Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (54 page)

Hasnain and Zaidi witnessed a doctor at Jinnah Hospital, one of Karachi’s two main emergency hospitals known for dealing with police cases, conduct four autopsies in twenty-five minutes.
²¹
Post-mortems of police victims were conducted ‘with scant regard for the facts’. Often, victims’ bodies were not brought to medical facilities until hours after their murder, allowing the corpses to decompose and forensic evidence to be destroyed. There was often no effort to conduct proper medical examinations on the victims; ‘the MLOs (Medical Legal Officers) usually just make an incision on the chest and then sew it up to give the impression that a post-mortem has been done.’
²²
A gruesome photograph accompanies the authors’ assertions.

The
Herald
journalists, digging further into the role of the medical community, uncovered more distressing facts: out of the fifty-five MLOs and eight assistant police surgeons in Karachi at the time of Operation Clean-Up, not a single one was trained in forensic pathology – a basic requirement of doctors performing post-mortems.
²³
The nine doctors in the Sindh Health Department with forensic training, and therefore qualified to conduct autopsies in Karachi’s bloody 1990s, did not have sufficient
safarish
or political connections to land themselves a well-paid MLO posting. In addition, Karachi’s only forensic laboratory at the time – with a staff of over a hundred people – did not have a single forensics expert on its staff.
²⁴

Close to 3,000 people would be killed on the streets of Karachi before Operation Clean-Up was declared successfully completed. These are, of course, the official numbers – they are the numbers of the body bags that had names on them, of the corpses who had relatives to identify and retrieve them for burial. There must be others, unnamed and unclaimed victims of the state’s war on their citizens. People told me there were parts of Karachi, in Korangi and places like it, where bodies were left to rot out in the open, serving as gruesome warnings.

Naeem Sharri’s bloodied face appears on the cover of the
Herald
’s issue on Operation Clean-Up. He was, at the time the magazine went to print, the state’s latest and most notorious victim. Sharri was a
wanted man, one of MQM’s most feared figures; he was accused of numerous counts of murder among many other crimes and had a price of 5 million rupees on his head. On 11 March 1996 Sharri and a companion were killed in a police encounter. The Rangers at the helm of the operation claimed that the two men had resisted arrest and fired at them – a standard excuse – and that the Rangers had to fire back to protect themselves, resulting in a deadly gun battle during which four Rangers were injured. However, in the course of their investigation the
Herald
journalists uncovered a more sinister reality. The Rangers, alleged Hasnain and Zaidi, were hit by ‘their own highpowered bullets ricocheting off surrounding walls’ while Sharri and his companion were killed in a premeditated manner.
²⁵
No evidence matched the Rangers claim of crossfire and photographs of Sharri’s body, showed that the skin on his torso and arms had been scorched off, with the flesh on the left side of his body torn off his bones. He had not died as a result of a simple gun battle.

Sharri and his associate were, by all accounts, hardened thugs and ruthless criminals. That is not in dispute. But even hardened thugs have the basic right to a trial, and deserve the right to defend themselves before a court of law. Friends of my aunt and her supporters in general attacked me when I wrote about Operation Clean-Up in Pakistani newspapers or brought up Benazir’s dismal human rights record. ‘You don’t know,’ they would say condescendingly, ‘they were monsters.’ ‘This is what we should be doing in Swat now,’ they would urge. ‘We need more Clean-Ups.’ The government is currently doing exactly that.

‘A leading human rights watchdog says it has received “credible reports of numerous extrajudicial killings and reprisals carried out by security forces”,’ the BBC reported, noting that twenty-two bodies were discovered buried in the Surat valley, bringing the total of mysterious deaths in the month of August 2009 to 150.
²⁶
Some were blindfolded, some were bound. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has demanded the state launch an inquiry into the killings in Swat, but so far nothing has been done.
²⁷

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21
}

T
his was the Karachi of my youth. This was the city we loved and feared. In the winter of 1994, we would experience the full brutality of Karachi’s police force first-hand for the first, but not the last, time.

It happened out of the blue, towards the end of December 1994. Karachi’s temperature had dropped a few degrees. A soft breeze was coming in from the Arabian Sea, the only sign of a change in seasons during an otherwise warm and temperate winter. Joonam was returning from the Karachi Special Courts where Murtaza’s court cases continued to be heard. He often had to appear before the judge lest his bail be revoked, but sometimes it was sufficient for his lawyers to be present and Joonam often went along to make sure everything was in order. She was accompanied by Ali Hingoro, one of Papa’s top workers who had been an important activist in the ranks of the PPP since Zulfikar’s arrest. It was Ali who had taken charge of Papa’s election campaign alongside Joonam and Mummy; he was a diehard PPP activist.

As they pulled out of the courts, turning on to the main road, Joonam’s car was stopped by a police van. Policemen ran towards our car, opened the door of the old brown Mercedes, grabbed Ali by his arms and dragged him out of the car. They took him away without an arrest warrant and without informing him what charges they were acting upon. All that was said was that he was being detained on the orders of the Chief Minister, Abdullah Shah. This was not the first time that my father’s workers had been harassed by the Chief Minister; he had made mention of several instances in his otherwise humorous letter to the
Friday Times
not long before.

Joonam got out of the car and tried to intercede. She placed herself between the officers holding Ali and their mobile unit and demanded to see the official papers ordering his arrest. There are no papers, the police said brusquely, we have orders. Ali was taken, illegally – without warrant – to Karachi’s Central Jail. That was the last time Joonam saw him alive.

