Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (28 page)

Shahnawaz did not move to Afghanistan with his brother immediately. He was still in London, dealing with some personal business. He had been engaged to a young Turkish girl, Nurseli, whom he had met in college in Switzerland. They had dated for several years before Shahnawaz proposed. Nurseli was from a wealthy Turkish family, a
plain and plump girl, but Shahnawaz loved her and was faced with an ultimatum. When he informed her that he and his brother had planned to wage an armed struggle against the junta in Pakistan, Nurseli’s family baulked. Give up your ‘activities’ they warned Shah or we break the union. There wasn’t much he could do. So he settled his affairs in London, broke his engagement, and packed his bags for Kabul.

The brothers moved into the Chicken Street bungalow on Wazir Akbar Khan Road in the autumn of 1979. The house was called Palace Number 2 and was opposite the German embassy, to the left of the Libyan embassy and a half a kilometre from the residences of the Pakistani embassy. It was a simple one-storey house with three bedrooms – one for Murtaza, one for Shah, and one for Suhail – a study, a kitchen, and a large drawing room/lounge. The walls were painted off-white and the sitting areas panelled in wood. Outside, there was a large lawn and the three young men put up a net where they would play badminton. They carted a grill outside and would often have barbecues in the evenings.

In Kabul, Murtaza went by the alias of Sulaiman Khan. One couldn’t be too careful, especially with Pakistani officials living down the road. He didn’t know much Dari, only a few words – formalities and pleasantries that could get him by – and no Pushto, unlike Suhail, whose family hailed from Peshawar. Shah spoke the most Dari out of the three, not because of their Iranian mother, but more because he had a large number of Persian-speaking friends in college. Together, they were almost fluent.

Wolf, the dog Della spoke Greek to, had been brought to Kabul from London by Murtaza. He always loved dogs and claimed it would be useful to have a guard dog. But Wolf was more of a pet than a guard dog. There were a bunch of Russians – no one knew why then – who lived in the adjoining portion of Palace Number 2. They had their own entrance and their own lawn, but they often stopped outside the gate to play with Wolf. When they left, Wolf mysteriously disappeared with them and Murtaza was certain the Russians had stolen him. He brought another German Shepherd
home after Wolf ’s departure and promptly named him Wolf 2. When Murtaza left Kabul three years later, Wolf 2 went with him.

