Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (32 page)

But you, young and beautiful as you are, will have to seriously think about your own future. Don’t worry about me, my destiny will be decided through the barrel of a gun . . . I have got involved in a job and a lifestyle that is not of my own making. You must not destroy your life for my sake.

Murtaza tells Della that he will always say, till his dying day, that she was the true and only love of his life. Think of yourself, of your future. I’m lost in my work for the next two or three years. He asks this much
of her, for his sake. There is so much more he wants to write but cannot. It was the last thing Murtaza wrote before ending their relationship.

‘We were the only organization at the time in which there was no free entry,’ Suhail tells me about Al Zulfikar, the new name of the organization founded by the Bhutto brothers, a play on their father’s name and the famous sword of Imam Ali. ‘We contacted people, never accepting those who came to us because we were wary of infiltration.’ He shakes his head and looks down. ‘But it still happened, even though we were careful.’
¹⁰

At the start of 1981 the organization was finally taking shape. Party workers who had been active from 1977 to 1979, the time of Zulfikar’s trial and imprisonment, were the ideal candidates to join the liberation movement and they came to Kabul from all across Pakistan’s four provinces. ‘Because of the persecution in Pakistan,’ Suhail explains, ‘many loyal party workers and activists were compelled to migrate. It was too dangerous for them to stay on in Pakistan, they were being beaten, tortured and arrested. We were under a strict dictatorship. Party workers, those who had the most sincere records, were largely poor, had neither the resources nor the means to migrate to Europe or the West. They would come to us. Our base in Kabul was basically a refuge for them where they could be safe and carry on the struggle against the junta.’
¹¹

Suhail is a trim man, tallish. His hair has thinned on top and has greyed over the passage of time, turning even the light hairs on his moustache a cloudy white. He smokes cigarettes, like my father did, slowly and as if they require his consideration and attention. When we speak about the old days, the Kabul days, he wavers between laughing and joking about the memories of these three young men – all from privileged families – sitting in Afghanistan and plotting to overthrow a dictatorship and complete seriousness when we talk about the actual work they had sacrificed their lives to undertake.

‘A few women did come from Punjab to join the movement,’ he says, recalling every detail as if it was yesterday. ‘We were certainly open to it, we didn’t want to close any doors to those who had a sincere belief in our cause, but keeping in mind the terrain – having to cross through our Tribal Belt to reach Afghanistan – it didn’t work out.’ They did try though. It makes me happy, this small thought – that my father was progressive enough to recognize that men alone do not make revolutions, even at his young age of twenty-seven. As I linger on the thought, Suhail continues, describing the day-to-day life they led in Kabul – a period I’ve often heard him refer to as ‘the best times’.

‘There were about a hundred people who joined us at the end. We had a separate compound where we worked and housed everyone and had divided the movement into three parts – there was a political wing, a military wing and a security wing. Mir was the Secretary-General of Al Zulfikar and Shah initially headed the security wing and then later the military wing.’

Al Zulfikar, which we call AZO, adding the O for organization, was never completely real to me. I was very young when it was disbanded. I only heard about it in passing, saw its logo on stationery kept in a dusty unused drawer. I saw its members, like Suhail, as family friends, as uncles who would take us out to eat ice-cream and whose children I grew up playing with. The notion that it existed in a different context is a strange one, like someone telling me about a foreign film that I’d watched but never read the subtitles of. But now I can finally understand the danger that followed my father and Uncle Shah for most of my childhood; it suddenly all makes sense and while his are not the choices I would make now, I feel secretly proud of my father for abandoning the offer of a bland but comfortable exile in London to fight what he believed was an unjust system.

‘The daily routine started in the early morning with physical exercises, which Shah would lead,’ Suhail says, toying with his packet of local cigarettes. ‘Then we’d have a political lecture – different people who worked in the political wing would come and talk on a number of issues, the floor was always open. We’d hear lectures on the history
of the military in Pakistan, the growth of the People’s Party, histories of democratic struggles in other nations – it was always varied.

