Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (35 page)

In 1982, around the time they were both due to become fathers, Murtaza and Shahnawaz re-evaluated the activities of their organization. ‘Most of our work from then on,’ Suhail confirms, ‘was centred around helping to foment resistance to the regime within Pakistan. We had become a sort of headquarters for those disaffected with the regime, a refuge or gathering place for Pakistan’s poor political activists who suffered the lion’s share of the junta’s political brutality.’
⁴

Murtaza was working at the time on transmitting radio programmes into Pakistan from Kabul. He had been gathering accounts of life under the dictatorship, of human rights abuses and political malfeasance, and was putting together a series of programmes while trying to sort out the logistics of broadcasting across the border. Increasingly, the brothers had different roles. Murtaza, it seemed, was eager to get back to fighting the regime through diplomatic means. Shahnawaz, meanwhile, spent most of his time with the organization’s cadres, focusing on security and military training. He was still angry and wanted to inflict the maximum damage on the dictatorship. ‘After their father was murdered, Shah looked to his older brother as a father figure,’ Suhail says, trying to explain their dynamic. ‘They complemented each other, they really did. You have to give credit to Shah – he opted for this life. He gave up everything to come to Kabul, to work in the
organization, he felt duty-bound to help his brother in this insurmountable struggle.’
⁵

Back home in Pakistan, the movement to unseat Zia ul Haq was faltering. The MRD launched a campaign of civil disobedience in 1983, which was strong in Sindh but failed to take root in other provinces, except perhaps Balochistan. Unlike Gandhi’s acts of civil disobedience, the MRD drive in 1983 was not entirely peaceful. There were strikes and shut-downs, but they were accompanied by significant acts of violence. Agitation in Larkana, Sukkar, Jacobabad and Khairpur in Sindh was so fierce that the Governor of Sindh was forced to admit that in the first three weeks of the unrest the government had 1,999 people arrested, 189 killed and 126 injured.
⁶

But cracks surfaced fairly soon within the movement itself. The Sindh leadership of the MRD felt that their provincial counterparts didn’t do enough to fight the regime, even though thousands of Punjabis had been jailed by the junta, while the Punjabi leadership felt that Zulfikar’s young and inexperienced daughter Benazir had hijacked the movement as a personal vehicle for her political ambition. The MRD was not strong enough to overcome its internal strife. The movement backfired, destroying the resistance movement at large, in two crucial ways.

The success of the civil disobedience movement in Sindh but not in the Punjab enhanced the politics of regionalism and ‘deepened the cleavage between the two provinces’
⁷
, a dangerous harbinger of provincial discord that would last for many years to come. More importantly, by agitating solely about democracy and the necessity of elections, but not addressing the ethics of military rule and the political oppression and human rights violations of the regime, by 1983 the MRD had convinced General Zia that steps had to be taken to publicly legitimize his rule once and for all.

In December 1984, Zia held a referendum on his Islamization programme, linking the referendum to his right to remain in power. The question placed before the voters was insideously worded: ‘If you agree that Islamic laws be brought in in conformity with the Koran, then say YES. If the results of the referendum are positive it will mean
that you approve of General Zia ul Haq continuing as President for another five years.’
⁸
The referendum produced a ludicrously inflated 98 per cent
⁹
approval rating for the President and his policies. The MRD, afraid of upsetting the religious parties, did not campaign against the Islamization programme but decided simply to boycott the vote, a pointless exercise.

With the ‘support’ of the people behind him, Zia called for elections in early 1985, which in turn created the plausible façade of a new civilian order and effectively legitimized the General’s rule. The MRD boycotted the elections and put itself out of the running. It had failed to dislodge the dictator and had pushed Zia in the right direction – he had taken it up on its suggestion and had begun to ‘democratize’.

