Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (55 page)

Eventually, it would be estimated that during their second stint in power the couple stole somewhere between $2 billion and $3 billion from the Pakistani treasury.

In his seminal article ‘House of Graft’, the
New York Times
reporter John Burns exposed the Zardaris’ corruption. They bought a huge estate in England, nicknamed Surrey Palace, for approximately $4 million. The couple later denied it was theirs, even though the British authorities returned to Pakistan various artefacts from the house such as plates bearing inscriptions that suggested that they had been gifts to the first couple.
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When an English court issued a notice to sell the house and return the proceeds of the sale to the government of Pakistan, Zardari demanded that the proceeds be returned to him as the rightful owner.

In 1994 and 1995, Burns alleged, Zardari spent more than half a million dollars at Cartier and Bulgari jewellery stores.
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But it wasn’t just shopping; the couple were also embroiled in kickbacks and high-level government deals. In 1995, a French military contractor signed a deal to pay Zardari and a business associate $200 million for a billion-dollar fighter jet deal that never reached fruition.
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During a state trip to Syria during Benazir’s first government and while we were still in exile there, Zardari had gone so far as to ask Papa to facilitate a deal he was considering in the Middle East, offering him a cut of the profits. Papa was sickened; he had never liked his sister’s husband. His corruption and the stories of his excess reached Papa’s ears often and it hurt him that such a man would use Zulfikar’s name and memory to bilk investors the globe over of millions. He was further annoyed that Zardari, hapless when it came to any understanding of what Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s legacy meant, would be so crooked as to assume that the son of a martyr, who had been struggling in exile for over a decade at that point and who had never compromised on his beliefs, would jump at the sound of a cut in a Zardari deal. ‘We don’t do that, Zardari,’ Papa said furiously.

In another deal, made just weeks after Benazir took the oath as Prime Minister for the second time, her Swiss banker set up an offshore company called Capricorn Trading with Zardari as its principal owner.
‘Nine months later,’ according to the Burns article, ‘an account was opened at the Dubai offices of Citibank in the name of Capricorn Trading. The same day, a Citibank deposit slip for the account shows a deposit of $5 million paid by ARY, a Pakistani bullion trading company based in Dubai.’ Two weeks later, ARY, which at the time was known for producing gaudy gold necklace pendants in heart shapes, deposited another payment of $5 million into the account.
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The corruption allegations kept piling up. A deal for Polish tractors was made with considerable kickbacks and properties were bought in Spain. An Oil for Food deal was drawn up with Saddam Hussain’s Iraq, in exchange for a $2 million payoff. According to a BBC investigation led by Owen Bennet Jones and aired in October 2007, a UAE-based front company called Petroline FZC – either listing Benazir as its chairman or including her as a director (along with one of her nephews and another close political advisor), depending on differing documents, including papers with Benazir’s signature and a photocopy of her passport (‘Occupation: former Prime Minister’) which Bennet Jones claims to have seen during the course of the BBC investigation – was caught in the Oil for Food scandal. An independent inquiry committee established by the United Nations and chaired by the former head of the US Federal Reserves, Paul Volker, found that Petroline received a contract for $145 million worth of Iraqi oil after a $2 million kickback was paid to Saddam’s regime.
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As Benazir’s former press secretary, Hussain Haqqani said of his one-time boss, ‘She no longer made the distinction between the Bhuttos and Pakistan . . . In her mind, she was Pakistan, so she could do as she pleased.’
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Haqqani is now, in a typically ironic twist, Zardari’s ambassador to Washington.

But the case that finally brought the couple down was the SGS/Cotecna case in which the Zardaris were convicted by Swiss courts of receiving an approximate $15 million pay-off in return for awarding a government customs contract to a Swiss company. The 2007 BBC investigation followed the trial that led to the damning Swiss conviction.

