‘A leading human rights watchdog says it has received “credible reports of numerous extrajudicial killings and reprisals carried out by security forces”,’ the BBC reported, noting that twenty-two bodies were discovered buried in the Surat valley, bringing the total of mysterious deaths in the month of August 2009 to 150.26 Some were blindfolded, some were bound. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has demanded the state launch an inquiry into the killings in Swat, but so far nothing has been done.27
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T his was the Karachi of my youth. This was the city we loved and feared. In the winter of 1994, we would experience the full brutality of Karachi’s police force first-hand for the first, but not the last, time.
It happened out of the blue, towards the end of December 1994. Karachi’s temperature had dropped a few degrees. A soft breeze was coming in from the Arabian Sea, the only sign of a change in seasons during an otherwise warm and temperate winter. Joonam was returning from the Karachi Special Courts where Murtaza’s court cases continued to be heard. He often had to appear before the judge lest his bail be revoked, but sometimes it was sufficient for his lawyers to be present and Joonam often went along to make sure everything was in order. She was accompanied by Ali Hingoro, one of Papa’s top workers who had been an important activist in the ranks of the PPP since Zulfikar’s arrest. It was Ali who had taken charge of Papa’s election campaign alongside Joonam and Mummy; he was a diehard PPP activist.
As they pulled out of the courts, turning on to the main road, Joonam’s car was stopped by a police van. Policemen ran towards our car, opened the door of the old brown Mercedes, grabbed Ali by his arms and dragged him out of the car. They took him away without an arrest warrant and without informing him what charges they were acting upon. All that was said was that he was being detained on the orders of the Chief Minister, Abdullah Shah. This was not the first time that my father’s workers had been harassed by the Chief Minister; he had made mention of several instances in his otherwise humorous letter to the Friday Times not long before.
Joonam got out of the car and tried to intercede. She placed herself between the officers holding Ali and their mobile unit and demanded to see the official papers ordering his arrest. There are no papers, the police said brusquely, we have orders. Ali was taken, illegally – without warrant – to Karachi’s Central Jail. That was the last time Joonam saw him alive.
Ali Hingoro had been a life-long supporter of the PPP and the Bhutto family. Growing up in Sindh, he had been a sporty child, bringing home trophies from football matches. But soon politics consumed his life and he would bring home a different sort of accolade. He joined the MRD movement after Zulfikar’s execution – by that time already fired up by the PPP manifesto and the politics of confronting the military junta, Ali became known as one of the MRD’s most committed grassroots activists. Nusrat, his brother Usman remembers, used to keep the gates of 70 Clifton – as opposed to 71 Clifton, the family’s office – open for Ali and would leave the door of the downstairs annexe unlocked, for Ali to use as an office.1
In 1986, when Benazir returned to Karachi, it was Ali who organized the massive reception that greeted her at Jinnah Airport. A sea of hundreds of thousands carried Benazir to Lyari, Ali’s community, where she rode on top of the truck that Ali had arranged and built to her security specifications, standing alongside her the whole time to make sure no harm came to her. ‘Yeh mera subse acha bhai hai,’ she told the jubilant crowd that day. ‘Yeh Ali bhai hai.’ This is my favourite brother, she said. My favourite brother is Ali bhai (the honorific for brother).
In jail, Ali’s health began to deteriorate. His family believes he was tortured on a daily basis. He had been in fine health before his detention, they say, but within weeks of being imprisoned he began to waste away. Usman, Ali’s brother, believes he was being poisoned; the superintendent of Karachi’s Central Jail at the time was a close acquaintance of Asif Zardari. The Hingoro family has always held the current President and the then first spouse responsible for what happened to Ali. Ali was being beaten, humiliated, given false confessions to sign implicating Murtaza in some terror plot or other, and pressured to hold a press conference and denounce Murtaza before publicly deserting him. He refused. He said no.
‘Mir baba told him to do what they said,’ Usman remembers. ‘He sent Ali messages – do what they want. Denounce me, hold the press conference. Your life is too precious for us to lose.’2 But still, Ali refused.
