Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (29 page)

After her trip to Afghanistan, Della went back on the road lobbying for her husband. She flew to America and found herself meeting with Ahmed, the former Somalian Ambassador, who had since been posted to the United Nations. Everywhere she went, it seemed, she was speaking either for her husband or for Murtaza. Ahmed asked about Murtaza and how things had been since Zulfikar’s execution, but there was little Della could offer – there was no longer much she could do on Murtaza’s behalf.

In February, in between a trip to Turkey and Libya, Murtaza stopped over in Athens to see Della. He was back to his old self, scribbling notes in her diary when she wasn’t around. ‘Club’, Della had written in a date marked for March. ‘
Which club?
’ wrote Mir, underlining it for emphasis. He flipped forward to September, his birthday, and wrote under the date 18/9 ‘A historic date’. As soon as it seemed that the old Murtaza had resurfaced, he was gone again.

In Pakistan, ever since Zulfikar’s imprisonment there had been a concerted smear campaign against the Bhutto family. The junta printed stories of Zulfikar’s ‘un-Islamic’ nature, calling him a communist and an atheist. They ran photographs of Nusrat and her daughters – their heads superimposed on bodies of women cavorting in swimsuits or
knocking back drinks at raucous parties. But they saved the fiercest attack for Murtaza and Shahnawaz.

Since their move to Kabul and their declaration that they were going to fight the military regime until the democratic constitution of 1973 was restored, the regime began to portray them as terrorists. Al Zulfikar had – thus far – done nothing except release statements, invite support, and speak out about the government’s use of torture and violence against the Pakistani people. But there was large covert support for the organization among students and activists in Pakistan. They were part of a larger framework of resistance and that wasn’t received kindly. But Murtaza always kept his sense of humour, no matter how dour the situation. He wrote funny letters, teasing Della about her country in one. ‘Greece is internationally famous for three reasons. First it has more islands than people. Second, it used to be a part of Turkey. Third, its national hero, Alexander the Great, was a Yugoslavian.’
¹³
In Libya, he sent Della a postcard of a camel and told her he was wearing a ring she had given him, though he never wore jewellery, except for a watch his father had given him. ‘I think of you all the time,’ Murtaza wrote and asked Della to come to India with him in the summer.

Della could not make the trip; her health had been bad and she was exhausted. She was paying more attention, finally, to herself after neglecting the health problems she had been suffering from for years, so instead Murtaza flew to Athens on his way to Delhi. In another of Zulfikar’s prison letters, one I have heard about from my mother, Ghinwa, but never seen, Murtaza’s father praises his sons for their hard work through the Save Bhutto Committee. He makes notes and suggestions here and there, ending the letter with another directive – he forbids his sons to go to India. It is not a request and a reason is not given; it must have been obvious to the sons, though they were not to listen.

In Delhi, Murtaza met with Indira Gandhi, who had a famously rocky relationship with Zulfikar, and her son Rajiv. I remember the day Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. My father and I were in a supermarket in Lebanon and we passed by a television set near the electronics section just as the news of his death was coming on.
Papa stopped and watched it, shaking his head. I never even knew that they had met.

Murtaza flew to Athens twice more: on his way back from India and for four days to celebrate his birthday en route to Damascus in September. Della didn’t ask where he was going; she didn’t want to know any more. In October, Murtaza went to see her for the last time. They weren’t to know that they’d never see each other again, but still the visit was bittersweet. Murtaza was pensive – Della watched him smoothing down the hair at the crown of his head, something he only did when he was anxious. She noticed that he smoked too many cigarettes and was less talkative than usual. Della was still not well and Murtaza asked her to stop neglecting herself.

On 18 October, before leaving for the airport, Murtaza wrote a tender letter to Della that he left for her to read after he had gone. She drove him to the airport in Athens and they embraced and kissed as Murtaza was about to board his flight. They would see each other soon, they promised.