Sometime in the summer of 1997, while Zardari was in prison for
a second time, jailed on a fresh round of corruption and murder cases, Benazir went shopping in London. At a jeweller’s on Bond Street she bought a sapphire and diamond jewellery set costing $190,000. A year later the necklace – the most extravagant item of the set – was seized by a Swiss magistrate, Daniel Devaud. An investigation into the money that was used to pay for the jewellery was launched, involving thousands of pages of bank documents, receipts and paper trails. After six years and exhaustive research on the part of the Swiss magistrate, Benazir and her husband were found guilty of money laundering and receiving kickbacks while she was Prime Minister, a portion of which went towards the hefty price of the Bond Street jewellery. Devaud found that Benazir and Zardari were equally culpable of corruption; Benazir controlled the bank account used to buy the jewels and husband and wife shared fifty-fifty control over the bank account used to receive kickbacks. Devaud’s 2003 verdict was scathing: ‘Benazir Bhutto knew she was acting in a criminally reprehensible manner by abusing her role in order to obtain for herself and for her husband considerable sums in the interest of her family at the cost of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.’
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It was not just Benazir and Zardari who were convicted by the Swiss courts; various lawyers, random friends and relations, and most shockingly Nusrat, who shared bank accounts with her daughter from the days of Zia’s dictatorship when they needed to hold each other’s power of attorney, were also dragged into the fray. The former first couple were ordered to repay approximately $11.9 million in kickbacks to the Pakistani government, hand over the Bond Street necklace to the state, and spend 180 days in prison.

The couple launched an appeal against the conviction, but the damage to their reputation was done. Even though Benazir’s 2007 negotiations with the dictator General Musharraf eventually resulted in the passing of a bill called the National Reconciliation Ordinance which wiped clean twenty years’ worth of corruption cases against politicians, bureaucrats and bankers, and shelved the SGS/Cotecna case in the Swiss courts, she responded to the allegations by saying, ‘I mean, what is poor and what is rich? If you mean, am I rich by

European standards, do I have a billion dollars, or even a hundred million dollars, even half that, no, I do not. But if you mean that I’m ordinary rich, yes.’
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In 2009, after becoming President, Zardari would publicly declare his personal fortune to be around $1.8 billion. A fraction of what he and his wife are reputed to have stolen from Pakistan.

Politically, Benazir’s government had meddled with the judiciary, filling the courts with judges sympathetic to the party and sacking those who ruled unfavourably against the state. She had been exposed for her government’s policy of creating ‘ghost schools’. Schools were opened with funds provided by foreign NGOs or rich foreign governments, PPP officials would cut school ribbons to declare open the hundredth school in the scheme but would not bother to equip the schools with desks, books, teachers or, for that matter, students. Incompetence was rife and people in Pakistan were beginning to react.

After a year of travelling across Pakistan, speaking to local press clubs, answering his critics in parliament and writing regular articles in both Urdu and English newspapers, Murtaza had shown that he was a different breed of Pakistani politician. He had not returned to Pakistan with the assumption that after sixteen years of exile the Bhutto mantle was his for the taking. He had returned as a member of the provincial assembly, the first rung on the political ladder, aware that he had a lot to prove before he rose any further.

After Murtaza’s hard work and the growing evidence that Benazir’s second government was failing, people began to turn towards him – even those who had initially dismissed him as inexperienced and untested. Writing on the anniversary of Zulfikar’s death, 4 April, a columnist wrote, ‘To call Benazir the heir apparent of Bhutto is the height of absurdity. Mir Murtaza is without any doubt the only heir apparent . . . [but] it is she who inherited her father’s legacy. The question really is: what has she made of that legacy?’
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The conclusion was damning and it echoed the sentiments being voiced in newspapers and drawing rooms across the country.

Papa spent the winter of 1994 working on a paper that presented his political programme and included his remedy for the political ills which had destroyed the PPP. It became a family endeavour of sorts.

Having Papa finally at home with us for long stretches of time as he worked on the paper, we banded together as a family and relished our time alone. We would sit with Papa as he wrote in the downstairs drawing room. He would sit in his usual green armchair, writing by hand while four-year-old Zulfi, already a budding artist, sketched and I curled up on the long blue sofa reading. When the paper was ready, Mummy sat at the computer with Papa and they typed it up together. The paper, ‘New Direction: Reforms in the PPP and Pakistani Society’, was printed in 1994 and would serve as the manifesto for the political party he was preparing to launch.