The President of Afghanistan, who came to power after a communist revolution in 1978, welcomed the Bhutto brothers to his country and allowed them free rein to organize their liberation army in Kabul. They were given a permanent driver, Abdur Rehman, whom Murtaza grew very fond of. Abdur Rehman was in his mid-forties and used to drive them all over town as well as delivering the meals that the presidency insisted on sending over twice a day. ‘They had a strange system in Afghanistan,’ Suhail remembers. ‘In every office from the President’s to the peon’s, government employees were given subsidized rates for food. They’d get rice, two pieces of double
roti
(white bread), some curry and potatoes. Dr Najibullah, the head of Intelligence and a member of the politburo, used to get the same meal – only with a bowl of yoghurt on the side. Afghans don’t grow rice, but they’re mad about it – they ate the same thing every lunch! When the Russians invaded, because of the curfew, we used to get our dinner at around six in the evening, so we used to wait till late at night and then ‘pakify’ the food, adding onions and tomatoes and
masala
to it, then we’d heat it standing over the stove and eat it all up.’
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Dr Najibullah, who was later to become President of Afghanistan, had two people working directly under him,
muawans
or helpers as they called them in Dari, and his
muawan
number one, a Mr Nooristani, was assigned to deal with the newly arrived Pakistani exiles. Nooristani was a shortish, clean-shaven man, his greying hair balding at the top, who always met the Bhutto brothers dressed sharply in a suit. ‘We became friendly with him,’ recalls Suhail. ‘He would come by and see us two or three times a week and update us on the situation in the country and what they were hearing about Pakistan. He came from a well-known political family – his brother was in charge of Kabul airport and his brother-in-law was the head of the Supreme Court.’
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Suhail and Murtaza had a chance meeting with Nooristani in Peshawar, where he had fled, their roles reversed, after they returned to Pakistan in the mid-1990s. I asked Suhail if he knew where Nooristani was now, was he still in Peshawar? ‘I don’t know,’
he says, shaking his head. ‘We heard that his brother-in-law, the head of the Supreme Court, was killed by the mujahideen. I don’t know what happened to him or his brother, Sultan, who ran the airport.’
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Kabul was lonely for the three young men. When the Russians invaded, two months after they moved to Kabul, a 9 p.m. curfew was imposed. ‘We used to make long-distance calls to our families and loved ones in the evenings when we were stuck inside’, laughs Suhail, ‘and the lines were so bad that we’d give up and just stay on the phone chatting to the operators. Time would pass so slowly. We’d be so bored some evenings, we used to forget whether we’d already had dinner, only remembering when we entered the kitchen and saw the sink full of dirty utensils.’ Once the curfew was imposed, there was no more mobility, no more operators willing to stay on the line and shoot the breeze, and the boredom intensified. ‘There was only one channel on TV, the state channel, and at the weekends they would broadcast a half-hour programme called
Ranga Rang
or “The Colourful”,’ Suhail tells me, smiling. ‘It was a music programme that would feature six songs, including one Urdu song and one English song. It was our favourite programme. Otherwise it was propaganda all day! We’d wait for it all week, sitting in front of the television at the ready with our paki-fied food and snacks.’
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While the Russians had been moving troops into Afghanistan from the autumn of 1978, they launched a full-scale deployment in December 1979. For those living in Kabul, the Russian invasion was not a surprise: there were plenty of them around already – even living next door. But the news of the invasion was carried with typical sensationalism on the international airwaves. Della was watching television in Athens when she heard of the Russian move into Afghanistan and was shocked by the news that President Taraki had been executed. He had been in charge during Della’s last visit and the violence with which events seemed to be unfolding unsettled her. She has notes in her purple Asprey diary, taken from Murtaza as he tried his best to explain the complex dynamics of Afghan politics. He wrote down names for her to read up on, Babrak Kamal, Hafizullah Amin, Noor Mohammad and so on. Her own notes are written in small handwriting, squeezed
in between dates and appointments, and when she goes back to the diary to seek some answers explaining the sudden about-turn in Afghanistan, she’s less comforted than she hoped she might be. ‘Kyber, one of Kamal’s men, said too much in a speech, is killed,’ reads one entry. ‘Amin killed in Taraki’s house,’ reads another.

Panicking, Della tried to reach Murtaza by telephone, but the lines were dead. She called his friends in London and was told they hadn’t heard from him either. Everyone was worried, but Della acted. She went to a friend, a lawyer, who through his stock holdings at the
Acropolis
newspaper got her a press pass, slung a Nikon camera around her neck and headed off for the airport. Della departed on Alitalia flight 788 from Athens to New Delhi, hoping to catch a connecting flight to Kabul from India. She reached Delhi in the middle of the night only to find the Ariana Airlines desk empty. She spent what was left of the night sleeping on her black suitcase in the dank surroundings of the Indian airport.

The following afternoon Ariana Airlines announced that the next flight to Kabul had been cancelled. Della mingled with the disappointed passengers and found an Italian diplomat with a briefcase chained to his wrist and an American dressed in jeans and cowboy boots. The American introduced himself as a traveller en route to Kabul to buy carpets. It wasn’t a terribly subtle cover, and Della tells me later that he reeked of the CIA. At least she had a camera to help her disguise. Where were the cowboy’s carpet accoutrements?

The strange trio left the airport and booked three rooms at the nearby Taj Mahal Hotel. They spent the evening at the hotel’s rooftop restaurant and got to sleep early, hoping to find a way out of the country in the morning. However, the next day’s flight to Kabul was cancelled too. Della left Delhi airport with her odd companions and, finding no rooms at the Taj Mahal, headed towards the Asoka Hotel, an older and infinitely cheaper establishment. The Italian diplomat, who only ever removed the chain that connected him to his briefcase at mealtimes, decided to give up and go to his embassy, so Della and the American carpet buyer were forced to count their pennies and share a room with two beds at the thriftier Asoka Hotel.

