Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (22 page)

At the bottom of the printed quotes is Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s slanted signature. The book is more than just a compendium of the legal flaws in the case against Zulfikar presented by the junta’s White Paper; in the chapter called ‘The Prejudice’, Zulfikar dealt with the various propaganda attacks against his government and presents a rare insight into the conditions he was being held under.

‘Since 18th March 1978, I have spent twenty-two to twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four in a congested and suffocating death cell,’ Zulfikar writes.

I have been hemmed in by its sordidness and stink throughout the heat and the rain of the long hot summer. The light is poor. My eyesight has worsened. My health has been shattered. I have been in solitary confinement for almost a year, but my morale is high because I am not made of the wood which burns easily. Through sheer willpower in conditions that are adverse in the extreme, I have written this rejoinder. Let all the White Papers come. I do not have to defend myself at the bar of public opinion. My services to the cause of the people are a mirror in front of them. My name is synonymous with the return of prisoners of war, with Kashmir, with the Islamic summit, with the Security Council, with the proletarian causes.

Ordinarily, I would not have bothered to reply to the tissue of lies contained in this disgusting document [which included charges of Bhutto being a ‘bad Muslim’ as well as the Kasuri murder charge], but the circumstances are not ordinary. A principle is involved: the principle of the right of reply, the principle of the right to face the lie with the truth . . . As I said at the trial in Lahore forget the fact that I have been the President and Prime Minister of Pakistan. Forget the fact that I am the leader of the premier party of this country. Forget all those things. But I am a citizen of this country and I am facing a murder trial. Even the ordinary citizen – and I consider myself one – is not denied justice.
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If I am Assassinated
was not simply a tract on innocence and justice; it was like his letters – detailed, thorough, and resounding in its eloquence and force. Zulfikar weaves in an analysis of the political coalition that rose against him, the non-aligned movement, and General Zia ul Haq’s Afghanistan connections.

Papa kept one of the first copies of the book on his bookshelf when I was growing up. One winter, when I was around nine years old, I took the book off Papa’s shelf and sneaked it into my bedroom. I never really understood Pakistani political lingo – White Paper, red tape, all kinds of official acronyms and officials – but I wanted to and commenced with highlighting the yellowed pages of
If I am Assassinated
with a pink Bic pen. If Papa was annoyed when he saw that I’d graffitied the pages of his one copy in Damascus, he managed to hide his feelings well. ‘I’m going to write a book on grandpapa,’ I apologized sheepishly. Papa knew the book by heart, he could quote from it citing page numbers. I never asked why and in all those years Papa never mentioned his role in its publication.

It was an ordinary London night in May 1978 when Murtaza and Shahnawaz took some time off to have dinner with friends at the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane. That night, in the Trader Vic’s restaurant, my father’s attention was caught by a different kind of political lobbyist.

Della Roufogalis was born in Veria, Greece, the birthplace of Alexander the Great. Her father, Anastasios Pasvantidis, was a small merchant who had once fought in the underground resistance against the Germans when stationed in a small Albanian town during the Second World War. Della, eight years older than Murtaza, was in London to attend a conference of the United Nations and to lobby for the release of a loved one jailed in Greece. She was eating with the Somalian Ambassador to the United Kingdom when she noticed a handsome man staring at her. She could hear him and his friends speaking English, but they had accents; she noticed that the man who
was staring at her was half a head taller than the others at his table, even though he was sitting down. She smiled at him and he smiled back. She remembers that when he returned her smile, a light spread across his face. The Ambassador noticed Della’s distraction and pointed towards the man she was glancing at and asked if she knew who he was. ‘He’s the son of the ex-socialist Prime Minister of Pakistan,’ he told her. ‘His government was removed by a military junta and he’s now in jail.’ Then the Ambassador added piquantly, ‘Just the opposite situation from yours,’ and continued to eat his dinner.

Like the Bhutto brothers, Della’s young life had also been wildly tempestuous. As a young girl in Greece she wrote poetry and composed lyrics, writing to find an outlet for her thoughts and fantasies. There is evidence that Veria existed as a city as far back as 1000 BC and it grew in glory long before Alexander fled its soil to build his empire, notably in the texts of Thucydides and through the preaching of Paul the Apostle. As a teenager Della was restless; she was tall and beautiful and was waiting to burst out of the small world she felt stuck in. She married young, at sixteen, and moved with her husband, a mechanical engineering student, to South Africa. Their mutual wanderlust took them to Johannesburg at the peak of apartheid. Trapped in a marriage that was violent and abusive, Della became a model. She was a local sensation; delicately tall, blonde and olive-skinned, Della soon won an international contract with Wilhelmina models in New York. She eventually left her husband and returned to Greece, where at a dinner party she met and fell in love with Michael Roufogalis, General Roufogalis to the men who feared him.

Twenty-five years her senior, the General – head of the State Information Department, the most dreaded office in military-led Greece – proposed to Della and married her a mere three months before his government was overthrown, with the junta dictator President Papadopolous serving as Roufogalis’s best man at the Greek Orthodox ceremony. In their wedding pictures, Papadopolous is waving a finger at Della, looking beautiful with her hair temporarily dyed red, as if warning her of something (the dangers of marrying into the
junta? Probably not). She returns the dictator’s bizarre remonstration by smiling gracefully.

The police came to take General Roufogalis to jail early one morning in 1974. Under the new government’s courts, the General was found guilty of treason and given a life sentence. Della, the General’s new bride, immediately took to lobbying for her husband’s release both in Greece and abroad.