The preface, written a month before the paper was printed, is passionate and heated.

Shaheed
Bhutto’s slogan was ‘
roti, kapra aur makan
’ (food, clothing, and housing), but the slogan of the highly corrupt and disreputable coterie who have hijacked the party and are in full control of it seems to be ‘loot, plunder, steal’ . . . they use political power not in the service of the people but rather to dispense favours to a selected few, to enjoy the grandeur of the corridors of power at the taxpayers’ expense, to use the police as a private army against opponents who dare to raise a voice of dissent and above all to feather their nests.

His hope, he wrote, was to:

realign the course of the People’s Party with the salient features of the ideology of
Shaheed
Bhutto . . . Whereas the question of altering or diluting
Shaheed
Bhutto’s ideology does not arise, there is need to bring his views into conformity with contemporary values and standards. It is entirely possible to work within a certain framework of ideas, while allowing for changing times, but remaining sincere to the spirit of the original concept. This shall be my endeavour.

‘New Direction’ touched upon all the issues that Murtaza had spoken about since returning to Pakistan – the redistribution of powers and decentralization of the state, the law and order situation in Sindh, agriculture, health, education, bilateral foreign policy, poverty alleviation and more.

When Papa received the first print run of the manifesto, he gave me a copy to read and asked me to put down my thoughts. I was six months away from my thirteenth birthday and had recently read about the American Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in
Roe
v.
Wade
and felt that nothing was under more threat in the modern world than women’s reproductive rights. I told Papa that I thought abortion freedoms as well as free access to contraceptives should feature somewhere in his manifesto.

I also suggested that a section be included on my other cause at the time, AIDS awareness and treatment programmes. I had just finished reading a cautionary novel for teenagers, the kind that starts with a young girl having fun at a rock concert and ends with her dying of AIDS, alone and afraid. Papa listened to my suggestions. We went over them one evening in the drawing room while we nibbled on salted carrots and cucumbers and he wrote my thoughts down in his copy of the manifesto. He was a progressive but still typical father in that he was very strict about the idea of his daughter having boyfriends or dating, but he listened to me thoughtfully, not freaking out over the apparent fact that his twelve-year-old daughter was obsessed by abortion and AIDS.

On 15 March 1995 the streets outside our house were opened to the public. People came from across the country – from Balochistan and the Frontier and from across the interiors of Sindh and the Punjab – for a two-day workers’ convention. The topics covered in ‘New Direction’ were discussed and notes were made on what form the new party should take and what additions should be made to the draft manifesto. At the end of the convention, the Pakistan People’s Party (Shaheed Bhutto) was launched. Papa was no longer an independent candidate.

He launched his party with great passion and continued travelling
the country and speaking out against the excesses of the regime. In November 1995 Murtaza addressed a press conference in Larkana on the law and order situation in Karachi and spoke aggressively against Operation Clean-Up. ‘The police have collapsed totally and become a part of the criminal underworld,’ he said. ‘How strange is it that in this modern world, the Frontier Constabulary [a branch of law enforcement] is cordoning off entire areas to catch terrorists – in this way the government is giving birth to more terrorists.’
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Joonam often accompanied Papa on his tours and she too spoke openly against her daughter’s politics. With good reason; bank accounts in her name, that she had opened with Benazir years before, had been used to siphon money into and her name was being mentioned as one of the beneficiaries of the first couple’s corruption. ‘I fear that when her government ends,’ Joonam said in a newspaper interview, ‘she will be held accountable.’ But she could not have foreseen her own name being dragged through the muck too, not until it was too late. She felt let down and betrayed by her daughter’s graft at the nation’s expense, but she was still her daughter. While Joonam criticized Benazir and Zardari’s politics, she never closed the door on her eldest child.