By the time the new government took power, Zia allowed the head of the MRD and newly appointed chairperson of the PPP, Benazir, to return to Pakistan from self-imposed exile in the UK. Benazir had taken a leave of absence from Pakistan. Her brothers, living in Kabul, disagreed with her choice. They weren’t given the option of taking sabbaticals and re-energizing, but she had taken their father’s death badly and had suffered ear infections under house arrest so they acquiesced and said nothing when she went to London. There was, however, a tremendous amount of friction over Benazir and her position at the centre of the MRD’s and PPP’s politics. Her takeover of her father’s party was not subject to a party vote but was carried out unilaterally by Benazir herself, with her bereaved mother Nusrat as the symbolic head of the party. Nana, Della’s sister, told me over dinner in Mykonos that she understood there was tension over Benazir’s ambition, even at this early stage. ‘There was friction between Mir and her. He loved her; he stepped aside for her. He said to us once, “She wants to be the political heir, so OK, I’ll move aside.”’
¹⁰

The advisors to the new Prime Minister, Junejo, had in fact, pushed him to allow Benazir back into the country telling him and General Zia that ‘Benazir was more a threat to the MRD than to the government’.
¹¹
The advisors proved to be right. By 1985 the MRD was politically deflated; not only had it failed to unify the varied resistance
movements, but it had broken them. Unwittingly, by constantly insisting on the importance of democratic government, but not tackling the abuses of the military regime or the incompatibility of the armed forces and an egalitarian system of rule, the MRD had given Zia the tools to strengthen his hold on power and neutralise the opposition to his junta. Democracy, after all, has always just been a word, a catch-phrase or election slogan – not a style of governance – in Pakistan.

By the time I was born, my father and uncle had decided to leave Kabul and the process of packing up had started. In the summer of 1982 it had become clear that the Bhutto brothers could no longer remain in Afghanistan. The fallout from the hijacking and the independence Murtaza and Shahnawaz exercised in marrying locals and expanding their activities meant that they lost the support of their hosts.

‘We noticed that the Afghan authorities had started hindering our communications with Pakistan,’ Suhail concludes, ‘which was the very reason we were in Afghanistan to begin with – to be close to Pakistan. Our travel papers were being held up by official delays, we were living in an official government residence, being guarded by their security, using their driver, and things had become tense. We told them, “Your own situation has become difficult, so we’ll go and return when things settle down.” They were upset because we were choosing to leave and they understood that we were doing so on a protest note.’
¹²
But there was no animosity in their farewell. Nooristani, who had chiefly dealt with Murtaza, was sad to see him and Shah go but didn’t try to stop them.

The hundred or so people who had joined the brothers in Kabul began to pack up their lives and prepare to be resettled under the protection of a new state. It was decided that Libya would be the next port of call. ‘In those days, Libya was a hub for political dissidents,’ Suhail remembers. ‘Palestinians, Bangladeshis, Filipinos, you name it
– any spot in the world that suffered some kind of conflict or the other had nationals living in Tripoli.’
¹³
Murtaza travelled first to Libya to speak with President Gaddafi, who had been an ally to the Bhutto family during Zulfikar’s arrest. Suhail accompanied him on the trip and together they decided that while Murtaza and his family would settle in Damascus, Suhail and Shahnawaz would look after the organization in Tripoli.

Shahnawaz would look after the base as he had done in Afghanistan; he had become the most comfortable with the work. He had built a rapport with the many men who came to find a place in the struggle against the dictatorship back home and busied himself training the young cadres in military and security techniques. Murtaza, as the elder brother and the head of the organization, was the diplomat. He had spent his years writing, negotiating and trying to influence Pakistan’s standing in the world through various projects – including the documentary that he had started while living in London. Suhail opted to stay with Shahnawaz, who moved to Tripoli with his wife shortly after their daughter Sassi was born. By January 1983, Suhail’s wife Kamar and two sons, Bilal and Ali, had joined him in Libya. They would, however, barely last three months in northern Africa.