The then Chief Justice of Sindh, Justice Nasir Aslam Zahid, a respected judge who now works with the Women’s and Juvenile’s Jails in Karachi, ordered Ali Hingoro to be released when his case of illegal arrest and detention came before the courts. Justice Aslam Zahid concluded that Ali was bekasool, innocent. So naturally the case was shifted out of his court. A new judge took the case and sat on it. ‘We kept fighting to have Ali released on medical grounds,’ Usman says, adding quietly, ‘but nothing.’3
Papa was frantic. He had been the only non-Muhajir politician to condemn the government’s extrajudicial killings in Sindh. He knew what Ali was up against and it frightened him. He wrote urgently to several justices, asking them to consider the illegality of Ali’s detention. He contacted Amnesty International and sent information to other human rights groups, including Ali’s family’s allegations of torture.
On 26 March Papa wrote Ali a letter. ‘You are a brave and honourable young man. For me there is no difference between you and my brother Shahnawaz. Allah is the final judge and we seek justice from his court. Your tormentors too will have to face that court.’ He signed the letter ‘Your brother, Murtaza Bhutto’.4 Before his death, Ali was sent to Jinnah Hospital’s prisoners’ wing. He was told that if Murtaza Bhutto came to see him, he’d be carted right back to jail and left to die there.
Eventually, Ali was shifted to Agha Khan Hospital, which had better medical facilities. He was near the end of his life and asked Murtaza to come and see him. Papa went under the cover of night on 27 April. Our car drove through one of the hospital’s numerous gates, with Papa hidden from view crouching on the back seat. He entered the ward by the back doors and walked quietly up the stairs to reach Ali’s deathbed. Usman was there at the time. ‘We left them alone,’ he recalls. ‘Ali was in a near coma and it was very difficult for him to speak, but we could see from the window that he was trying to talk to Mir baba. Both of them cried.’5 Papa was with Ali for more than an hour.
At 6.30 the next morning, Ali died. ‘He was waiting for Mir baba,’ Usman says. That day, we had plans to drive to Karachi’s Hawksbay Beach, an hour from 70 Clifton. Mummy and Papa had arranged a lunch for some diplomats who had become new friends – including the Dutch and British consuls – and we were preparing our things in the morning when we got the news. Papa came into the bedroom, shaken. ‘The bastards, they killed him,’ he told Mummy. Ali’s only crime had been his refusal to denounce Murtaza Bhutto. That was it; that was what his life had hinged on at the end.
We all got into the car, leaving Zulfi at home because he was too small to accompany us to the funeral, and drove straight to Ali’s family home in Lyari. Papa went to the men’s section and Mummy and I to the women’s. Ali’s mother, I remember, was on the floor next to a stretch of white fabric, weeping. ‘They killed my child,’ she kept saying, over and over again, her arms around the cloth. As we drew closer to her, I saw that it was Ali’s body shrouded in his burial kaffan that she was holding on to. It was the first time I had been so close to a corpse. The second time would come soon.
Across Pakistan the tide was turning. Stories of the state’s bloody Operation Clean-Up were spreading far beyond Karachi, creating fears of a civil war and of the secession of Karachi from Sindh. This was a menacing threat from the MQM and it would result in Pakistan being cut off from its economic and commercial lifeline. But it wasn’t simply violence that had begun to rock the foundations of Benazir’s second government; stories of the first couple’s corruption had resurfaced.
In his seminal article ‘House of Graft’, the New York Times reporter John Burns exposed the Zardaris’ corruption. They bought a huge estate in England, nicknamed Surrey Palace, for approximately $4 million. The couple later denied it was theirs, even though the British authorities returned to Pakistan various artefacts from the house such as plates bearing inscriptions that suggested that they had been gifts to the first couple.6 When an English court issued a notice to sell the house and return the proceeds of the sale to the government of Pakistan, Zardari demanded that the proceeds be returned to him as the rightful owner.
