Crawling from the Wreckage (13 page)

I got to know Benazir Bhutto a bit in the mid-1970s, when she had finished her degree at Harvard and was doing graduate work at Oxford. She actually spent much of her time in London, in a grand flat just off Hyde Park, and if you knew a lot of people in town who took an interest in Middle Eastern and subcontinental affairs—I had been studying at the School of Oriental and African Studies—and you weren’t too old or too boring, you were likely to end up at her flat once in a while, at what some would call a salon but I would call a party.

A fairly decorous party as those things went in seventies London, to be sure, with everybody showing off their sophisticated knowledge of the region’s politics and nobody getting out of hand, but definitely a party.
The hostess was well informed and quite clever, and she obviously had money coming out of her ears. We knew her dad had been prime minister of Pakistan before Zia overthrew him, of course, but she was neither a serious scholar nor a budding politician.

She seemed more American than Pakistani in her style and attitudes, but beneath the Radcliffe and Harvard veneer she also seemed like thousands of other young upper-class women from Pakistan and India floating around London at the time. They called one another by girlish nicknames like “Bubbles,” didn’t take anything very seriously (including their studies), and seemed destined for a life of idle privilege.

Then Benazir Bhutto went back to Pakistan in 1977, just about the time that Zia sentenced her father to death in a rigged trial. He was hanged in 1979, and Benazir was thrown into jail for five years. When she came out after Zia died, she was already the head of the party her father had founded, the Pakistan People’s Party, and by 1988, she was prime minister. She was only thirty-five.

She was prime minister twice, from 1988 to 1990 and from 1993 to 1996, and was removed from power both times on corruption charges. The charges have never been proven in court, but the evidence of kickbacks and commissions, especially to her husband, Asif Zardari, whom she foolishly made investment minister, is pretty overwhelming. The real problem, however, was that she never seemed to have any goal in politics, apart from vindicating her father by leading his party back to power. At the start, she was hugely popular, but she wasted her opportunity to make real changes in Pakistan because she had no notion (beyond the usual rhetoric) of what a better Pakistan would look like. Pakistan is already pretty good for her sort of people, so it should not surprise us that there was almost nothing to show for her years in office.

If she had become prime minister again, which was a quite likely outcome of the current crisis, there is no reason to believe that she would have done any better this time. Her assassination just makes it harder to solve the crisis at all.

Benazir Bhutto’s party, the Pakistan People’s Party, has no alternative leader with national visibility. The other major opposition party leader, Nawaz Sharif, is equally compromised by his past failures, and is currently planning to boycott the elections scheduled for January 8. Ex-general Pervez Musharraf, who had himself “re-elected” president
in October and then imposed emergency rule in order to dismiss the Supreme Court judges who would have ruled his “election” illegal, is totally discredited and unlikely to last much longer. The most probable outcome is a new period of military rule under a different ruler, simply for lack of a good alternative.

It is pathetic that a country the size of Pakistan should have so few inspiring or even promising candidates for high political office. The vast majority of the politicians and of the people who run almost everything else in Pakistan apart from the armed forces, are drawn from the 3 or 4 percent of the population who constitute the country’s traditional elite. It is a very shallow pool of talent, made up of people who have a big stake in the status quo and a huge sense of entitlement.

Look east to India, west to Iran, or north to China, and by comparison Pakistan’s political demography is absolutely feudal. So long as that remains the case, it is absurd to imagine that democracy will solve Pakistan’s problems. I admired Benazir Bhutto’s courage and I am very sorry that she was killed, but she could never have been Pakistan’s saviour.

In the end, they made Benazir Bhutto’s son the head of the Pakistan People’s Party and put her husband, Asif Zardari, in the presidency. Whether this is just an interlude before “a new period of military rule” remains to be seen
.

The greatest mistakes are made on the morrow of the greatest victories. Sri Lanka is now approaching a decisive victory in its twenty-six-year war against Tamil separatism, and it is about to make a very big mistake.

