Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (25 page)

‘Murtaza was clearly in a traumatic state,’ remembers Tariq. ‘On Murtaza’s face emotions showed very clearly. When his father was finally executed, the grief was visible.’
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Shahnawaz was furious. The youngest child of the family, he had become incandescent with rage. Della remembers the police knocking on the door of the mews house a few days after Zulfikar’s execution. There had been a bomb threat phoned into the Pakistani embassy and the police had traced the call to the house. In those days, there wasn’t really the technology to figure these things out, but the police had the means. Shahnawaz answered the door. He had made the call. There was no actual bomb threat, no means to carry out any such attack, but he was young and he was angry and he wanted the embassy to feel afraid, to feel that their actions in Pakistan had consequences. The police took Shah to the station; Murtaza insisted on going with him, and he was eventually let go. The police understood that he made the call under immense stress; his father had just been killed.

The Save Bhutto Committee organized a
namaz-e-janaza
, a Muslim prayer for the dead, in Hyde Park. Thousands of people came, wearing white, to offer the Islamic rites for the dead. ‘There were lots of us who were incredibly upset,’ recalled Tariq Ali. ‘I remember speaking with Murtaza and Shah and Murtaza saying to me, “Well, that’s it now.” His grief had given way to anger. “We have to fight them till the end. There’s no other way left. It’s the only language these people understand.” He was so enraged; there was a real anger that his father had been executed, that the world had watched it happen and that he couldn’t do anything to stop it.’
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Della postponed her trip back to Athens to remain with Mir. He was destroyed by his father’s execution. For forty days, the traditional Muslim mourning period, Murtaza slept on the floor of the flat, with no blankets or pillows. ‘I want to remember,’ he would tell Della when she asked why he insisted on sleeping so uncomfortably when what he needed to do was rest properly and gather his strength. Her sisters, Nana and Vou, fussed over Murtaza and Shahnawaz too, trying to make sure they were eating and getting through the day. Nana also asked Murtaza why he insisted on sleeping on the cold floor. ‘I want to feel the same as he did,’ he told her. When he and Shahnawaz went to see President Hafez al Assad in Syria one month later, Murtaza was still sleeping on the hard floor.

After two years of fighting to save their father’s life through diplomatic and media channels and losing the battle to an armed and violent state, Murtaza and Shahnawaz began a different kind of campaigning. Spurred on by their father’s letter and the increased brutality being waged against the democratic process in Pakistan, the two brothers, who as young men had both idolized Che Guevara and the resistance movements of Latin America and Africa, began to organize a more dangerous defiance of the Zia regime. Suhail, who would leave behind his family and his life in Pakistan to join Murtaza and Shahnawaz, sums up the feeling that drove them to
the idea of armed struggle: ‘When a constitution is abrogated, when the legal and political agreement to live together is cut, and you’re running a country through the barrel of a gun, it becomes every citizen’s duty to fight against this.’
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Tariq Ali, who watched the campaign closely, concurs. ‘The failure to win diplomatic support from governments around the world played a big part in convincing Murtaza that the only option was armed struggle.’
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He had tried everything – printing newspapers, speaking to journalists, holding press conferences, protesting outside embassies, speaking to foreign ministers and legal advisors the world over, and none of it had worked. None of it had managed to save Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s life.

In May 1979, Murtaza flew to Damascus, accompanied by Shahnawaz, to seek President’s Hafez al Assad’s support. The President had long been a close friend of their father’s and had offered the brothers asylum in his country. Murtaza didn’t tell Della why he was travelling to Damascus, but she sensed that something was different. ‘He changed after his father’s execution,’ she remembers. ‘He became very serious. Before he was a student, the son of the Prime Minister – he went to nightclubs, to beaches, he liked the best of things, clothes, food, and then he just stops. He goes to places like Syria, Libya, Afghanistan. He stopped smiling, laughing, Mir was putting himself in training. He was torturing himself.’
¹⁹

By telephone Murtaza asked Della to come and meet him in Kabul, where he would be heading after Syria. By the summer of 1979, Murtaza and Della were no longer two lobbyists, commiserating with each other and trading war stories; they were seriously in love and committed to each other. Murtaza had given Della a simple ring from a jeweller on Sloane Street and asked her to marry him. She couldn’t. She was already married. With her husband, General Roufogalis, still in prison in Greece, Della told Murtaza that she couldn’t think about it then. Maybe later. Maybe.