‘Then there would be a period of physical training, shortly before lunch. When the time to eat came, Shah would eat with everyone – he’d made a lot of friends among the recruits by that point and was very jovial and jolly during his break time with the men. And then we would have political discussions, group talks about our aims, what we were fighting for and general debates. Shah was very popular with the people who joined us; he was young and fun and had a real sense of the physical dynamics of fighting an armed struggle. Murtaza would visit the compound every day, but he was more concerned with the diplomatic and political side of things. He would meet with political groups that sent delegations or members from Pakistan, he would spend hours collecting news about the situation in the country, scouring the press and speaking to journalists, preparing political statements and so on – it was Murtaza’s job as the Secretary-General.’ Their separate roles – Shah as the more militant commander of the organization and Murtaza as the political leader – would become more defined as time went on and would mark their lives in very different ways.

Meanwhile, in Athens, Della was furious. She hadn’t bargained for an easy life when she began to see Murtaza and she wasn’t going to let him slip away into the ether of his political life.

She wrote an angry letter back to Kabul, her tears smudging the blue ink of her writing. ‘You crazy fool,’ Della began. ‘Who asked your opinion about my future? My future belongs to me and I will do what I want with it . . . I too have a destiny, a duty that I am trying to fulfil and a big, deep love for you. When I read your letter I thought that the skies had opened up, that all the snow of the Afghan mountains was falling on my head.’
¹²
She made a copy of the letter, the one she gives me twenty-seven years later. She sent the original, crossed out ‘Always love Mir’ in her purple Asprey’s diary, and waited.

A week later a postcard from Mutaza arrived, sent from Libya and postmarked 29 January. Della took the postcard to the Libyan embassy in Athens, showed it to the man seated behind a desk and demanded answers. She told him she was looking for the sender of the postcard.
The embassy official looked at the card carefully, wondering if the tall blonde woman was playing at something and told her to come back in a few days. When Della returned she was told that no such person was living in Libya and that she must have been deluded to think that the embassy could help her on such a wild goose chase. Storming out, Della grabbed an armful of tourist brochures on Tripoli. As soon as she got home Della called all the hotels explaining that she was looking for a certain man. But she couldn’t find Murtaza. He had already left.

Undaunted, she eventually reached Shah by phone. He was surprised. If Della could find him by blind-calling hotels in random countries, their secretive lifestyle wasn’t so secretive after all. Murtaza wasn’t with him, but Shah told Della he’d relay the message. A few days later Shah called her back and told her Murtaza had called him from Abu Dhabi, asked Shah to speak to Della and assure her that he was fine, asked her to be patient and promised that he would write soon and explain everything.

On 24 February there was a serious earthquake in Greece. A lot of damage had been caused and Greeks sat in front of their TV screens watching the news of the disaster unfold. As Della watched, another headline caught her attention. A PIA aeroplane had been hijacked. The hijackers were claiming that they were part of a militant movement based in Afghanistan, to where the plane was being diverted. Della listened carefully, making sure she heard everything the newsreader was saying. It couldn’t be, she thought. It can’t be. Murtaza and Shahnawaz Bhutto, the news said, had ordered the Pakistani plane to be hijacked; the men on board claimed they were acting on the orders of Al Zulfikar.

The phone rang in Palace Number 2 sometime in the early evening, around 5.30. Murtaza picked up the phone and the caller asked to speak to Mir Murtaza Bhutto. It was a somewhat strange call, as their number wasn’t public – it wasn’t in the Kabul phone book and most of the government officials who called Murtaza were friendly enough with him for him to know their secretaries by name. However, he still assumed the call was from some government office or other. ‘Salamullah Tipu wants to speak to you,’ said the caller. The name was familiar,
but not especially so. ‘Who is Salamullah Tipu?’ Murtaza, now annoyed, asked as politely as he could. ‘He’s hijacked a plane. I’m calling from the Kabul airport control tower. He’s in the aeroplane now and asked to be put through to you.’

