Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (21 page)

It was summer when the army finally struck. Elections were getting close and the embattled Zulfikar had been doing his best to appease his opponents. As an understanding between the PPP and a newly formed alliance of opposition parties was reaching its culmination, General Zia declared martial law. He closed down the country on the night of 4 July 1977 and appointed himself chief martial law administrator. Elections would be held in ninety days, he promised on television, adding that the Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was under ‘protective custody’.

Zulfikar was released several weeks later. He immediately set off on a political campaign across the country, rallying crowds and attacking the military’s attempt to discredit him and seize power. As millions of people came out to hear him, whatever political credit Zulfikar had lost during his time in power had been regained. He was unstoppable. General Zia realized that Zulfikar would not lose the election, no matter when it was held. ‘It’s either him or me,’ the General is said to have prophesized. ‘Two men, one coffin.’
¹

It was summer in Karachi, hot and stifling, and Murtaza was home from his first year at Oxford. As soon as his father was arrested, a message was sent to his eldest son: ‘Go to Larkana, begin the campaign.’ Murtaza went straight to the family constituency, accompanied by his younger brother, Shahnawaz. He was twenty-three years old and singlehandedly, as Zulfikar and his lawyers began a process of legal protection, began to
work for his father. He met with peasants, with local notables, with those he had first worked alongside as a young boy campaigning for his father’s first election.

After several arrests and releases the military government placed a ‘conspiracy to murder’ charge against Zulfikar, accusing him of attempting to murder a political opponent, Ahmed Raza Kasuri. Three years earlier, gunmen had fired at Kasuri’s car, killing his father. At the time Kasuri – a former member of the PPP – blamed the government. A tribunal was called to investigate the matter and rejected the allegations, after which Kasuri rejoined the People’s Party – the party he claimed had attacked him and killed his father. The claims, sensational and provocative, were factually weak. But a man, even a Prime Minister, could be hanged for murder. Kasuri cooperated with the military and charges were filed against Zulfikar. They finally had him in their sights.

It was in Larkana that Murtaza saw his father a free man for the last time. Zulfikar had come to the city from Lahore. He hadn’t slept in two days. Gudu was working in the ruins of Moenjodaro, thirty minutes from the Bhutto home, at a job Nusrat had recommended him for, and was living with Murtaza at the time. It was late at night, past midnight, when Gudu, who was in the bathroom, opened a window because a noise outside had startled him. There was a commotion of sorts, but not the familiar noise of crowds outside Al Murtaza that one grew used to hearing, the chants of slogans and exuberant chaos. There was something more orderly and alarming about the racket. Upon opening the window Gudu saw that the walls of the house were being scaled by men in uniform. ‘I panicked’ he recalled. ‘I ran to Mir and told him what I had seen. He was as calm as ever. He told me to calm down and then we went to tell his father.’

By the time they reached Zulfikar, an army officer was standing in front of him. Gudu remembers the soldier apologizing to the Prime Minister. ‘Sorry,
sahib
’, he said before escorting him to the car waiting outside.

Mir, Shah and I were alone in the house then. We stayed up all night, I packed my clothes and planned to quit my archaeological
gig at Moenjodaro in the morning. Mir was worried, of course, but he held himself together. Zulfikar told him something before he was taken away. It was private. The next morning he got on a plane to Rawalpindi to join his mother, Nusrat.

In Rawalpindi, the sons met with their mother. She had been cloistered in the compound since the arrest and was sick with worry. Since Zulfikar’s first arrest in July, Nusrat had been unable to sleep at night. The sound of boots climbing the steps to her bedroom to arrest her husband, frightening her children, haunted her. She wore earplugs from then on. I remember her always putting them in when she retired to her room for the night, to block off the sound of boots in her sleep. It simply wasn’t safe for Murtaza and Shahnawaz to be in Pakistan. The regime was building its case against Zulfikar personally, not just politically, and the danger to those around him grew. Zulfikar sent word to his sons to leave the country. He asked one of his friends to arrange to send Murtaza and Shahnawaz out of Pakistan. Do it legally if you can, he asked, but if not then find other channels. If there was a vendetta against Zulfikar being played out at the highest levels of the state’s military, his sons would be the next natural targets. Murtaza tried to argue, but Zulfikar’s reply was final.