“While separatist terrorism must be eradicated,” wrote Lasantha Wickrematunge, editor of the
Sunday Leader
, “it is important to address the root causes of terrorism, and urge government to view Sri Lanka’s ethnic strife in the context of history and not through the telescope of terrorism. We have agitated against state terrorism in the so-called war against terror, and made no secret of our horror that Sri Lanka is the only country in the world routinely to bomb its own citizens.”

Wickrematunge left that on his computer, to be published if he was murdered, which he duly was last month. He knew it was going to happen, and he believed that he knew who would be responsible: the government. This is why he addressed President Mahinda Rajapaksa directly in his post-mortem article. (It was the first time that most of Wickrematunge’s readers learned that he and the president had been close friends for a quarter-century. In fact, they regularly met late at night at the president’s house, alone or with a few other old friends.)

“In the wake of my death,” Wickrematunge wrote, “I know you [President Rajapaksa] will make all the usual sanctimonious noises … but like all the inquiries you have ordered in the past, nothing will come of this one. For truth be told, we both know who will be behind my death, but dare not call his name. [Almost certainly Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the president’s brother.] Not just my life but yours too depends on it.”

Like the United States under President Bush, Sri Lanka has ceased to respect the law in its fight against “terrorism.” Since the Tamil minority began fighting for a separate state in 1983, over seventy thousand people have been killed in Sri Lanka, the majority of them civilians—and since President Rajapaksa took power in 2004, fourteen journalists have been murdered by unknown assailants.

Rajapaksa is now on the brink of destroying the rebel army, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Tamil Tigers). Even one year ago, they still controlled some fifteen thousand square kilometres in the north and northeast of the island, where they maintained all the institutions of a sovereign state, but the relentless offensive of the Sri Lankan army has now reduced them to only a couple of hundred square kilometres of territory.

Within a week or two that will be gone too, and what remains of the Tamil Tigers will no longer control a pseudo-state. Good riddance, for they were brutal extremists who killed their own Tamil people in order to enforce unquestioning obedience, just as readily as their suicide bombers killed the majority Sinhalese population. But that doesn’t mean Sri Lanka can just go back to the kind of country it was before the fighting began in 1983. The Tamils had a reason to revolt.

Tamil-speaking Hindus have been part of Sri Lanka’s complex ethnic and religious mosaic for centuries, but they are only 12 percent of the population. They got along well enough with the Sinhalese-speaking,
Buddhist majority when the island was first united under British imperial rule in the early nineteenth century, but after that the relationship went rapidly downhill.

The British, in typical divide-and-rule style, favoured the Tamil minority in education and in civil-service jobs. Sinhalese resentment grew rapidly, and the first Sinhalese-Tamil riots were in 1939. As in the subsequent bouts of killing, most of the victims were Tamils.

Once independence arrived in 1948, the Sinhalese used their majority to pass laws giving members of their own community preference for university entrance and government jobs, and Sinhala was declared the sole national language. As Sinhalese and Tamil ethnic nationalism grew more extreme, some of the riots in the 1960s and 1970s verged on anti-Tamil pogroms.

By the late 1970s, the process of setting up a shadow Tamil state in the north and northeast had begun. Open war broke out in 1983, with the Tamil Tigers rapidly eliminating the rival Tamil separatist groups and establishing totalitarian control over the population under their rule.

Twenty-six years later, the Tamil Tigers’ army has finally been crushed, and the Sri Lankan state (in practice, the Sinhalese state) is triumphant. But the 12 percent of the population who are Tamils will still not accept unequal status, and they are not going away.

This is the time when a peace that gives the Tamils equal rights and autonomous local governments in the areas where they are a majority could secure the country’s future, but it is most unlikely to happen.

