Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (40 page)

The Sheraton was the only serious hotel in town. The Cham kept its pool open for longer, but you couldn’t beat the Sheraton for quality in those days. The hotel was tiled in beige and black and boasted the best food in town, for us foreigners at least. But that day I was determined not to eat a bite of my lunch, taking refuge in my illness. I was always ill as a young child, suffering fevers and flus all the time; I caught any bug that was going around. I was a terrible eater anyway, and picked at my food if it wasn’t dessert. It annoyed my father and the only time he became cross with me was when it came to food. I would refuse to eat and he would force-feed me. That didn’t work for long because I would always manage to throw up the meal. I couldn’t be goaded into eating, and tricks and games never worked – I saw through them. That day, Papa threatened to send me to Fowzia if I didn’t eat. Ghinwa heard him and thought the threat was mean. I was obviously afraid, but held my ground by snarling at him as I gave in
to his threat. I shovelled some morsels into my mouth, frowning at my father, angry that he had embarrassed me in front of my new friend.

After lunch, Papa had to take me to my doctor, a jolly woman with a white hijab called Dr Lemia Nabulsi. As we sat in the car, Aunty Ghinwa began to sing the letters of the ABC and I joined in. By the time we had reached Jisr al Abiad, or the White Bridge area in central Damascus where the paediatrician was located, I was holding Aunty Ghinwa’s hand. Murtaza and Ghinwa stopped to part at a crossing; she was going to visit Mazan at his office and we were going to the doctor. I held on to Aunty Ghinwa and made to walk away with her. ‘OK, Fati, see you later,’ Papa said, and I realized I had gone the wrong way. I quickly ran over to him and took his hand in mine. ‘I don’t know who I fell in love with first, your father or you,’ Mummy says to me twenty-three years later in Grandpapa’s old closet/living room. ‘It was a love triangle.’

Ghinwa and Murtaza courted for some time, cooking each other dinners, with Murtaza attempting to make Pakistani
chapli kebabs
with ingredients bought in a Syrian supermarket (and not grinding the pomegranate seeds and coriander, thus giving his date an instant stomach ache) and Ghinwa making him overly salty Lebanese food. I was the third wheel on most, if not all, of their dates. After several weeks of seeing each other, Murtaza asked if he could meet Ghinwa’s parents. ‘He was so decent,’ my mother says, remembering how he came to their Muhajirin apartment, which was simply furnished with small mementoes from their house in Beirut. ‘He brought you with him and I introduced him to my parents as Dr Khalid, his Damascene
nom de guerre
. Mir let me finish and then said no, that’s not really my name. I am Mir Murtaza Bhutto, the son of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and told them that I was in safe hands.’ Jiddo, as I called my grandfather in Arabic, was terribly impressed. He was the lone man in a house of five women – all daughters, all loud and difficult. Teta, my grandmother, was more wary. ‘She pretended she couldn’t speak English the first time she met Mir,’ Mummy says, laughing. ‘She was trying to suss him out.’ But they liked me and instantly we formed a bond.

When Papa had to travel I began to stay with Teta Kafia and Jiddo
Abboud. I’m not sure what I called them then, before they were formally my grandparents, but they always embodied some sort of familial warmth. Mummy says I knew just how to catch their attention without calling them anything formalized, but the truth is I’ve always thought of them as my grandparents, never as anything else. Aunty Ghinwa would move my colour TV into the apartment – because they only had a small black and white set – and bring my clothes over along with a certain kind of strawberry milk I drank, as I was such a fussy eater. I’d come straight to the apartment from school and spend the afternoon with Teta eating
zaatar
, the crushed thyme powder and olive oil that always sat on their breakfast table in small glass bowls. I busied myself by helping Teta with the laundry, which only created more work for her to take care of. Once, when Papa was away, I fell ill. I had to have blood tests and take antibiotics to bring my fever down. Exhausted, I started to cry. ‘I want to go home,’ I sobbed to Aunty Ghinwa, who was confused because we had decided to spend the night at our flat since I was ill and wanted my things around me. ‘But you are home,’ she said softly, because she always spoke to me in whispers at night. ‘This isn’t my home. Pakistan is my home,’ I wailed back. I had never even been there.

Pakistan was an ever-present ghost in our house. As was Zia. And Zulfikar. And Shahnawaz. My father and I carried invisible baggage with us, both loved and feared. ‘When we first met, Shah’s death kept cropping up. I didn’t know how much it affected Mir though, till a year later when Sassi’s name came up and I saw your father cry. It was one of the only two times I saw him cry. He told me after that that he didn’t want me to think he was taking me for granted, that he hadn’t asked me to marry him because it was too soon after his brother’s death – two years later by then – and that when the time was right we’d get married.’