Della flew out to Kabul on 12 June. Murtaza was waiting for her at the airport. The government had given him a small villa and he was beginning to get his new life in order. The villa, near Chicken
Street, so called on account of the butcher’s shops nearby, was simply furnished, and propped up against the walls of the bedrooms Della found newly unpacked automatic weapons. She tried to contain her shock and Murtaza, who had previously stacked the floors of his bedroom with books, laughed it off. ‘They’re just toys,’ he said. ‘Nice toys,’ Della replied. ‘I don’t think he realized at the start how dangerous the task was,’ Della tells me thirty-one years later. ‘How large it was. It was very obvious what he gave up to do this. Even with my husband and his situation, I couldn’t have done it. It shocked me, but I admired him for it. How is he going to live like this every day? He was driven by the will of his father, that’s indisputable.’
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After a dinner of Kabuli
naan
and lamb, Della raised the subject of the weapons again and why Murtaza was in this strange country alone. She told him plainly that she thought the way he and Shah had chosen to avenge their father’s death was wrong. Murtaza bristled. ‘You can’t understand, they hanged my father. You do not know how that hurts.’ He told her that he had flown from the Middle East with the weapons, the lone passenger on a plane full of arms. She couldn’t reconcile this image of Murtaza with the one she had known only two months earlier. They tried to spend a few pleasant days in Kabul – Murtaza took her to buy
shalwar kameezes
, which Della wore indecently by tucking the long tunics into the trousers, thinking them more fashionable that way, but exposing the one part of the suit meant to be hidden – the crotch. She told me that she spoke to Murtaza’s dog, an Alsatian called Wolf, in Greek and walked around in her untucked baggy
shalwar kameez
, stumbling over guns.

A week later, Della left for Athens, stopping in Karachi to deliver letters Murtaza had given her for Nusrat and his sister Benazir. It was the first time that Della had visited Pakistan; upon arriving at 70 Clifton she was taken straight to see Nusrat. They embraced, looking closely at each other. This was the first and only time that they would meet. Nusrat is a slightly shorter, brunette version of Della – their resemblance is striking. Both women have regal and defined cheekbones, long elegant noses and perfect ballerina-like posture. Nusrat nervously asked about her son and Della handed over Murtaza’s
envelope, trying to answer all her questions. At one point in their hushed conversation, Nusrat held Della’s hand as she was speaking and moved her across the room, out of the light of the chandelier they had been standing under. ‘The house has ears,’ Nusrat said, pointing overhead. Della was sweaty and dirty from the trip and was desperate for a shower and a change of clothes, but Nusrat insisted she meet Benazir first to give her the letter her brother had sent for her. But Benazir was not there to receive Della. After some time, Della got tired of waiting and asked to be taken to Benazir.

She was taken through to 71 Clifton, the adjoining house and office, and entered a room to find Benazir sitting at a table, typing. She didn’t look up; she didn’t even acknowledge the blonde stranger in front of her. ‘I wait so long that it begins to bother me. What is she trying to prove?’ Della writes in her memoirs.
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‘I’ve come all this way from Afghanistan with news from her brothers, whom she hasn’t seen for over two years, and she doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to hear it.’ Della was eventually given an audience with Benazir, seven years her junior. It was long enough only to exchange names and for Della to hand over Murtaza’s letter. She acted like a political heir, Della recalls, remembering Murtaza telling her that Benazir had always wanted to lead the political charge after their father and explaining that he loved his sister enough to step aside for her. It was a tense visit; Nusrat would only speak to Della in whispers, certain that the entire house was bugged – while Benazir wouldn’t speak to her at all. Della left the next morning for Athens.

While Della was in Greece and Murtaza in Kabul, they corresponded by letter. Murtaza and Shahnawaz had abandoned the idea of a diplomatic solution to Pakistan’s junta – their two years out in the world convinced them that there was no peaceful way of dealing with the military regime. Zia’s violence was too powerful, the military’s grip on the country too strong. The only way to fight the junta was with force. The brothers formed the People’s Liberation Army, modelled on the guerrilla outfits they had idolized as young men, but quickly found that their romantic ideal of a people’s armed resistance against a gargantuan military apparatus was not an easy one to operate.