In 1994 and 1995, Burns alleged, Zardari spent more than half a million dollars at Cartier and Bulgari jewellery stores.7 But it wasn’t just shopping; the couple were also embroiled in kickbacks and high-level government deals. In 1995, a French military contractor signed a deal to pay Zardari and a business associate $200 million for a billion-dollar fighter jet deal that never reached fruition.8
During a state trip to Syria during Benazir’s first government and while we were still in exile there, Zardari had gone so far as to ask Papa to facilitate a deal he was considering in the Middle East, offering him a cut of the profits. Papa was sickened; he had never liked his sister’s husband. His corruption and the stories of his excess reached Papa’s ears often and it hurt him that such a man would use Zulfikar’s name and memory to bilk investors the globe over of millions. He was further annoyed that Zardari, hapless when it came to any understanding of what Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s legacy meant, would be so crooked as to assume that the son of a martyr, who had been struggling in exile for over a decade at that point and who had never compromised on his beliefs, would jump at the sound of a cut in a Zardari deal. ‘We don’t do that, Zardari,’ Papa said furiously.
In another deal, made just weeks after Benazir took the oath as Prime Minister for the second time, her Swiss banker set up an offshore company called Capricorn Trading with Zardari as its principal owner.‘Nine months later,’ according to the Burns article, ‘an account was opened at the Dubai offices of Citibank in the name of Capricorn Trading. The same day, a Citibank deposit slip for the account shows a deposit of $5 million paid by ARY, a Pakistani bullion trading company based in Dubai.’ Two weeks later, ARY, which at the time was known for producing gaudy gold necklace pendants in heart shapes, deposited another payment of $5 million into the account.9
The corruption allegations kept piling up. A deal for Polish tractors was made with considerable kickbacks and properties were bought in Spain. An Oil for Food deal was drawn up with Saddam Hussain’s Iraq, in exchange for a $2 million payoff. According to a BBC investigation led by Owen Bennet Jones and aired in October 2007, a UAE-based front company called Petroline FZC – either listing Benazir as its chairman or including her as a director (along with one of her nephews and another close political advisor), depending on differing documents, including papers with Benazir’s signature and a photocopy of her passport (‘Occupation: former Prime Minister’) which Bennet Jones claims to have seen during the course of the BBC investigation – was caught in the Oil for Food scandal. An independent inquiry committee established by the United Nations and chaired by the former head of the US Federal Reserves, Paul Volker, found that Petroline received a contract for $145 million worth of Iraqi oil after a $2 million kickback was paid to Saddam’s regime.10
As Benazir’s former press secretary, Hussain Haqqani said of his one-time boss, ‘She no longer made the distinction between the Bhuttos and Pakistan . . . In her mind, she was Pakistan, so she could do as she pleased.’11 Haqqani is now, in a typically ironic twist, Zardari’s ambassador to Washington.
But the case that finally brought the couple down was the SGS/Cotecna case in which the Zardaris were convicted by Swiss courts of receiving an approximate $15 million pay-off in return for awarding a government customs contract to a Swiss company. The 2007 BBC investigation followed the trial that led to the damning Swiss conviction.
Sometime in the summer of 1997, while Zardari was in prison for a second time, jailed on a fresh round of corruption and murder cases, Benazir went shopping in London. At a jeweller’s on Bond Street she bought a sapphire and diamond jewellery set costing $190,000. A year later the necklace – the most extravagant item of the set – was seized by a Swiss magistrate, Daniel Devaud. An investigation into the money that was used to pay for the jewellery was launched, involving thousands of pages of bank documents, receipts and paper trails. After six years and exhaustive research on the part of the Swiss magistrate, Benazir and her husband were found guilty of money laundering and receiving kickbacks while she was Prime Minister, a portion of which went towards the hefty price of the Bond Street jewellery. Devaud found that Benazir and Zardari were equally culpable of corruption; Benazir controlled the bank account used to buy the jewels and husband and wife shared fifty-fifty control over the bank account used to receive kickbacks. Devaud’s 2003 verdict was scathing: ‘Benazir Bhutto knew she was acting in a criminally reprehensible manner by abusing her role in order to obtain for herself and for her husband considerable sums in the interest of her family at the cost of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.’12 It was not just Benazir and Zardari who were convicted by the Swiss courts; various lawyers, random friends and relations, and most shockingly Nusrat, who shared bank accounts with her daughter from the days of Zia’s dictatorship when they needed to hold each other’s power of attorney, were also dragged into the fray. The former first couple were ordered to repay approximately $11.9 million in kickbacks to the Pakistani government, hand over the Bond Street necklace to the state, and spend 180 days in prison.
