Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (43 page)

Benazir’s government ended with a whimper, not a bang. The ethnic and sectarian violence that would cloud her second term in power, with allegations of widespread human rights abuses, had its roots in her party’s first term in office. 1989 saw tensions between ethnic Muhajirs, those who had crossed over from India at the time of Partition, and Sindhis come to a head with ‘an escalation of unexplained shooting incidents in Karachi’.
¹³
Even the Sindhi Prime Minister herself was forced to admit that the spiralling violence in her home province was out of control, calling it a ‘mini-insurgency’.
¹⁴

In a letter to his mother, Murtaza raised the concerns that had been creating ripples of anger in the party. ‘On the telephone I threatened to write a long letter,’ Murtaza started. ‘However, I will try my best to keep it short. I am sorry that the content is a bit grim, but I believe it is at least worth a mention. In Clifton recently two dedicated PSF [Pakistan Students Federation, the student wing of the PPP] boys were killed by police under the guise of ‘anti dacoit operations’. Other staunch party loyalists who were active and/or imprisoned during Zia’s years are now back in prison. We are receiving word that many are now being tortured again.’ Murtaza spends the next page listing the names of those suffering at the hands of Benazir’s police system; the list goes from Hyderabad to Thatta to Karachi and onto various other cities in the province. The grievances then continued: ‘Kausar Ali Shah [not yet a PPP parliamentarian] who in Kabul conspired with the Afghan rebels to have Shah and me killed, has been made Managing Director of the National Construction Company. Saifullah Khalid meanwhile continues to face abuse and humiliation because despite having his body and mind broken in torture camps, he refused to implicate you or Pinky in Zia’s false cases. I hear Pinky says he is “burnt” and “must be disposed of”, at least agree to see his father and try to help his brothers.’

Murtaza’s letter is written in red ink, not the kind he used normally but it adds a measure of urgency.

Two other boys, from Punjab, Javed Iqbal
¹⁵
and Mohd Yousef were horribly tortured during Zia’s years. Till the end they said ‘We are Bhuttoists and will remain so no matter what you do to us.’ In 1983 a team of army psychologists interviewed them to determine how the PPP could so effectively ‘brainwash’ its cadres that under the severest torture they did not break. These two ‘case studies’ of loyalty to Bhutto Shaheed are still in prison in Lahore. Isn’t that a shame? I am sure you have many other problems to confront but I also believe we have a moral obligation to redress these ones too.
¹⁶

Murtaza ended the letter with love to his mother and sister and on the back of the page he taped a clipping from a Pakistani newspaper reporting on the silencing of the independent press by Benazir’s government’s, adding, ‘P.S. I thought you may like to see this.’

Meanwhile Benazir and the coterie that surrounded her were busy making as much out of Pakistan as they could. There was no room for matters of domestic politics. The PPP had been fully opened to the remnants of Zia’s regime. Mahmood Haroon, whose signature was on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s death warrant, was appointed the Governor of Sindh; Nisar Khuro, who publicly demanded that Zulfikar be ‘hanged first and tried later’, was made the head of the party in Sindh, and various other floaters from Zia’s cabinet and inner circle had been given party tickets.

Benazir reversed many of her father’s programmes, easily and openly. She asked the Commonwealth to allow Pakistan back, oblivious to Zulfikar’s principled decision in leaving the British-run organization; she scrapped the ceilings on land holdings set in place by Zulfikar’s land reforms, thereby safeguarding the feudal system her father had been taking steps to roll back; and she began the process of privatizing the industries that her father had nationalized and made sure that the lion’s share was never far from her hands. The Naudero sugar mill built by Zulfikar for the people was privatized by Benazir and bought by Anwar Majid, a businessman and Zardari’s frontman for many years. The Shadadkot textile mill, also part of Zulfikar’s people-owned Sindh-based industries, was snapped up by Nadir Magsi, a member of Benazir’s PPP, the party that had built and nationalized these very mills for the province’s poor. The list of mills bought by the first couple’s stand-ins is long and embarrassing; suffice it to say the list continues to grow to this very day. Zardari’s crooked business chums along with petty small-time thieves he happened to know also found space for themselves within the inner sanctum of the PPP. It was said that they made millions, money taken under the table, and that kickbacks were ceremoniously given back to the first couple, earning Zardari the nickname Mr Ten Per Cent.

