Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (15 page)

The PPP’s 1970 election manifesto took a strong stand against Ayub’s unilateral policies, maintaining that Pakistan had been ‘made use of as a pawn in the international game by the neo-colonialist allies’
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and that the only way to create an independent Pakistan would be to leave its existing international alliances. Foreign policy and Pakistan’s sovereignty made up the introduction to the manifesto and while there were similarities between the document and the PPP’s earlier tract,
Foundation and Policy
, which set out to define the scope of the new party, such as the strong sense of solidarity with Muslim peoples the world over and with fellow Third World nations, there were some key additions.

Zulfikar, while writing the manifesto with his colleagues, translated his vision of bilateralism more clearly than he had previously. He was the lone voice in Pakistan calling for the nation to leave the British Commonwealth which, in his estimation, had ‘lost any meaning it might have had at one time’ by serving colonial interests and taking the side of the United States in its war against Vietnam.
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Zulfikar did not see Pakistan’s relationship with the Commonwealth as beneficial to Pakistan and enunciated this in his party’s manifesto, stating that Pakistan would only engage in relations based on reciprocity and mutuality of interests. (Under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s presidency, Pakistan voluntarily withdrew from the Commonwealth in 1972. Pakistan voluntarily rejoined the Commonwealth in 1989, under the premiership of Zulfikar’s daughter, Benazir.)

The first ever general election held in Pakistan, on the principle of one man, one vote, took place on 3 December 1970. Twenty-three political parties contested 291 seats in the National Assembly, putting up a total of 1,237 candidates. Three hundred and ninety-one candidates ran as independents.
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The results were predictably divided; the
Awami League took East Pakistan and the PPP won the majority of seats in the West, sweeping Punjab and Sindh. East Pakistan, however, made up 56 per cent of Pakistan’s population and so the balance hung in the Awami League’s favour. However, any constitutional settlement hinged on the two parties reaching an agreement to share power, which would leave Mujib with East Pakistan and Zulfikar with the West and General Yahya Khan in charge of the military.

Mujib wanted the constitution to be framed by his party, allowing him to form the government, while Zulfikar was not comfortable with the army’s assurances that the PPP would be given as equal a hand as the Awami League in the proceedings. Effectively, promising power and position to both parties, the army played the two men against each other and ensured that no harmonious settlement was reached. After decades of Western hegemony over the country, the army – based in Western Punjab – had no interest in handing over power to its compatriots in the East. However, it was equally reluctant to allow the socialist Zulfikar to translate his party’s victory into government. On 1 March 1971, the National Assembly proceedings were postponed and General Yahya Khan dissolved his civilian cabinet. The army vetoed the proposed coalition government and the Awami League’s opportunity to form a national government was over. Riots broke out across East Pakistan. The bloodletting began.

In East Pakistan a campaign of civil disobedience was undertaken by Bengalis refusing to pay taxes and wilfully ignoring the radio and press censorship enforced by the military.
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On the other side of the world, Murtaza, now at Harvard, discovered that he was being watched by the US State Department. His father, not yet the head of the country, did not have enough power to merit having his son followed at college. There were death threats made against young Murtaza, from Bengali quarters, and the State Department began to take them seriously. Eventually, Zulfikar was notified that his son’s life was in danger and security was arranged, aided by the Iranians, who sent over some young-looking agents to watch over the former Foreign Minister’s son. Two of Murtaza’s Harvard roommates, Peter Santin and Bill White, remember finding out about Mir’s precarious situation much later.
He had downplayed it in order not to worry them. When I asked both former roommates about the incident years later, they pursed their lips and said little. It was a sensitive topic. An Iranian agent followed Murtaza around college, eating Chinese food with the students and playing cards with them in their dorm for a time. They couldn’t escape Mir’s Iranian shadow then, and were reluctant to discuss him with me. It was too uncomfortable a topic.

