Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (2 page)

We are a country that has enthusiastically fought the war on terror against our own people for the last seven years. But never before have we allowed a foreign country, American or otherwise, to carry out strikes on our own soil. It’s unheard of. Never before have we allowed machines to fly through our skies and kill our citizens for free, as if life here costs nothing and can be swiftly cancelled out if the political will is strong enough.

Pakistan is being spoken of now, as if the transition happened quietly, almost secretly, as the third front in this war: Afghanistan, Iraq and now Pakistan. Robert Fisk was on Al Jazeera – a channel still officially banned in Pakistan, the ban circumvented by wily cable operators – saying the excitement over the recent global financial meltdown has been used to cover the fact that Pakistan is the world’s new battleground. The American vice-presidential candidates, in their debate, both said Pakistan represents more danger than Iran. Barack Obama has said, if need be, America will bomb us. But they already have.

Tonight, as I write this, the BBC is reporting that a US missile strike in North Waziristan has killed eight schoolchildren. Two missiles, fired from yet another drone, hit the school this morning. The school was near a supposed Taliban commander’s house. The Pakistani Army issued a classic
we’re investigating this
response. The United States has said nothing. This is how wars are fought now. The new President of Pakistan has hungrily asked for drone technology for himself; he needs it, he says, to fight Pakistan. The new parliament has vowed vigorously to continue to help America, and its allies, the Pakistani Army, to launch successful operations against the terrorists. Or militants. Or Al Qaeda. Or schoolchildren, if they happen to get in the way.

Bodies, mutilated corpses bearing the signs of torture, have started turning up again in Karachi, on the outskirts of the city, in jute sacks. The newspapers, sedated, merely note this. Man found on a highway, cause of death body riddled with bullets, killer unknown – the victim had been shot to death. End of story. There is nothing new about this. Recently, I met the German consul general; he had come to say goodbye – he was retiring from his post and leaving Pakistan. I mentioned the resurgence of tortured bodies and roadside burials, mentioned that there was a time when this happened before. He told me his office had reports of sixty such deaths. Sixty such sacks since the new government took over in February, not even a year ago. I asked him what the timing meant to him. He shrugged and nibbled on some more goodbye cake. ‘I’m retiring,’ he laughed.

Political opponents of the PPP, not necessarily very active or interesting ones, have left the country. They’re waiting out their time in Dubai or London. Those who stayed have missed the opportunity to lounge in exile and have been dealt a different sort of banishment. The former provincial representative of Larkana, a rotund, thuggish fellow, who belonged to an anti-PPP pro-Musharraf party, has been in jail since he lost the February elections. The charge levelled against him is that he plotted to kill the President’s sister, a housewife turned politician. His lawyers have quit. No one will defend him. Another opposition member, a currently elected
member of parliament and former Chief Minister of Sindh who belongs to the same passé pro-Musharraf party, was physically beaten in the middle of the assembly. The Home Minister, a wealthy business associate of the new President turned politician, came on television after the public beating his party associates had carried out and said, ghoulishly, ‘I’m a doctor, we’ve just treated a sick man.
*
If he is not careful, he will receive more of our medicine.’ The Information Minister of the PPP – who also happens to be a former Karachi socialite and journalist as well as being the Minister of Health and an advisor to the President – said in August, ahead of the new President’s debut, that her party ‘never indulges in the politics of revenge’. It was telling that such a statement had to be made; they’re prostesting too much, thought those of us who have suffered under these political demagogues. But that’s how the business of politics is done now.

How have we come to this state of affairs? The journey goes back a long way, before my father was murdered.

Four years ago I set out to trace my father’s life. I opened dusty boxes filled with newspaper clippings, letters, diaries and official documents kept and collected by various members of the family over a fortyyear period. I unearthed my father’s old school bag, kept in its own dusty box, and racked my memory for names of college friends and classmates, cold-calling people whose names sounded familiar and writing long letters to addresses that I hoped were still valid. The search for my father’s past took me across Pakistan, from our Karachi home to the peaks of the Frontier province and the lush plains of Punjab.

I travelled across Europe and America, searching out lost loves and old acquaintances, all connected in the web of my father’s youth. Interviews were conducted in person, by email, and on the telephone. Photographs were scanned and sent across or delivered by mail when we felt that the internet might be too open a space on which to exchange information about sensitive topics. I spoke not only to childhood friends and family members who remembered the Bhutto children at their youngest and most uncomplicated, spread out across continents, but also to police officers, members of my grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s cabinet, founding members and foot soldiers of the original Pakistan People’s Party, judges, lawyers, and South Asia experts and professors. There were many who asked that I protect their identity; it is not an easy task to speak out against the status quo, to criticize the legacies of serving parliamentarians and presidents, but they spoke to me still and interviews were conducted in crowded meeting places to circumvent our voices being picked up by the recording devices that logged conversations at home. Other times, when it might have been too dangerous to be seen speaking to me, interviews were done in confined private spaces, without notebooks or pens, memory serving as my only transcriber until I was safely at home and able to put pen to paper and record what I had learned. 70 Clifton, our family home, is an archive in itself. It is a living testament to the Bhuttos. There are still wardrobes filled with my great-grandfather’s suits and shelves that hold my grandfather’s cologne, Shalimar, his glasses and his cufflinks. Bookcases rise towards the ceiling cluttered with velvet-lined state albums and official government memoranda in musty green leather folders bearing the insignia of the Prime Minister’s office. Documents, both written by hand and officially typed, served to build a political as well as a personal chronology.