Internationally, the government carried on Zia’s policies
unamended. The Afghan adventure continued, aided and abetted by the Intelligence agencies, as did Pakistan’s nuclear programme. Iqbal Akhund, one of Benazir’s foreign affairs advisors and a career diplomat who watched Benazir’s government first hand, summed up the PPP’s foreign policy perfectly: ‘On Afghanistan, Kashmir and India the government was faced with very complex and thorny issues but the decision making in all these had been taken over by the army and the intelligence agencies in Zia’s time, and there, in the ultimate analysis, it remained.’
¹⁷

As Prime Minister, Benazir made the decision to cover her head with a white
dupatta
. She was the first member of our family to wear a
hijab.
Her father, so progressive that he shunned traditional Sindhi dictates of
purdah
, the system of keeping one’s womenfolk at home and behind closed doors so no unrelated male might eye them, and broke barriers by taking his wife and daughters to public gatherings along with his sons, never considered the headscarf necessary for public approval. Fatima Jinnah, the sister and companion of the nation’s founder, fought elections against General Ayub Khan in the 1960s and she, an unmarried woman, never covered her hair. Benazir’s choice was the first of its kind; not even her mother Nusrat covered her hair; it was a choice designed to keep the Islamic parties and leaders, like Maulana Fazlul Rehman’s Jamiat e Ulema Islami – a constant election ally – on her side. Islam was an accessory at times and at others, it seems, an ideology. Benazir did not suspend the Hudood Ordinances, that called for women who commit adultery or engage in premarital sex to be put to death; nor did she enhance women’s rights in any official way. In a two-year period, the Pakistan People’s Party government led by Benazir did not introduce any meaningful legislation. Nothing was changed, no institutions strengthened. At the start of August 1990, in the days of Zulfikar’s birth, Benazir Bhutto was sacked by President Ghulam Ishaq Khan on the grounds of massive corruption and the failure to control ethnic violence in Sindh.
¹⁸
According to the historian Ian Talbot, ‘The Bhutto government had comprehensively failed to live up to expectations during its twenty months in office.’
¹⁹

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16
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M
urtaza was overjoyed at the birth of a son. He called him Zulfi, borrowing his father’s nickname, and privately fretted over what he’d call him when he wanted to scold him – how could he yell his father’s name? In the family we called him Junior. He was a gorgeous baby. He never cried, never made a fuss, ate plenty and was exactly the companion I had been longing for. Zulfi would follow me around the house, copying me and acting like I had split the atom. As he got older, and I sterner, Mummy would intervene when I reprimanded him, only to be told, quite seriously, by Zulfi, ‘Mummy, let Fati be. She’s doing it for my own good.’ I’d never felt so protective of anyone, not even Papa, until we had Zulfi.

Papa was nostalgic and uninspired when he imagined his life for ever caught in the comfortable malaise of the Middle East. One afternoon, we drove a short way outside the city limits to eat lunch at the Ebla Hotel, for once cheating on the Sheraton. It was early spring. The weather was warm, but not yet dry and arid as the summers in Damascus become. On our way to our table in the garden, we walked past the Ebla’s large swimming pool and I saw a mischevious look in Papa’s eyes. I could feel his excitement as we rounded the corner of the pool; he wanted to push me in. I had been dressed up by Mummy, wearing nice shoes and little earrings that I was quite proud of. Papa was looking elegant, as always. My friend Nora was with us and I wasn’t in the mood for Papa’s jolly hysterics. ‘Don’t,’ I warned him as we made our way to lunch. He held himself back, but only just, and we enjoyed a perfectly forgettable lunch.