That was how Murtaza came to know that a plane had been hijacked in his name. But it was not the first time he had heard of Tipu.

None of the interviews I did on the hijacking were easy to arrange. Suhail and I tried to speak in 70 Clifton, but I think the chandeliers still have ears there. I moved us to the garden, where we sat under a
champa
tree speaking in whispers, hunched over our chairs under the watchful gaze of our neighbours, the Russian consul’s residence and the Iranian consulate. It still didn’t feel safe enough, even in such friendly company. The hijacking had been a sword hanging over my father’s head, ready to drop at any time. It was important for me to get as much information as I could on the incident. The official case against my father and uncle, absolving them of any involvement, was quietly concluded in 2003 and has left, for me at least, a gaping hole of unanswered questions. Who had arranged the hijacking? Who pulled the plane out of the sky? It was too easy to end the case once the Bhutto brothers had been taken care of and removed from the picture. I took Suhail to a trendy coffee shop in Karachi’s busy Zamzama shopping area. Here again we adopted our hunched poses and whispered over overpriced hot lattes. I thought it absurd that we were sitting among teenagers comparing mobile phones and
desi
yuppies gossiping in corporate-speak, discussing the details of a junta-backed hijacking. Suhail was indulgent with me and my constantly paranoid shifting; he’s always been a surrogate father of sorts. He was present at my birth and at my brother Zulfi’s, and was there when as a family we adopted Mir Ali, a month-old baby boy from a Karachi orphanage. Suhail travels to Karachi for all our birthdays, even mine and I’m nearing thirty.

A group of men had come to Kabul from Karachi three months earlier. Salamullah Tipu was one of them. He had a reputation in Karachi, known among students for his violence in university politics. He had
fought with the student wing of the religious Jamaat Islami party and had been involved in a shooting incident at Karachi University as a result of a power struggle within the party.

Tipu was a good-looking man, Suhail remembers. He had been in the army once, briefly. It had been his childhood dream to join up and he had been selected by the armed forces as soon as he was old enough. But Tipu left claiming that he had been shunted out during training for personal reasons he would never go into. ‘The story was unclear, a little foggy, that and the fact that he had come to us – it cancelled him out for us,’
¹³
says Suhail, struggling to put the pieces of that first meeting together.

‘He wasn’t a member of our organization, he didn’t come through the PPP cadres; he’d come to Kabul through common contacts. Our headquarters were visited by many Pakistani activists, tribal leaders, nationalists, leftists – they’d often call on Murtaza to discuss the situation in Pakistan or to bring news from home.’ Tipu seemed smart, he was aware of the problems the people were facing under Zia’s regime, but something about him didn’t click. There was something edgy about him, something rough. He’d come from a violent background within both his family and his community. ‘But he came to us,’ Suhail repeats, ‘and that aroused our suspicion.’

The visiting group consisted of two men besides Tipu; one was his cousin and the other was his friend. It was the age of hijackings – made famous by the Palestinians, desperate to call attention to their plight. Leila Khalid, who proudly proclaimed hijacking as her occupation, became a guerrilla symbol of Palestinian frustration overnight. Hijackings, then seen as media-savvy operations, had captured the world’s notice.

Tipu suggested to Murtaza that the newly formed Al Zulfikar follow the lead of other liberation groups and hijack a Pakistani airliner. Suhail remembers his pitch. ‘You know, there was tyranny in Pakistan. There was no judicial remedy to the excesses of the junta. Tipu really caught on to that and talked about how people there were bubbling with fear. He talked about the fact that so many political workers were in prisons and that they had no recourse to the courts. He was
right; the lawyers were divided between supporting and aiding the regime and those who were cracked down upon because they were vocally opposed to it. He spoke about hijacking an aeroplane to negotiate the release of prisoners.’