The couple launched an appeal against the conviction, but the damage to their reputation was done. Even though Benazir’s 2007 negotiations with the dictator General Musharraf eventually resulted in the passing of a bill called the National Reconciliation Ordinance which wiped clean twenty years’ worth of corruption cases against politicians, bureaucrats and bankers, and shelved the SGS/Cotecna case in the Swiss courts, she responded to the allegations by saying, ‘I mean, what is poor and what is rich? If you mean, am I rich by
European standards, do I have a billion dollars, or even a hundred million dollars, even half that, no, I do not. But if you mean that I’m ordinary rich, yes.’13 In 2009, after becoming President, Zardari would publicly declare his personal fortune to be around $1.8 billion. A fraction of what he and his wife are reputed to have stolen from Pakistan.
Politically, Benazir’s government had meddled with the judiciary, filling the courts with judges sympathetic to the party and sacking those who ruled unfavourably against the state. She had been exposed for her government’s policy of creating ‘ghost schools’. Schools were opened with funds provided by foreign NGOs or rich foreign governments, PPP officials would cut school ribbons to declare open the hundredth school in the scheme but would not bother to equip the schools with desks, books, teachers or, for that matter, students. Incompetence was rife and people in Pakistan were beginning to react.
After a year of travelling across Pakistan, speaking to local press clubs, answering his critics in parliament and writing regular articles in both Urdu and English newspapers, Murtaza had shown that he was a different breed of Pakistani politician. He had not returned to Pakistan with the assumption that after sixteen years of exile the Bhutto mantle was his for the taking. He had returned as a member of the provincial assembly, the first rung on the political ladder, aware that he had a lot to prove before he rose any further.
After Murtaza’s hard work and the growing evidence that Benazir’s second government was failing, people began to turn towards him – even those who had initially dismissed him as inexperienced and untested. Writing on the anniversary of Zulfikar’s death, 4 April, a columnist wrote, ‘To call Benazir the heir apparent of Bhutto is the h
eight of absurdity. Mir Murtaza is without any doubt the only heir apparent . . . [but] it is she who inherited her father’s legacy. The question really is: what has she made of that legacy?’14 The conclusion was damning and it echoed the sentiments being voiced in newspapers and drawing rooms across the country.
Papa spent the winter of 1994 working on a paper that presented his political programme and included his remedy for the political ills which had destroyed the PPP. It became a family endeavour of sorts.
Having Papa finally at home with us for long stretches of time as he worked on the paper, we banded together as a family and relished our time alone. We would sit with Papa as he wrote in the downstairs drawing room. He would sit in his usual green armchair, writing by hand while four-year-old Zulfi, already a budding artist, sketched and I curled up on the long blue sofa reading. When the paper was ready, Mummy sat at the computer with Papa and they typed it up together. The paper, ‘New Direction: Reforms in the PPP and Pakistani Society’, was printed in 1994 and would serve as the manifesto for the political party he was preparing to launch.
The preface, written a month before the paper was printed, is passionate and heated.
Shaheed Bhutto’s slogan was ‘roti, kapra aur makan’ (food, clothing, and housing), but the slogan of the highly corrupt and disreputable coterie who have hijacked the party and are in full control of it seems to be ‘loot, plunder, steal’ . . . they use political power not in the service of the people but rather to dispense favours to a selected few, to enjoy the grandeur of the corridors of power at the taxpayers’ expense, to use the police as a private army against opponents who dare to raise a voice of dissent and above all to feather their nests.
Songs of Blood and Sword Page 38