The military, unsurprisingly, reacted with brute force to the rumblings in East Pakistan, most notably by sending General Tikka Khan, a soldier known for his eager use of force, to act as the military’s chief authority in the province. General Tikka Khan, a graduate of the Dehra Dun school and a Second World War officer who fought on the Burmese and Italian fronts under the banner of the Raj, enjoyed an infamous reputation. He was nicknamed the ‘butcher of Balochistan’ for his role in quelling the province’s secessionist unrest in the early 1960s. He would soon add ‘butcher of Bengal’ to his CV.

By 25 March 1971 talks between Bhutto, Yahya and Mujib had stalled and the military put into effect an emergency plan: within the next twenty-four hours Mujib was arrested, the Awami League banned and a cessation of all political activities throughout Pakistan enforced.
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At midnight, General Tikka Khan led the assault on Dhaka University and various other points in the city’s old quarters. Thousands were killed. Pakistan was plunged into a bloody civil war as the East Pakistan Rifles, a paramilitary group, mutinied and joined the rebels fighting to take East Pakistan. The army countered the insurgency by mounting a fierce offensive against the Bengalis. Within six months, on top of thousands dead and wounded, a refugee population of approximately 10 million had been created, with thousands fleeing across the border into India.

The violence of the conflict was staggering. Reports from East Pakistan placed the number of civilian casualties in the millions, citing figures of around 3 million killed. Pakistani officials, via the ludicrous Hamood-ur-Rehman commission – whose pages were edited by the army and whose full copy no one has yet seen – insisted the number was closer to some 30,000, a mere by-product of the war. International figures,
treading lightly, estimated around 200,000 dead on the Eastern front. While the numbers differ, there is no dispute regarding the sheer force used by the Pakistani Army against civilians, most notably women.

In her moving and disturbing work,
Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape
Susan Brownmiller claims that some 400,000 women were raped by the Pakistani Army as a tactic of war. The women were singled out in an effort to destabilize and stigmatize the Bengali people. Brownmiller recounts the story of a thirteen-year-old girl, Khadiga, from Dhaka with shocking effect.

Khadiga . . . was walking to school with four other girls when they were kidnapped by a gang of Pakistani soldiers. All five were put in a military brothel in Mohammedpur and held captive for six months until the end of the war. Khadiga was regularly abused by two men a day; others, she said, had to service ten men daily . . . At first, Khadiga said, the soldiers tied a gag around her mouth to keep her from screaming. As months wore on and the captive’s spirit was broken, the soldiers devised a simple quid pro quo. They withheld the daily ration of food until the girls had submitted to the full quota.

In addition to reports of sanctioned violence towards women, there were charges levelled against the Pakistani Army for its use of violence towards intellectuals, academics and minorities, Hindus specifically. Word had spread to Karachi that the Pakistani Army, having killed 200 intellectuals in Dhaka, was planning to carry out the same kind of massacre in Sindh to quell inconvenient questions of their brutality in the civil war. Abdul Waheed Katpar, the Sindhi lawyer who worked with Zulfikar early on his career, was present when the news reached the ears of the People’s Party chairman. I asked Katpar if he meant to say that Zulfikar believed the rumour that the army was planning to massacre Sindhi intellectuals. ‘Yes!’ replied Katpar ardently. ‘They don’t believe in anything, these
Khakis.’
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Zulfikar picked up the phone and called General Gul Hasan, the corp commander of Sindh. ‘He was furious,’ remembers Katpar. ‘He told him, “I’m hearing you’re
killing intellectuals in the East. If you bring this vicious tactic to Sindh, I’ll be your second Mujib and rise up against you!”’

The Hamood-ur-Rehman commission, headed by the Chief Justice of Pakistan, denied any wrongdoing on the part of the Pakistani armed forces and deflected blame for the war away from the army. Similarly, Sarmila Bose, an Indian Harvard-educated professor and granddaughter of the nationalist leader Sarat Chandra Bose, made ripples in 2005 when she claimed that Bangladeshi allegations of mass rape and religious targeting committed by the Pakistani Army were greatly exaggerated for the new country’s political purposes.

While the Pakistani Army has always denied that rape was used as a means of fighting the East Pakistanis, the occurrence of rape during the war was so commonplace that Mujib ultimately coined a term for victims,
Birangona
or heroines, and attempted to honour the rape survivors after the war had ended, a miscalculated initiative that only further shamed and alienated the women survivors among their communities and families.