Murtaza returned to Oxford and Shahnawaz to his college in Switzerland, but not for long. The brothers immediately mounted an international campaign to save their father’s life, the Save Bhutto Committee, and its base of operations was to be in London. Sometimes with their mother, who remained in Pakistan with her daughters, but most often travelling with other political workers belonging to the PPP or alone, the brothers set off on diplomatic missions. They met Colonel Gadaffi, a close friend of their father’s, in Tripoli. He offered his support to Murtaza and Shahnawaz, going so far as to extend asylum to them should they ever need it. After the General’s military junta was firmly in place in Pakistan, the government several times asked Gadaffi to extend an invitation to General Zia for a state visit. Gaddafi always refused, out of his affection for Zulfikar and his
memory, even though a number of Pakistani servicemen were stationed in Libya for long-term training.

Murtaza and Shahnawaz flew to Beirut to meet the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat. A Palestinian friend from college arranged the meeting for Murtaza and his brother, and for his part Arafat confidently told the Bhutto brothers that their father’s life would be spared. He recounted a story of running into General Zia at Mecca while both men were performing the Hajj. Arafat told the brothers that he asked General Zia in front of the Kaaba to spare Bhutto’s life and that the General had promised clemency. They met Giscard D’Estaing of France, who sent a strong letter of support for Bhutto to General Zia, called on Kurt Waldheim, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, and received support from the Pope and the friendship and assistance of Hafez al Assad of Syria among many others.

Murtaza and Shahnawaz, twenty-three and nineteen years old respectively, were carrying out a gruelling schedule. Together they met with dignitaries, spoke at press conferences, picketed Pakistani embassies and lobbied journalists and Pakistani communities to raise their voices against the abrogation of the 1973 constitution, all the while carrying on with their studies and sending in their work by post or speaking to their tutors by phone. But they were still young men, raising their eyebrows at each other over Arafat’s effete and handsome young assistants. They often found small moments of levity to amuse each other in the face of such daunting odds.

Travelling in the States alone, without his brother, but accompanied by Bhutto’s one-time Chief Minister of Punjab, Mustafa Khar, Murtaza became exhausted by the older man’s finicky ways. Khar, a man whose chequered domestic history prompted his wife Tehmina Durrani to write
My Feudal Lord
, a wildly successful tell-all about their marriage, could not start the day without half an hour of yoga in the morning, which he insisted on practising in the nude. Murtaza would have to wait outside the room until Khar had found his morning zen. He quickly grew tired of the monotonous morning schedule. One day, to liven things up, Murtaza decided not to place the ‘Do not
disturb sign’ outside their hotel door as Khar had asked him to do. Instead he hung the ‘Please make my room’ sign. Murtaza waited in the corridor for the housekeeper to arrive and collapsed laughing when the startled housekeeper ran out of the room screaming after she had walked in on Khar in a naked downward dog pose.

Shahnawaz would return to Switzerland in the spring of 1978 to concentrate on his studies. He had planned on leaving school to campaign full-time for his father’s life alongside his brother, but Zulfikar, a very stern father, would not hear of it and instructed Shah in no uncertain terms to return to his university. Education was nonnegotiable. Murtaza remained in London organizing marches to Trafalgar Square and meetings with Pakistani Britons while he worked on his master’s thesis. It was in the summer of 1978, when the activities of the Save Bhutto Committee were at their peak, that my father fell in love.

The Save Bhutto Committee was running its operations from London but there were chapters of the organization across the United Kingdom. Murtaza travelled to Manchester and Birmingham to speak to chapter members and supporters and to enlist allies to rally around the cause of saving Chairman Bhutto’s life. The Save Bhutto Committee held rallies in parks and public halls where Murtaza spoke openly and passionately against the dictatorship that had taken hold of Pakistan.

The People’s Party newspaper,
Musawat
, had recently been banned under the Zia regime in Pakistan and Murtaza took charge of resurrecting the paper and began to publish it from London. He gathered several journalists and former political activists to edit and write articles for it, but took charge of the paper’s editorial line, submission guidelines and the logistics of having
Musawat International
, as it was now called, printed and distributed.