On 17 August 1988, General Zia ul Haq, accompanied by five generals, including General Akhtar Abdur Rehman, the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff and the former head of the ISI Intelligence agency that fought the Afghan war for the CIA, the American ambassador Arnold Raphel and General Herbert M. Wassom, the head of the US military aid mission to Pakistan, arrived at the Tamewali firing range to watch American MI Abrams tank trials.
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The trials, however, were ‘a fiasco’ with the supertanks missing their targets ten out of ten times.
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There was little to celebrate and the VIP guests were in a grumpy mood. They ate lunch in the officers’ mess and had ice-cream for dessert. General Zia excused himself to say his prayers, which he never missed, and then summoned his companions back to Pak One, the presidential plane that was to fly them back to Islamabad.

Pak One was the aircraft that Al Zulfikar had narrowly missed hitting in 1982, and it had increased its security since then. The American-built Hercules C-130 had a sealed VIP cabin – air-conditioned, no less – to protect its most powerful passenger from assassination attempts.
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In the cockpit was a four-man crew led by Wing Commander Mashood Hassan, along with a co-pilot, navigator and engineer all personally selected by Zia. The crew had flown the plane on exactly the same route the day before to ensure that there would be no hiccoughs on their flight with the President on board.

At 3.46 p.m. Pak One took off from Bahawalpur on schedule. The flight to Islamabad was expected to be smooth and trouble-free. Minutes after take-off, however, Pak One failed to respond to the Bahawalpur Tower Control. ‘At a river eighteen miles from the airport, villagers looking into the sky saw Pak One lurching up and down as if it were on an invisible roller coaster,’ wrote Edward Jay Epstein in his article for
Vanity Fair
a year later. ‘After its third loop it plunged directly towards the desert, burying itself in the soil. Then it exploded and, as the fuel burned, became a ball of fire. All thirty-one persons on board were dead. It was 3.51 p.m.’
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All that was left of General Zia, who had left no section of Pakistani society free from his tyrannical grip on power for ten years, was his jawbone. There were no other remains found at the crash site.

The daytime weather was perfectly clear and sunny and pilot error was quickly ruled out. The rumour circulating at the time was that a box of mangoes had been packed with explosives and placed on board Pak One. People whispered that it was fruit that had finally taken the dictator down.

There were, according to Epstein, ‘no outcries for vengeance, no efforts at counter coups, no real effort to find the assassins. In Pakistan, Zia and Rehman’s names disappeared within days from television, newspapers and other media.’
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The Pakistan Air Force Board of Inquiry said the ‘most probable cause’ of the crash was ‘sabotage’ but stopped short of taking the investigation further.
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In fact a thorough investigation was never carried out. It was standard procedure; once the assassination had been carried out, no records were kept, no archives made. Nothing. Violence was the easiest means of disposing of yet another Pakistani politician, however odious he may have been. The United States National Archives has some 250 pages of documents on the incident, but they remain classified to this day.
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Officially, Al Zulfikar, inactive in the years since Shahnawaz’s murder, was disbanded. I know my father would have loved knowing that AZO was among the many groups whose names popped up in regard to General Zia’s plane crash, but their symbolic resistance to the dictator’s tyranny had ended. Hope, as usual, did not prevail for long.

The General had taken the step of announcing elections for 1988, fully emboldened in his new role as the seemingly ‘democratic’ head of an authoritarian government. He had even begun to conduct secondparty negotiations with Benazir, who was not going to be left out of the power stakes by boycotting the elections like she had done in 1985. It was Benazir’s tremendous luck, something she had always benefited from, that Zia was killed before the elections took place. She had been preparing to be Prime Minister to his President.

Murtaza had spoken to his sister about the party’s decision to engage in power-sharing negotiations with the junta. He had disagreed with her fundamentally on this issue. I remember the conversation. ‘What do you mean “take part”?’ Papa said, almost shouting. ‘You’re willing to be Zia’s Prime Minister?’