As we walked back towards the car park and passed by the pool, I was lost in earnest discussion with Nora. ‘
Fati!
Look!’ Papa yelled, confusing me long enough for him to pick me up and hurl me into the water. I hit the ice-cold spring water with a loud splash and almost scraped my chin on the side of the pool in an attempt to avoid being totally subermerged. After touching the bottom of the deep end with my toes I swam back up and angrily pulled myself out of the pool. Papa was bent over in laughter. Mummy was shaking her head at his shenanigans, thankful that he had spared her. Nora was giggling along with Papa. I was on the verge of tears. ‘You can’t do that to me again!’ I shouted through clenched teeth, ‘Not ever again!’ Papa was still laughing his whispery
khe khe khe
laugh and stopped only to say, ‘Oh come on!’ and wave his hand at me. ‘No!’ I yelled ‘You can’t.’ I thought for a minute, aware that this was what Papa and I did – we joked around, we pulled pranks, we were the only ones who enjoyed these silly sorts of games. ‘You can’t, not until I’m fourteen at least. Then you can throw me in a pool again. But not until then.’ I was nine years old. Fourteen seemed like a lifetime away. Papa’s laughter petered out and he surprised me by saying softly, ‘But Fatushki, what if I’m not alive then?’

I burst into tears. Here I was trying to reach a compromise, banning pool dunkings till the reasonable age of fourteen, and there was Papa talking about his death. I bawled and bawled. He sat me down on his lap, soaking wet and ruining his silk suit, hugging me and rocking me back and forth. He didn’t take it back. He didn’t say he was just kidding. He just wiped my eyes.

In between my tears, I shouted at my father. ‘Fourteen isn’t far. Of course you’ll be alive. You have to live till I’m a hundred!’ I wiped my nose on his shoulder. Papa kissed me and continued to rock me. ‘I hope so,’ he said.

Back in Pakistan, Benazir was now in opposition. She reprinted her stationery to signal her new posting as head of the largest party opposed
to the government and set about planning her political return. Dr Ghulam Hussain was summoned to meet his former political student, who was, in late
1990
, in a good mood.

‘She asked me what I thought the difference had been between her government and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s,’ he says. ‘I told her, “Leave it.” But she insisted, she was feeling quite jolly. So I told her. “In front of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto we party workers were afraid to lie – we were punished for it greatly. In front of you,” I said, “we are afraid to tell the truth.”’
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Dr Hussain is an emotional man. His eyes welled up as he spoke to me in the living room of his Islamabad home. ‘I was called to the party’s Central Committee meeting once, as the ex-Secretary-General, and I saw all these new sycophants there around the table. I told her, in front of them, “Benazir
sahiba
, your people are selling employment tenders, are you aware of that?” And she replied, “Oh doctor, you’re from an old time. This is a new age, we have to keep up with Nawaz Sharif”’ – Benazir’s one-time arch enemy/soon to be best friend, and Zia’s protégé who led the Pakistan Muslim League. ‘“He has tons of money,”’ she helpfully added, by way of explaining her party’s dubious financial tactics.

‘“But Benazir
sahiba
,” I told her,’ Dr Hussain says, having now forgone his tears for anger, his voice rising, ‘“You think you can buy credibility? You can’t! How much will it cost?”’ Dr Hussain doesn’t mince his words, but still, I’m amazed that he spoke to her like that. That she tolerated his questioning of her leadership. It was never easy to do, but Dr Hussain’s seniority afforded him his right to speak, and he continued, before the doors were closed on him for good. ‘“In my village,”’ Dr Hussain shouts, as if with my notebook and pen before him I suddenly represent Benazir, ‘“there used to be no electricity, no schools.” I told her, “If you were born in my village, you wouldn’t have got past primary school. We earned this right to criticize and we fought to speak openly. You only inherited it.”’