{
9
}

A
t the other end of the world, Pakistan was beginning to burn. The movement against General Zia, initially held back by the sheer force of the regime, was growing. After executing Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and ordering a strict curfew to halt movement across the country, General Zia banned all political parties and political activity of any kind, forbade public meetings and instituted complete and total press censorship.
¹
. Zia’s total disregard for civil rights, human rights, sexual liberties and basic democratic freedoms inspired the most concerted resistance Pakistan has ever seen. The General’s regime, for its part, came down strongly against the movements his brutality generated. Zia’s state was not only excessively brutal – ordering public floggings and hangings – but also well versed in the art of humiliation. During the Islamic month of fasting, Ramadan, Zia ordered water lines in Karachi to be cut, ensuring that no running water was available for un-Islamic drinking from sunrise to sunset, forcing the fast on those who were less than willing (that sewage lines were also closed demonstrates in what esteem the regime held secularists). For the rest of the year, General Zia made the five-time-a-day prayers mandatory in all offices, businesses and schools.

The resistance movement in Pakistan was represented by four large groups: the press, lawyers, women and union workers, and the agitation was led by political groups and activists, of which Murtaza was a part.

As soon as General Zia reneged on his promise to hold elections in October 1979, the junta instituted blanket press censorship. Six daily newspapers were permanently shut down –
Musawat
, which Murtaza
carried on printing and distributing from London,
Tameer
,
Hawat
,
Aafaaq
,
Sahafat
and
Sadaqat
. The weekly
Mustaqbul
and monthly
Dhanak
were also closed.
²
Martial Law Regulation No. 19 was enacted and gave the government the right to censor matters deemed ‘prejudicial to Islamic ideology’, Pakistan’s security, and ‘morality and maintenance of public order’.
³

Local and international media outlets, including the BBC, were subject to twice-daily checks by the junta censor, who alone had the power to decide what would and would not be reported. What was considered offensive to ‘Islamic ideology’, a pet cause of the fundamentalist General, was often absurd and arbitrary – one over-eager TV producer went as far as censoring Popeye’s girlfriend Olive Oyl out of the cartoon because she wore a skirt.
⁴
Women anchors on Pakistan state television, PTV, were required to wear a
hijab
before being allowed on air. Mehtab Rashdi, a newscaster, was the first woman to quit in response to the mandatory
hijab
edict.

The reporting of any item that made the military regime look bad was considered ‘anti-state’. Hussain Naqi, the Lahore bureau chief of the Pakistan Press Institute, lost his job in 1984 when he reported that the US President had stated during a press conference that Pakistan wasn’t a democracy.
⁵
Such a close watch was kept on the press that news of hunger strikes, student protests and political rallies were made known to reporters and editors only to prevent them from covering such events.
⁶

While previous governments in Pakistan – in fact, one could be generous and say all governments – had imposed restrictions on the press at some point or other, no other government was as ruthless in meting out punishment for press disobedience as Zia’s. In 1978, the editors of the Urdu dailies the
Urdu Digest
, the
Sun
and the PPP’s
Musawat
were arrested and sentenced to one year of rigorous imprisonment and ten public lashes for ‘publishing derogatory remarks against Zia’.
⁷
They were later pardoned and released but the message was clear. Disobedience to the state was unacceptable. Siddiqueh Hidayatullah, a teacher who was at the start of her career at Kinnaird College in Lahore, witnessed the frenzy around the city’s first public flogging and described the spectacle for me. ‘The lashing was being held on a large
chowrangi
or roundabout on Jail Road, right there in the open, in the middle of a busy street. People came in what looked like the thousands to watch, some were called from the nearby bazaars and others must have just turned up to have a look. Some men even climbed trees to have a decent view. It was sick. There was such a
tamasha
, or commotion, created around the floggings so that all of us would know how ferocious the regime was.’
⁸
The same year, the editor of the Karachi daily
Sadaqat
– which would eventually be permanently shut down – was arrested for the crime of criticizing the government’s central budget.
⁹

Local playwrights, poets and writers were also subject to Zia’s lack of tolerance for creativity and were punished or silenced, and forced to leave the country when their writing made the junta unhappy. Notable writers from this time who fled Pakistan include the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who took refuge in Beirut, Rehmatullah Majothi, Naseer Mirza and Tariq Ali.