Suhail Sethi, Murtaza’s childhood friend who would follow him into exile, frequently travelled to London with messages for Murtaza from Nusrat in Pakistan. Suhail came from a privileged Peshawari family, and he had only recently got married. Because of his loyalty to Murtaza and the Bhuttos, the army routinely harassed his family, raiding
his house and his wife’s parents’ home, and he was regularly warned to stay away from politics. But he didn’t. He was, and remains, my father’s most trustworthy friend. ‘It was difficult, we were working in secret most of the time. At one point,
Begum Sahiba
– Nusrat – was in Lahore and we knew she would be travelling to Peshawar for the death anniversary of one of the founding members of the PPP, especially to show party solidarity against Zia. She was a strong woman; I knew she’d make it, no matter how hard the authorities tried to stop her, but I didn’t know how. I went to the airport one evening, knowing that a Fokker flight was coming in from Lahore and I stood there in the arrivals hall waiting to see
Begum Sahiba
but couldn’t spot her. And then I noticed a rather tall woman walking towards me in a burqa, which no one wore in those days, especially Mrs Bhutto, and it was her – she came in disguise!

‘Other times the problems came from within the family. Pinky—’ Suhail stops, it’s instinctive to call Benazir by her childhood nickname rather than the various formal titles she acquired in later years ‘– intercepted a message for me once. Mir needed me to come to London to assist with the
Musawat
relaunch and asked her to relay the message but she didn’t think it was necessary to pass it on. She didn’t understand the importance of what Murtaza was doing in London publishing
Musawat
. He ran that newspaper from the end of 1977 till 1982, he was in charge of it. And not just that. People only talk about Murtaza and Shahnawaz with guns and guards, but they have no idea what they were doing at that time.’ Suhail takes a deep breath and smiles. ‘One time Benazir sent Mir a confidential letter through one of her gaggle of girlfriends. This friend of hers had a boyfriend who was travelling to London and Pinky allowed her friend to pass on the letter to this fellow. Mir only knew a letter was coming, he didn’t know who was bringing it but assumed it was someone dependable since his sister had stressed it was an important letter.’ At this Suhail starts to tap his cigarette packet, his fingers drum quicker as the story crescendoes. ‘The boyfriend reaches London and lo and behold goes straight to the Pakistani embassy and gives them the letter. We didn’t know what had happened, we were still waiting for the
letter to reach us until we read excerpts of it in
Nawa-i-waqt
, a Pakistani newspaper.’
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Indeed, it was the failure of those diplomatic and political efforts that changed Murtaza and his brother’s life. But they did not know what was in store, and if they did, they showed no signs of wavering as they fought on. They worked day and night to spread the news of the injustices being done to the state of Pakistan under the military junta. The military made countless accusations against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto through their courts in Lahore in the form of White Papers. Zulfikar, who spent hours in his cell in Rawalpindi jail writing legal rejoinders to the Supreme Court, penned a response to the accusations against him. Naturally, the junta banned Zulfikar’s response from being carried in the media – the newspapers were not allowed to print even extracts of Zulfikar’s rejoinder.

A copy was smuggled out of the country to Murtaza in London and he arranged for it to be printed as a book, titling it
If I am Assassinated
. ‘Murtaza should have written a foreword to it,’ remembers Suhail. ‘In those days he was so desperate that the truth got out he didn’t even ask the publishers for the royalties.’ It was published first by Biswin Sadi publications in Delhi. ‘Mir didn’t ask for a single penny,’ Suhail says exasperatedly. ‘His mission was that it should reach the people and in one year they printed nine or ten editions of the book.’ Later it would also be printed and distributed by the international offices of
Musawat
from a small office on Brushfield Street in London.

The Indian edition of
If I am Assassinated
has a photograph of Zulfikar on the back along with quotes from the text.

If I am assassinated through the gallows . . . there will be turmoil and turbulence, conflict and conflagration . . . The events of the last twenty years have made me arrive at the unambiguous conclusion that, at present, the greatest threat to the unity and progress of the Third World is from coup-gemoney . . . More than my life is at stake. Make no mistake about it. The future of Pakistan is at stake.