf’s MQM) also possess a small tank – it is learnt that the MQM has obtained the support of Murtaza Bhutto’s Al Zulfikar Organization which is providing it with weapons. Official sources say that wagons loaded with weapons have recently reached 70 Clifton.’

  It is normal practice for Chief Minister Abdullah Shah’s dogs to kidnap visitors coming to, or going from, 70 Clifton and subject them to vicious torture in undisclosed locations (eight days ago my private secretary was kidnapped, along with my driver and car, from outside my house. Only yesterday we were able to trace them to the CIA4 centre in Saddar. Both the driver and secretary were barely alive).

  How wagons loaded with we
apons can get past the combined dragnet of a dozen federal and provincial agencies that have laid permanent siege to 70 Clifton is best left to Mr Adil’s galloping imagination. But let me here, for the sake of posterity, set the record straight. Actually, one summer’s evening Altaf Hussain and I met at the edge of a forest and sat down under the shade of a large banyan tree. We, both Mir and Pir [a religious mystic in Urdu and used here as a sign of the MQM’s devotion to their leader], were in a melancholy mood. The following conversation transpired:

  Altaf: You speak of the rights of Sindh and I of the rights of Muhajirs. Why don’t we cooperate?

  Murtaza: No problem. I can see your logic.

  A: You know, things are getting hot in District Central. RPGs just won’t do any more. We need tanks.

  M: You are talking to the right man. I have several of them in my basement at 70 Clifton. They are the latest in high-tech and are left-hand drive. When can I gift-wrap them for you so that you can escalate your chauvinist Muhajir agenda effectively?

  A: No, no. I don’t want those kinds of tanks. You Sindhi feudals live in large houses that have big basements. I am from the middle class and have a modest house. I want a small tank.

  M: Think small, want small. Look, I am sorry I can’t help you there. I don’t deal in Suzuki-class tanks. I only have Main Battle Tanks.