She spoke to Aristotle Onassis months before he died, and travelled to the United States to meet CIA representatives sympathetic to the jailed Greek junta. There was no real hope that she could get her husband’s life sentence lifted, he had already been spared the initial death sentence meted out to his colleagues, including the former Prime Minister, Papadopoulos, but Della wasn’t used to sitting back and letting the blows fall without offering some serious resistance. After his trial, General Roufogalis told his young wife to carry on living instead of fighting. ‘This will last for a long time,’ he told her. ‘How long, I don’t know . . . you’re young, you’re beautiful and you need companionship. Try to find someone of your calibre.’
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So she did, but not as he had requested; she honoured her commitment to her husband through her work. Carrying sensitive messages and organizing support from right-leaning governments and leaders around the world, Della believed she had a mission: she was the voice of the jailed Greek junta leaders, and she sought reversals of their sentences on the grounds that they were indicted under retrospective laws.

It was this charge that brought Della to London and seated her at a table in Trader Vic’s basement restaurant with the Somalian Ambassador. Trader Vic’s was always packed with an international clientele; it was the hottest place in town. The Pacific island feel of the restaurant, complete with rattan furniture and décor, meant Trader Vic’s served the meanest ribs in London and packed equally exotic cocktails into flower-laden goblets and punchbowls. The Ambassador asked Della if she wished to be introduced to Murtaza Bhutto, the young man she’d been exchanging glances with all night, but she replied that it wasn’t necessary; they didn’t have to cut their discussion short to make introductions. A little later Della excused herself
to go to the ladies, and when she came out, Murtaza was waiting for her. They swapped phone numbers and returned to their respective tables. As they were both leaving, the Ambassador approached Murtaza, enquired about his father and formally presented Della Roufogalis.

Murtaza called Della the next day at eleven in the morning and they arranged to meet for lunch back at Trader Vic’s. They spent the afternoon exchanging their life histories: Murtaza sharing stories from his own fight against his father’s imprisonment and Della speaking of her mission to free her husband. She knew they were treading on delicate ground; if anything, their experiences should have made them adversaries, each fighting against the other’s allies, but it didn’t. Della noticed that Murtaza listened when she spoke fondly about her imprisoned husband, not criticizing or judging. And for her part, she felt a tenderness for him as he talked about his father and the junta in his country. The next day they went dancing at Annabel’s and on the third day after a fast and frenzied courtship, Della had to return to Athens.

Murtaza and Shahnawaz took her to the airport but it was clear that the couple were not ready to say goodbye. Della walked through to the departure lounge feeling sad about leaving Mir behind. It was an unfamiliar feeling for her, this affection, after the last four years of frustration and isolation. By the time she made it to her flight she was distracted and annoyed to find a man sitting in her seat reading a newspaper. She cleared her throat to tell him that the seat was hers when he lowered the paper. It was Murtaza. ‘How did you do this?’ she asked him, incredulous. But he would have done anything to be with her.

Della was an unexpected relief for Murtaza, who had missed living his own life since General Zia ul Haq’s coup. She understood his work and how draining it was on the spirit and together they created a small shelter from the fear they had grown used to living under. Murtaza would surprise Della many more times. He would call her in Athens and tell her that Shah was passing through town on his way somewhere and that he would call on her to drop a letter or a book off for her. After sitting home patiently waiting for Shah to call,
the doorbell would ring and Della would answer it to find Mir, suitcase in hand.

During his first trip to Athens, Mir stayed at the Caravel Hotel and he and Della would spend the afternoon at Colonaki Tops in Kolonaki Square reading the
Herald Tribune
and chatting to other tourists and Greek friends of Della’s who happened to be passing by. Two days into his stay, Murtaza took Della to see a friend’s father – Milbry Polk’s father, who worked at the US embassy. William Polk’s brother George was killed in mysterious circumstances in Greece and the Polk family still maintains a journalism scholarship in his name. On the ride to the embassy, Murtaza gave Della a ring with green and blue enamel as a birthday gift. They had known each other for less than a week.

On 5 June Murtaza returned to London. He and Shahnawaz were trying to get a documentary made about their father’s trial – a work that would take many years to finally complete – and they had to meet various producers and directors back in London. He wrote to Della the following day, ‘My dearest Della, I have been involved with a lot of work here since I arrived, but that has not stopped me from thinking of you. I miss you dearly. I intend to be with you in Greece by the 15th of this month. Your embassy people better give me a visa.’
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(They did.)

When he was travelling, Murtaza often wrote to Della. He sent her postcards and love letters, scribbling on the back of air mail envelopes ‘with all my love, all my sleep, all my drinks, all my white hair, all my thoughts . . .’ I’d never known that my father wrote love letters. After Papa was killed, I turned to the boxes of correspondence he kept in his room, among his books and magazines, poring over every letter and envelope. I would scour the pages hoping to find something romantic and passionate, but I never did. I don’t think he knew how to write them then. I don’t think he knew until he met Della. From the New York Hilton he wrote to her on hotel stationery: ‘Maybe our relationship is tragic. It is, in a way, very sad. We love each other and are very happy together, but what obstacles we have. In the end, after all is over, a very sad love story can be written about us.’
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On his second trip, there was more than just lunch at Colonaki Tops to organize. Staying with Della at her flat at Pakgrati Square, Murtaza called Minister Lamprias, the secretary to the Prime Minister, Karamanlis. He enlisted Della’s help in speaking to those who didn’t understand English and got an appointment with the Prime Minister, a friend of his father’s. Karamanlis, a one-time right-wing politician turned moderate, had only recently returned to Greece after some time in exile. He was friendly to Murtaza and received him warmly. Murtaza asked for his support in the fight for Bhutto’s life; he asked the Prime Minister to put pressure on Zia not to kill Pakistan’s first elected Prime Minister.