It was with great relief that on the fourth day of waiting they finally found a flight to Kabul and began the journey to a new Afghanistan. Their flight landed safely and Della found Russians every-where; she distanced herself from the American, who was having a hard time explaining why a connoisseur of Afghan carpets would travel with a trunkload of camera film. When she phoned Murtaza from the airport he was shocked that she had spent four days trying to get to Kabul. Why hadn’t she called? ‘Stay there,’ he told her. ‘I’ll send someone to come and get you.’
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Suhail was dispatched to pick Della up from the airport and drive her back to Palace Number 2. It was the peak of Kabul’s winter and the roads, mostly empty, were paved with mud and snow. Della, warming to her new role as a journalist, noticed a Russian tank on the street outside the house. A Russian soldier was leaning against the tank, watching everything. Della leapt out of the car to take a photograph. Immediately the soldier lifted his rifle and marched towards her. Suhail grabbed Della and pushed her into the house’s garage, speaking quickly in pidgin Russian to the soldier. This wasn’t the Kabul Della remembered. Something ugly had happened to it.

Murtaza comforted Della and tried to make her feel at ease in a city that seemed on the brink of violence. A dinner guest announced himself in the evening, a lean man who went by the name of Azmuddin and, Murtaza warned Della, was part of the new government. Still in journalistic mode, Della asked Azmuddin about the situation. He spoke fluently, going back over a hundred years of Afghan history and stopping at Taraki’s murder. Azmuddin was casual about recent developments, telling Della that the word on the street was that the former Prime Minister had been suffocated in his sleep and rudely refused to die, taking a whole ten minutes for his life to be snuffed out. Della pressed him further, asking why the pro-Russian Taraki should be killed in such a manner. ‘He was dangerous. So we eliminated him,’ Azmuddin replied, staring straight at Della.
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Murtaza touched her, urging her not to continue. Azmuddin was with the Afghan secret service and the new fellows were not as congenial as the ones he and Shah had dealt with before.

One evening Della, Murtaza, Suhail and Shah went to the Intercontinental Hotel. Della noticed that when speaking of Pakistan and Zia’s military regime, Murtaza had become more resolute, more hard. Like Kabul, he’d changed. At the hotel there was a board with the day’s wire stories tacked on to it. Above the board were the words ‘Bulletin Board’. As they left, Della grabbed a pen from her bag and drew lines in between the letters so the sign now read, ‘Bullet/in/Board’.

At home with Murtaza, Della began to realize how much she loved him – how crazy she must be to have flown all this way just to see that he was OK. Murtaza explained that while he was happy to see her, things in Kabul weren’t safe. Because of her husband the Russians might assume she was with the Americans, working for the CIA even. People had been warning him of this since they first fell in love, but now it was serious – for Della’s own safety she had to leave Kabul as soon as possible.

They spent the next morning, a Sunday, trying to find a way out of the city for Della. Finally, her press pass proved to be the golden ticket and a Canadian TV crew that was flying out to Peshawar on a private plane agreed to take one more on board. They parted with a promise to see each other soon – Murtaza had to be in Turkey in February. Della didn’t ask why – she had stopped asking questions – and he promised to come to Athens to see her.

After the Russians invaded, television programming became a little more bearable. To tease the Islamist mujahideen, Egyptian belly dancers were often broadcast wriggling and writhing on screen:
Raqse Arabi
the show was called – ‘Arabic Dance’.

During the day the brothers worked at drafting a manifesto for their movement, whose name they changed to Al Zulfikar, the name of the two-pronged sword carried by the Shiite Imam Ali, who was known to be a fearless warrior and a brave leader, and of course there was the connection with their father, who took his name from the Imam’s sword: Zulfikar Ali, the sword of Ali. They spoke to activists in Pakistan, student leaders, university students, engineers, young men who had been fighting the military junta at home and who would
form the bulk of Al Zulfikar’s recruits. Oddly enough, Murtaza still had his Oxford thesis on his hands. He snatched as much time as he could to work on editing and typing his dissertation, carrying on an anachronistic side life as a student in between the demands of setting up an armed movement against Pakistan’s military dictatorship. As the new recruits trickled into Kabul, Shahnawaz and Murtaza spent days and weeks settling the men into the organization and holding meetings to discuss how best to fight the dictatorship. ‘Those young men were so grateful for that support and solidarity,’ Suhail tells me. ‘Once, after the Russians invaded, in the early days when there was fighting across Afghanistan, the mujahideen sent out a warning that they were going to attack Kabul, and Mir didn’t want all these men, who had come to join us – to fight our cause with us – to feel that they were alone, so he took his things and went over to their lodgings and spent the night with them.’
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