While reporters and editors continued to resist government censorship and were punished for their defiance with prison sentences or fines, the turning point came in May 1978 when four newsmen were publicly flogged for their dissidence.
¹⁰
Never before in the history of Pakistan had journalists been so brutalized. But the punishment failed to have the desired effect among the populace – instead of scaring the press into submission, the public floggings pushed members of the press towards actively resisting the government and they did this in two ways.

First, journalists began to invite arrest by staging highly visible sitins, hunger strikes and rallies and by printing material critical of the government. In the two months after the floggings took place, 150 journalists were arrested.
¹¹
Zia justified his regime’s unforgiving treatment of the press by declaring, ‘I have no respect for these newspapers and journalists who blindly use the stick of the pen to harm national interests.’
¹²

His comments only further enraged the press corps. As well as courting arrest, newsmen began an indefinite hunger strike at the offices of
Musawat
in 1979 as a protest against the paper’s closure. They agitated until they were carried away and arrested by the police.
¹³
Nine Urdu
dailies in Muzzafarabad were shut down by a local magistrate’s decree in 1979 as they refused to cease printing material critical of the government.
¹⁴
Ten journalists in Lahore lost their jobs in 1983 for taking part in a civil disobedience campaign protesting the extensive government repression, and as further punishment were banned from working in the media for the duration of Zia’s rule.

Second, the press, which has never been braver since, fought against martial law through covert resistance, or as the government called it ‘deviant behaviour’. Newspapers, under the orders of the board of censors, had to submit each and every article ahead of publication. Often, the board crossed out entire stories and news items it considered unfit to be edited, let alone published. Instead of filling their papers with large swathes of meaningless items, the newspapers began to leave the spaces blank. When the largest English daily newspaper,
Dawn
– an establishment mouthpiece – printed almost an entire newspaper of empty columns, the government threatened it with permanent closure
¹⁵
.

Many other newspapers followed suit, changing their tactics only once the government censors caught on. When blank columns in newspapers were forbidden, journalists like Mazhar Abbas, who wrote for the
Daily Star
, began resisting the censor’s pen more caustically. ‘In the blank spaces we would print a picture of a donkey or a dog and print news of Zia speaking or his ministers speaking underneath the pictures. So, they realized then that something fishy was going on, Then they said you had to inform the censorship board specifically of what news you would use to fill the blank spaces!’
¹⁶

When the censors tightened their reins further, cutting items in the evening that they had approved in the day’s check, the papers began circumventing them altogether. News items that the Karachi censors had cut would be printed in the newspaper’s Lahore edition, which had entirely separate printers and censors
¹⁷
. The efforts of the press, acting more or less as a unified front against Zia, successfully resisted the attempts to make the fourth estate into an agent of martial law.

During Zia’s time, half my family was in exile and the other half in jail. When I began my research into the period, I turned to journalists – who, as luck would have it, had taken Zia’s repression personally enough
to share their detailed memories with me when my textbooks and newspaper clippings became too dry.

I was twenty-two and in England studying for my master’s, and flirting with the idea of a journey through my father and family’s past, I decided to write my own master’s thesis on resistance to General Zia’s dictatorship. It was a timely topic; Zia’s successor, General Musharraf, was in the sixth year of his rule and a new Afghan war was on Pakistan’s horizon. But it was more than just intellectual curiosity that shaped my dissertation. I wanted to understand my father. I wanted to break the taboo of talking about what happened in Afghanistan. I grew up idolizing my father’s decision to take up arms against Pakistan’s military junta, but as I got older and had to grow up without my father I began to stuggle past my childhood reverence. Why had he gone to Kabul? It was a decision that altered all our lives. It wasn’t enough just to know he had gone. It wasn’t enough just to love him, regardless of his choices. I had to dig deeper and understand what happened through retrospective lenses. My reverence for my father did not change, but my method of questioning did. I buried myself in libraries, consuming resistance theory and history during what should have been an unencumbered and self-congratulatory time of study. My choice not only gave me the tools to understand a period that had been mythical for me growing up, but also gave me the added benefit of distance when working to understand a history that had deeply personal consequences.