Ali Hingoro had been a life-long supporter of the PPP and the Bhutto family. Growing up in Sindh, he had been a sporty child, bringing home trophies from football matches. But soon politics consumed his life and he would bring home a different sort of accolade. He joined the MRD movement after Zulfikar’s execution – by that time already fired up by the PPP manifesto and the politics of confronting the military junta, Ali became known as one of the MRD’s most committed grassroots activists. Nusrat, his brother Usman remembers, used to keep the gates of 70 Clifton – as opposed to 71 Clifton, the family’s office – open for Ali and would leave the door of the downstairs annexe unlocked, for Ali to use as an office.
¹

In 1986, when Benazir returned to Karachi, it was Ali who organized the massive reception that greeted her at Jinnah Airport. A sea of hundreds of thousands carried Benazir to Lyari, Ali’s community, where she rode on top of the truck that Ali had arranged and built to her security specifications, standing alongside her the whole time to make sure no harm came to her. ‘
Yeh mera subse acha bhai hai
,’ she told the jubilant crowd that day. ‘
Yeh Ali bhai hai
.’ This is my favourite brother, she said. My favourite brother is
Ali bhai
(the honorific for brother).

In jail, Ali’s health began to deteriorate. His family believes he was tortured on a daily basis. He had been in fine health before his detention, they say, but within weeks of being imprisoned he began to waste away. Usman, Ali’s brother, believes he was being poisoned; the superintendent of Karachi’s Central Jail at the time was a close acquaintance of Asif Zardari. The Hingoro family has always held the current
President and the then first spouse responsible for what happened to Ali. Ali was being beaten, humiliated, given false confessions to sign implicating Murtaza in some terror plot or other, and pressured to hold a press conference and denounce Murtaza before publicly deserting him. He refused. He said no.

‘Mir
baba
told him to do what they said,’ Usman remembers. ‘He sent Ali messages – do what they want. Denounce me, hold the press conference. Your life is too precious for us to lose.’
²
But still, Ali refused.

The then Chief Justice of Sindh, Justice Nasir Aslam Zahid, a respected judge who now works with the Women’s and Juvenile’s Jails in Karachi, ordered Ali Hingoro to be released when his case of illegal arrest and detention came before the courts. Justice Aslam Zahid concluded that Ali was
bekasool
, innocent. So naturally the case was shifted out of his court. A new judge took the case and sat on it. ‘We kept fighting to have Ali released on medical grounds,’ Usman says, adding quietly, ‘but nothing.’
³

Papa was frantic. He had been the only non-Muhajir politician to condemn the government’s extrajudicial killings in Sindh. He knew what Ali was up against and it frightened him. He wrote urgently to several justices, asking them to consider the illegality of Ali’s detention. He contacted Amnesty International and sent information to other human rights groups, including Ali’s family’s allegations of torture.

On 26 March Papa wrote Ali a letter. ‘You are a brave and honourable young man. For me there is no difference between you and my brother Shahnawaz. Allah is the final judge and we seek justice from his court. Your tormentors too will have to face that court.’ He signed the letter ‘Your brother, Murtaza Bhutto’.
⁴
Before his death, Ali was sent to Jinnah Hospital’s prisoners’ wing. He was told that if Murtaza Bhutto came to see him, he’d be carted right back to jail and left to die there.

Eventually, Ali was shifted to Agha Khan Hospital, which had better medical facilities. He was near the end of his life and asked Murtaza to come and see him. Papa went under the cover of night on 27 April. Our car drove through one of the hospital’s numerous
gates, with Papa hidden from view crouching on the back seat. He entered the ward by the back doors and walked quietly up the stairs to reach Ali’s deathbed. Usman was there at the time. ‘We left them alone,’ he recalls. ‘Ali was in a near coma and it was very difficult for him to speak, but we could see from the window that he was trying to talk to Mir
baba
. Both of them cried.’
⁵
Papa was with Ali for more than an hour.

At 6.30 the next morning, Ali died. ‘He was waiting for Mir
baba
,’ Usman says. That day, we had plans to drive to Karachi’s Hawksbay Beach, an hour from 70 Clifton. Mummy and Papa had arranged a lunch for some diplomats who had become new friends – including the Dutch and British consuls – and we were preparing our things in the morning when we got the news. Papa came into the bedroom, shaken. ‘The bastards, they killed him,’ he told Mummy. Ali’s only crime had been his refusal to denounce Murtaza Bhutto. That was it; that was what his life had hinged on at the end.

We all got into the car, leaving Zulfi at home because he was too small to accompany us to the funeral, and drove straight to Ali’s family home in Lyari. Papa went to the men’s section and Mummy and I to the women’s. Ali’s mother, I remember, was on the floor next to a stretch of white fabric, weeping. ‘They killed my child,’ she kept saying, over and over again, her arms around the cloth. As we drew closer to her, I saw that it was Ali’s body shrouded in his burial
kaffan
that she was holding on to. It was the first time I had been so close to a corpse. The second time would come soon.

Across Pakistan the tide was turning. Stories of the state’s bloody Operation Clean-Up were spreading far beyond Karachi, creating fears of a civil war and of the secession of Karachi from Sindh. This was a menacing threat from the MQM and it would result in Pakistan being cut off from its economic and commercial lifeline. But it wasn’t simply violence that had begun to rock the foundations of Benazir’s second government; stories of the first couple’s corruption had resurfaced.