As the civil war spread across the borders of Pakistan, India began to play a dangerously flirtatious role with East Pakistan. By the end of March, the Indian parliament had passed several resolutions in support of the ‘people of Bengal’, a term no one had used internationally at that point, still referring to East Pakistanis as Pakistani citizens. As Bengali nationalists and secessionists engaged in their own acts of violence against Pakistan, Pakistan closed its high commission in Calcutta and India shut its own consulate in Dhaka.

By the summer of 1971, the Mukti Bahini, a Bengali liberation army, began to receive training and equipment from India.
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As India continued funding and instructing the East Pakistani secessionists, reports began to surface of increased border shelling between the two countries. On 29 November 1971 the provisional government of Bangladesh was announced, just one week after General Yahya instituted a state of emergency and told his countrymen to prepare for an all-out war. As the year drew to a close, it was not only inevitable that Pakistan would be broken into two, but also that war with India was once again on the horizon.

On 3 December, the Pakistani Air Force struck Northern Indian military targets. The escalation in border shelling had reached its peak and this time India reacted with its full military might. By

4 December, India had launched an air, ground and naval attack into East Pakistan, converging on Dhaka. Two days after their spectacular invasion, the Indians had all but taken over East Pakistan, tightened their grip around the soon to be capital city of Dhaka and recognized the provisional government. The Indian government violated a tenuous peace between the two countries and continued to violate Pakistan’s sovereignty by securing its hold on Dhaka.

It was in the early weeks of December that Zulfikar was sent by General Yahya Khan to plead Pakistan’s case at the United Nations Security Council. It was on the 15th of the month, after the UN had ruled in Bangladesh’s favour by supporting its claim to independence, that Zulfikar angrily declared, ‘So what if Dhaka falls? So what if the whole of East Pakistan falls? So what if the whole of West Pakistan falls? We will build a new Pakistan. We will build a better Pakistan . . . We will fight for a hundred years.’ Zulfikar had felt from the start, leaving aside his respect for Mujib as a compatriot, that the Awami League’s Six Point programme would divide the new and fragile country. Now, disgusted with the proceedings at the Security Council, Zulfikar ripped up his papers and walked out, angry and frustrated. ‘My country hearkens for me, why should I waste my time here in the Security Council?’

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n 16 December, Pakistani forces surrendered and the following day a ceasefire was put into effect. Yahya Khan resigned his position four days later and Zulfikar, having just left New York, flew to Islamabad to assume the presidency.

In 1972, Zulfikar and the People’s Party took direct control of the government and worked to bring the party’s vision of socialism and Third World solidarity to the national stage. Having played a mediatory role in Nixon’s détente with China, Zulfikar visited Beijing shortly after the famous trip in February 1972. He was received graciously by China; in order to ease Pakistan’s transition back to life after its harrowing civil war, the Chinese government agreed to write off some of its earlier loans to Pakistan, totalling $110 million.
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Several months later, in the spring of that year, China sent Pakistan sixty Mi-G fighter jets and one hundred T-54 and T-59 tanks as part of the new $300 million economic and military assistance package negotiated during the President’s earlier visit.

Diplomatically buoyed by Zulfikar’s new socialist leadership, China supported Pakistan wholeheartedly. It used its United Nations veto to keep Bangladesh out of the international body, refusing to recognize the new state as a legitimate sovereign nation. In fact, China did not recognize Bangladesh until October 1975, long after Pakistan had extended its recognition, which it did in February 1974. China also refused to exchange ambassadors with India until it had fully restored diplomatic relations with Pakistan in the summer of 1976.

It was also reported that China, a nuclear state since 1964, had exported nuclear aid to Pakistan, whose nuclear programme was
started by Zulfikar in 1972. A 1977 report by the United States Arms Control Disarmament Agency concluded that ‘China had assisted Pakistan in developing nuclear explosives’ and had also provided Pakistan with highly enriched uranium (HEU) as part of its nuclear assistance programme.
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