‘It was the worst experience,’ Suhail says. ‘Kabul was a lively city, frankly speaking, but everything in Libya was upside down.’
¹⁴
He wobbles his hand as if to illuminate how topsy-turvy life in Libya felt. ‘The leadership, Gaddafi, was very sympathetic to us, very kind and very welcoming, but there was no structure in place, it was too sensitive.’ With their families, Shah and Suhail lived in separate villas at the Shati Andalous Hotel near the sea. When I tell Suhail that their new digs sound picturesque, imagining the Libya I’ve seen in travel magazines, he sighs and smiles. ‘Communication with the outside world was completely cut off, there were no newspapers because of the government’s strict censorship, we couldn’t understand anything on TV since it was all in Arabic. We were totally in the dark, we felt stranded. It was too bureaucratic.’ He pauses and then adds, as an afterthought, ‘It was also a
dry
country.’

It’s strange to me that Libya would seem such an unattractive
choice after living in war-torn Kabul, but Shah and Suhail couldn’t stand living there. ‘They ran a strange economy,’ Suhail continued, keen to convince me how miserable they had been in Tripoli. ‘You couldn’t always find staples like eggs or cigarettes in the market. When, once in a blue moon, they’d turn up at the supermarket you’d see people walking out with eight or ten cartons of eggs at a time. It was really strange.’ But they had changed too, these young men. They had seen their dreams of a Che Guevara-style resistance movement fail, they had seen their efforts, romantic but misguided, used against them. They had been swallowed up by negative public opinion. Years earlier they had been lauded as heroic young men trying to fight the abrogation of a constitution and now they had become simplified – they were called terrorists, derided as landless fighters. ‘We don’t want a medal for what we did,’ Suhail says, ‘but we were at the frontline of resistance to Zia. We weren’t lobbying State Department officials in Washington or attending luncheons in London. We spent our lives struggling.’
¹⁵

Eventually, it was decided that Shah and Suhail would join Murtaza in Syria. All three men had families now. They were no longer rebels alone in the hills. They had schools to consider and nappies to change. They spent a sleepy two years in Syria attending to the banalities of family life. The fuel that ran the resistance movement in Pakistan had run out, compromised by the political incompetence of the MRD. Journalists were tired of fighting a regime that showed no signs of weakening, aided as it was by American money and support. Students gave up their stone throwing and went back to classes, eager to earn degrees that would get them out of Pakistan. Writers who had made their names through subversive plays and articles had bills to pay. The same was true for Al Zulfikar. It existed, but only in spirit.

The brothers raised their families and did their best to pursue normal lives as the guests of President Hafez al Assad, the lion of Damascus. But, towards the end of 1984, the tedium of life as a wandering exile began to affect Shahnawaz. He started to feel frustrated. He was only twenty-six years old and had a young wife and a two-year-old daughter. He had always been the most free-spirited
member of the family. It couldn’t have been easy for Shah to adapt to living as a political refugee in a claustrophobic South Asian enclave, three families stuck on top of one another. It probably wasn’t fair to him either. He considered the idea of moving, of settling in Europe for a while and giving his family a small chance of freedom. It was to France, near where Shah had studied as a college student, that he wanted to go.

‘When it came to Shah,’ Suhail says, ‘Murtaza always treated him like his beloved younger brother. He adored him. So when Shah spoke about leaving, Mir must have put his feelings aside about the danger of being in Europe to allow Shah to make the move.’
¹⁶
Suhail’s voice is tight and he drags hard on his cigarette. I sense that he might not be talking for Murtaza when he speaks, obviously upset about Shah’s decision to move to France. I push. Why was it a bad choice? Why was France more dangerous than the other countries the brothers had been living in? Suhail puts out his cigarette, and looks straight at me. ‘The mistake was moving to France. Absolutely. In Afghanistan the brothers were guarded, they were protected. In Damascus too. But in France Shah was living out in the open. He was exposed. Once the brothers had made the decision to fight the junta, once they went to Afghanistan to struggle against the dictatorship, they were marked men.’
¹⁷