Sinhalese nationalism is as intolerant as ever, and now it is triumphalist to boot. Moreover, the rapid growth of a “national security state” under President Rajapaksa has undermined democracy and largely silenced criticism of government policies. The forecast, therefore, is for a reversion to guerrilla war in the north, and continuing campaigns of murder by both the government and Tamil extremists in the rest of the country.

In the afterglow of victory, Rajapaksa quickly called and won presidential and parliamentary elections. Sarath Fonseka, the general who commanded the Sri Lankan army in the final campaign, and who subsequently used his fame to enter politics and run against Rajapaksa for the presidency, is in jail facing court martial for “military offences.” So far, there has been no return to guerrilla war and terrorism
.

If a Shakespeare should ever arise in Bangladesh, he would have plenty of tragedies around which to weave his history plays. The country is only thirty-eight years old, but the vendettas between the leading families, the murders and plots and coups, have been just as tangled and bloody as the ones in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England that gave the great playwright so much of his material.

That kind of history may be coming to an end in Bangladesh, but it’s not dead yet. Last February, at least four thousand soldiers serving in the Bangladesh Rifles, a border defence regiment, mutinied and began killing their officers. Fifty-seven officers and seventeen other people were murdered by the mutineers, who dumped the bodies in sewers and an army-run incinerator. The violence spread to military camps all over Bangladesh.

The mutineers said that they were revolting against poor pay, but many people suspected that there was a political motive behind it all. If there was, it failed. The rest of the army remained loyal, tanks surrounded the regiment’s various camps, and the government promised to look into the rebels’ complaints if they surrendered.

That was a lie, of course: they were all arrested. The first nine soldiers went on trial for mutiny before a military court on November 24 and more than 3,500 others will follow in various military cantonments around the country, while several hundred more will be tried before civilian courts for murder, rape and looting.

This is not the kind of blood-spattered Shakespearean ending that Bangladeshis have become much too familiar with. The trials may even answer the question of whether there was a political motive behind the military uprising. But suppose there was. What could it have been?

Another high-profile court case in Bangladesh in the past month might provide a clue. On November 19 the Supreme Court confirmed the death sentences for twelve former military officers who took part in the 1975 assassination of Bangladesh’s founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The five ex-officers who are actually in custody, and whose final appeal was rejected, now face imminent execution for their crime of thirty-four years ago.

Few countries have had a bloodier birth than Bangladesh. For a quarter-century after the partition of India in 1947, it was just the eastern wing of Pakistan, a country split in two parts that had a great deal of Indian territory between them. But the two parts never got along, and when what is now Bangladesh tried to leave Pakistan in 1971, it got very ugly.

The Pakistan army killed up to three million people in rebel “East Pakistan” before an Indian military intervention forced it to withdraw. East Pakistan then became the independent country of Bangladesh, and the country’s nationalist political leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (who had spent the war in jail in West Pakistan), came home to lead it.

Mujib, as he was known, was an autocratic man, and by 1975 he had closed down all the opposition papers and declared himself president for life. But he did not deserve what happened to him and his family.

In the early hours of August 15, 1975, a group of young officers stormed Mujib’s house and killed everybody in it, including his wife, his three sons (one was only nine years old) and his servants. Twenty people in all. Only his two daughters, who were abroad at the time, survived. One of them, Sheikh Hasina, is now the prime minister. (I told you it was Shakespearean.)

The young officers who murdered Mujib were overthrown by a different group within months, and another coup removed that bunch before the end of the year. Eventually power ended up in the hands of General Ziaur Rahman, who was also murdered by fellow officers in 1981. His widow, Khaleda Zia, has been prime minister three times, and still leads the main opposition party.

General Zia was not involved in the murder of Mujib, but he did end up allied to the people who had killed him: officers who detested Mujib’s secularism and who, in some cases, had helped the Pakistani army slaughter their own people during the independence war. They killed Zia, too, in the end, but that does not stop Zia’s widow and Mujib’s daughter from hating each other.