It has been difficult to surround myself with the lives and scandals of the dead, to immerse myself among their personal effects and to speak to them through interlocutors acting as mediums. I have struggled to imagine people I have loved and known as human beings independent of my recollections. My detective work has been shocking
and painful at times, but it was, for me, an uncomfortable and necessary pursuit. Milan Kundera once said that the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting; this is my journey of remembering.

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 The Home Minister is a doctor, businessman, politician, was once in the supposed running for the chairmanship of the Pakistan Cricket Board and is an old chum of the President. He has been charged, at various points in time, with the crimes of fraud and murder. His wife, a doctor, businesswoman, politician and old chum of the President, is the speaker of the assembly.

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I
9 September 1996. It was close to three in the morning and we were sitting in the drawing room downstairs, a room typical of the house’s abstract art deco style, boxed in with no windows, with maroon velvet walls and decorated with modern Pakistani art. We had just come back from dinner at the Avari Hotel. Papa’s birthday had been the night before and some friends had invited us for a belated celebration. He was forty-two.

The Avari is one of Karachi’s grander hotels, founded by an old Parsi family patriarch, Dinshaw Avari, who eventually passed it, as is the custom in Pakistan, to his son, Byram. It’s rather a plain hotel, painted blue and white on the outside, not too ostentatious, unlike the spate of foreign chain hotels that are the Avari’s neighbours. In the days before skyscrapers captured the imagination of the city’s architects, the Avari was advertised as the country’s tallest building. Now banks compete with each other over whose building is the highest as they struggle upwards to escape from the smog and poverty of the city. In the mid-nineties, the Avari Hotel was known for being home to Karachi’s only Japanese restaurant, Fujiyama. We had eaten there that night.

That Friday evening Papa was wearing a navy blue suit, one of the few he had that still fitted him. Like his father, my grandfather Zulfikar Ali, Papa was a dandy when it came to clothes and grooming. He was an elegant man, nearly six foot three with salt and pepper hair and a neatly trimmed moustache. Papa had put on weight over the past two years, the busy and tense months that marked our return to Pakistan and the start of a newly public life, and we teased him
about it. He took it good-naturedly, insisting that he was going on a diet soon, while my younger brother Zulfi and I patted his belly.

Papa signed the Avari guestbook that night. The staff at the restaurant presented the book to him with a great flourish and opened it, ironically, on the very page where General Zia ul Haq had signed an effusive note. It was the absolute worst page they could have turned to. General Zia presided over the military coup that deposed my grandfather’s government. Two years later, after arresting and torturing him, General Zia put my grandfather to death. They say he was hanged, but my family never saw the body. The army had buried my grandfather’s body quietly, not even notifying our family, before they released the news of his execution to the public. Papa looked at the General’s handwriting. He calmly read the General’s thoughts on Fujiyama’s fine cuisine before making a face at me, sticking his tongue out and frowning comically, one of the few light moments we had that night at dinner, and then turned several pages on and began to write.

At dinner Papa was quiet. He sat across the table from me with his arms crossed in front of him, his chin resting in the bridge made of his intertwined fingers. It made me nervous to see Papa, usually animated and boisterous, so subdued.

Two days earlier, Papa had returned to Karachi from a trip to Peshawar feeling calm and rested. He had arrived late and was eating dinner and telling Mummy and me about his trip when, shortly after midnight, the intercom phone in the drawing room rang. It could only be someone in the kitchen or in the office next door at 71 Clifton: no one else was awake. The kitchen was close by and Asghar, our bearer, could have walked over if he needed to tell us anything. It had to be the office. Papa picked up the phone on the first ring. ‘
Gi?
’ he said, yes? He listened quietly for a few minutes. ‘
Gari tayar karo, jaldi
,’ he said, get the car ready, quickly. His relaxed mood was gone. Papa put down the phone, stood up and walked towards the door that connected to my parents’ bedroom. ‘What’s happened?’ I asked. ‘They’ve taken Ali Sonara,’ Papa replied. ‘They just raided his house and took him.’ ‘Where are you going?’ I asked slowly as Mummy’s hands went softly to steady my back, patting me and reminding me
that she was still there, that things were going to be OK. ‘I’m going to find him,’ Papa said and walked out of the drawing room.

Ali Sonara was from Lyari, one of the most densely populated, politically radical and poorest neighbourhoods of Karachi. He belonged to a Katchi Memon family, a small Sunni community whose roots in the region can be traced back to the Ran of Kutch and Sindh desert regions. He had been a loyal supporter of the Bhutto family since his early schooldays. After Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been overthrown and arrested by General Zia’s military coup in 1977, Sonara abandoned his studies and became one of Lyari’s most prominent activists.

He joined the Save Bhutto Committee in his community and worked tirelessly to oppose General Zia’s abrogation of the 1973 constitution. After Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was killed by the military government in 1979, Sonara joined the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) and worked closely with my aunt, Benazir Bhutto, for the next ten years. He was a member of the movement’s Karachi Committee and spent his time distributing pamphlets against martial law and the illegality of Bhutto’s execution, holding covert meetings to enlist local support and organizing protests and demonstrations.

In 1984, during the height of Zia’s dictatorial repression, a bomb was planted in central Karachi’s popular Bori Bazaar. Bori Bazaar is a busy market named after the religious sect of Bohri Muslims who wear distinctive long petticoats and blouses with hijab-like hoods. When the bomb exploded, scores of women and children who frequent the bazaar to shop for fabric, beads and colourful homeware were among the injured. Upon hearing the news Ali Sonara ran to the bazaar from his home nearby in Lyari.