I was young, only six years old. We were in Geneva, spending time together as a family early in the summer. Papa was a passionate man, but he was always in control of his emotions. He never yelled, never swore, never overreacted. He always displayed the cool assurance of someone used to winning the argument in the end. We were at lunch eating pizza. The atmosphere grew dark and tense very quickly. Benazir was less calm, but she too had the air of someone used to beating her opponents. ‘I have a plan,’ she said. Papa was enraged. I got worried, I had never seen my father so upset. He started speaking angrily, talking about the dead, about their father, their brother, the many who lost their lives under Zia and the many more who were still suffering. I began to close my eyes and to block out what Papa was saying. I heard him speak of himself as dead. I heard him and shut him out. I stood behind his chair, holding on to the frame, and tried to hug him.

I could never bear to hear my father speak of not being there. Sometimes he would say, ‘When I die . . .’ and I would get angry and fight with him. ‘But everyone dies at some point!’ he would say, laughing to make the issue sound uncomplicated and natural, but I always hated hearing him talk like that. Papa was angry now and he was fighting with the sister he called Pinky, who was about to capitulate to power for the first of many times. ‘I can’t keep sitting on the outside,’ she said. ‘We have to be in government. It’s my chance. I’m not losing it. We can’t keep living like this.’ She mentioned money, making it, and Papa exploded.

He refused to have anything to do with the party’s election campaign. He didn’t advise his mother or sister, he didn’t put forward any candidates, didn’t pledge his support. They spoke once more, Murtaza and Benazir, about the 1988 elections. He was upset that she had given her new husband, Asif Zardari, the party ticket to stand from Lyari, the heart of the People’s Party Power base in Karachi. ‘It’s for the workers, it’s their area, Pinky, how can you put him there?’ he asked her. She became cross and the conversation was over.

To say Asif Zardari had a chequered past is something of a polite understatement. Benazir was in her early thirties before she began to
consider marriage proposals, the first woman in her family to opt for a traditional arranged marriage. She didn’t think it proper that she, who worked daily with men and was about to ascend to the land’s highest post, remain single. And it might be damaging for her reputation. Mummy remembers one conversation in Damascus when Benazir was bemoaning her lack of options – who would marry her, a strong, powerful woman, and agree to take the back seat in the Prime Minister’s busy public life? Alternatively, who was strong enough to hold their own next to her? ‘She considered Yasser Arafat,’ Mummy recalls, unable to stop a smile from spreading across her face. ‘She thought he might be a suitable match.’
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Karachi folklore says that it was Zia’s secretary, Roedad Khan, who suggested to Asif’s mother that he send a proposal to Benazir the year she was arranging her marriage and that Asif’s mother took the idea to Manna, Zulfikar’s sister and only living sibling, who did the rest of the damage. Dr Sikandar Jatoi of Larkana, the Bhuttos’ hometown, snarls at the mention of Zardari’s name, ‘He was a vulgar street boy. Before marriage, who knew him? No one.’
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Suhail is more diplomatic. ‘His father, Hakim Zardari, contested the 1970 elections from Nawabshah’ – a centuries-old town since renamed Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto by order of President Zardari – ‘and joined the PPP. There are rumours, stories that Mr Bhutto didn’t like the man – that he humiliated him and even had him thrashed on occasion – I won’t go into them, but they exist. In Mr Bhutto’s lifetime Hakim left the PPP – or was thrown out, depending on who you believe – and switched sides, joining the National Awami Party, an anti-Bhutto party at the time, as head of the Sindh chapter.’ Suhail, a deliberate and cautious man, clears his throat before continuing. ‘The NAP was part of the alliance that hounded your grandfather and supported the Zia coup by publicly chanting slogans like “Hang Bhutto not once but a hundred times” and “Double the noose around Bhutto’s neck.”’ Hakim was with the NAP at that time and in a prominent position in Sindh. Did he take part in those chants and protests against Zulfikar? I don’t know. The ‘Hang Bhutto a hundred times’ is attributed to him, Suhail reckoned.
‘Of course!’ screamed Dr Sikandar. ‘Hakim was famous for such slogans.’ Mumtaz Bhutto, Zulfikar’s cousin and Chief Minister of Sindh, and keeper of all stories Sindhi, told me he didn’t know which story was true and which wasn’t, ‘but the fact of the matter is, Zulfi certainly didn’t like him. He had no time whatsoever for Zardari.’
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In any case, Hakim Zardari later switched parties again, becoming what is called a
lota
in derogatory politicese. I remember Papa used to call him ‘Hakoo the
Dacu
’ – thief – in his public meetings, a taunt that riled Zardari to no end. But what about Asif, I asked Suhail, what was he known for in the days before he became Mr Benazir Bhutto? ‘Oh, he was unknown,’ Suhail replied casually, ‘though he did have a reputation in Karachi circles as a gatecrasher.’
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