Writing to Della about the PLA’s organizational developments since she left Kabul in June, Murtaza jokes:

We, the PLA, are unique in many respects: 1) Our official spokesman is a dog (Wolf) 2) we have more commanders than fighters 3) We are the first organization in Pakistan’s history that believes in fighting 4) We consider secrecy nothing to be secret about 5) the PLA’s chief can make enemies much quicker than friends – and he thinks that’s interesting 7) No one yet knows exactly who the chief is 8) the official spoksman has ticks and likes to chew on bones – also, the official spokesman shits on carpets.
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He continues:

The people of Pakistan, whom the PLA seems to be fighting for, are an even stranger breed of people. Their ‘war’ for ‘independence’ was ‘won’ by them one year before they had wanted it. Independence was forced on them; they were begged to become independent and free . . . The Pakistani Army effectively reflects the valour and determination of the people it lives off. 1) When a soldier fell on his backside he suffered brain damage. 2) It believes in equality: it constitutes 00.06 per cent of the population but consumes between 70 and 80 per cent of its wealth . . . The official spokesman of the PLA, Wolf, feels he can take on the Pakistani Army any time in an intellectual confrontation. We have advised him to refrain from challenging them as it will only provoke the heroic Pakistani Army into committing mass suicide. This is a very predictable reflex in the character of our brave army. They are also world-famous for surrendering heroically. A very shrewd British statesman once remarked, ‘War is too serious a business to be left to the soldiers.’ How true. And then when given the government to run . . . Soon the rule of the Generals will come to an end for ever. The rule of the lash and the barracks will be buried. First they broke half the country. And now it’s
turn [sic] for the rest. Thus will end the short and sad history of Pakistan, a nation that killed its protector, that bit the hand that fed it; an artificial nation made to be broken on an ugly murderous scaffold. Pakistan will pass into history, shameful and forgotten.

Murtaza ends the letter with love and signs it ‘Salahudin’. It was his
nom de guerre,
a salute to the Arab liberator of Jerusalem.

By the end of July Murtaza and Shahnawaz left Kabul to travel to Libya for a meeting with Colonel Gadaffi. From there they went back to Damascus. Della joined the brothers in Syria, and when she accompanied Murtaza on a visit to meet President Assad, Murtaza introduced her as his fiancée. At one of their meetings with Syrian officials, a general asked Della how her husband, General Roufogalis, was faring. She was taken aback. What an impossible position to be in. Della stammered that General Roufogalis was fine, trying to keep nonchalant, but she was shaken. Murtaza took Della to Maa’lula, the southern Syrian city where Aramaic is still spoken, and they visited a monastery on a short break from Murtaza’s official meetings. A woman offered to read their cards. She told Della that she would never have children but that the man she was with would. How had it come to this? Della wondered. She was the wife of a right-wing jailed junta leader and the fiancée of a left-wing would-be revolutionary.

In their search for support for their newly formed People’s Liberation Army, Murtaza and Shahnawaz went to all the countries that had close relations with Zulfikar’s socialist government, and while thanking them for all their efforts in lobbying General Zia to spare their father’s life, the brothers explained to presidents and diplomats alike that they had decided to take another course. They were going to wage an armed struggle against the junta in Pakistan. Yasser Arafat, fond of Zulfikar, congratulated them on their commitment and spoke of his own battles, hoping to inspire them with tales of the Palestinian experience, but that was it. Many legends swarmed around that meeting – people whisper that Arafat sent PLO operatives to Kabul to train the men gathered by Murtaza and Shahnawaz.
They claim that he diverted arms from the PLO to the PLA, that he personally advised the Bhutto brothers on guerrilla warfare. It isn’t so. The brothers took to wearing
keffiyehs
, chequered Palestinian scarves; Murtaza wore the red
keffiyeh
, as he was the senior commander, and Shahnawaz the black. But that’s it. Knowing my father, I’m sure he would have loved the rumours, flattered by the myths that people dreamt up around the organization.