Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (33 page)

Murtaza turned him down. It was not the first time that someone had suggested hijacking an airliner, imagining it would strike a blow at the military regime in Pakistan. A month before Tipu and his friends turned up in Kabul, a group of young men from Rawalpindi had come and said the same thing. Murtaza had turned them down too.

He rejected Tipu’s offer, remembers Suhail, on the grounds that ‘we were fighting a military coterie which had usurped power from the people. Our fight was not against national institutions, like PIA, or against civilians.’ But Tipu was disappointed his passionate pleas had been refused. After that first encounter, he got in touch again and tried once more to push his idea. Tipu was refused, more sternly this time. ‘Mir was taken completely off guard when he got the call that night,’ says Suhail, shaking his head and toying with his unlit cigarette.

The PIA plane was scheduled to fly from Karachi to Peshawar and had been taken over in mid-air by three men. Tipu led the group and ordered the pilot to divert the plane to the Middle East, not taking into consideration that it was only prepared for a short-haul flight. There wasn’t enough fuel to take them that far. The hijackers then demanded that the plane be flown to Kabul; it was the closest landing point – a brief journey by air over the border from Peshawar. The Afghan authorities saw the hijacking as a rare opportunity to improve their relations with Pakistan and, strangely enough, the Bhutto brothers. As soon as the plane landed, the Afghan authorities called Palace Number 2 and asked Murtaza to intercede.

‘We were going through a rough patch in our relationship with the Afghans at the time,’ Suhail recalls. ‘They had started trying to interfere with Murtaza’s running of the organization, basically trying to work on the Pakistanis who were coming over to join us in the hopes of having some insider information on what we were getting up to. Murtaza was very upset; he was on the verge of leaving Kabul.

He wasn’t willing to be compromised. And then this hijacking happened.’ The call came from Dr Najibullah, the notorious head of the Intelligence services. He told Suhail he was coming over to the house to talk about the situation. The PIA station chief in Kabul also called Murtaza. ‘He knew us, and he called and said you people should help solve this stand-off – there are women and children on board the aircraft.’

Dr Najibullah turned up at the house, aware of the tension between his government and their guests. ‘He spoke English and Urdu perfectly,’ Suhail says, laughing, ‘but that night he insisted on speaking in Pushto and having me translate for Mir. Mir’s initial impulse was to help end the hostage crisis so he put aside the friction between us and the government and said he was ready to do whatever was necessary to solve the issue peacefully.’

Together, Murtaza and Suhail were taken to Kabul airport, driven there by Captain Baba, the oddly named head of the national Ariana Airlines. When they reached the airport the authorities gave them two blue coats to put on, the sort worn by airport engineers, then drove them towards the tarmac where the plane was standing. ‘Talk to them,’ pleaded Captain Baba, ‘tell them to end this, they’ll listen to you.’

‘It was late at night by the time we reached the tarmac,’ says Suhail, ‘two or three in the morning at least.’ At that point, no harm had been done to any of the passengers and everyone was anxious that the hijacking crisis be settled quickly and peacefully. Captain Baba dropped the two men off right in front of the airliner and a message was sent asking the hijacker in charge to come down to the tarmac.

The meeting between the three men was short, no longer than fifteen minutes. Murtaza asked Tipu to release the women and children on board. He asked that the hijackers not harm any of the passengers. ‘Mir was angry,’ Suhail recalls, ‘but he remained calm, aware of the danger everyone was in – our situation with the government, the passengers and the fallout from Zia’s thugs in Pakistan. He asked Tipu to end it. Tipu refused.’ The hijackers had already given a list of fifty-five prisoners in Zia’s jails that they were demanding be released in
return for the safety of the passengers on board. ‘We can’t stop now,’ Tipu told Murtaza and Suhail. ‘The government will butcher the prisoners, whom we’ve already identified to them.’ The fifty-five prisoners were mostly PPP activists, but included known leftist activists and workers imprisoned across the country, mainly in the Punjab. While Tipu agreed to Murtaza’s demand that the women and children be freed, he told them that without any concessions from the government it would be suicide for them to end the hijacking.

The meeting was over, Murtaza had asked for the end of the impasse and for the safety of those held hostage. There was no further discussion, no time to waste. After fifteen minutes Murtaza and Suhail left Kabul airport and Salamullah Tipu returned to the aeroplane. Several hours later, in the early hours of the morning, the women and children on board were released and taken to the Kabul Intercontinental Hotel.

‘The government of Pakistan sent a negotiating team to Kabul soon after we’d left to deal with the hijackers and end the siege,’ Suhail says. He sounds angry, even now, at the events that led to us, twenty-seven years later, sitting in a noisy and smoke-filled coffee shop in Karachi discussing the hijacking. ‘Watching their negotiations play out you got the feeling that the junta was perfectly OK dragging the drama of the hijacking on. They didn’t seem serious about ending the stand-off, almost as if they were stalling, as if they were trying to agitate the hijackers into a reaction so that the military government would be justified in responding to them with force.’

During the time the junta’s negotiation team was dealing with the hijackers, still grounded in Kabul, a passenger was killed. Major Tariq Rahim was shot by the hijackers. Rahim had once been Zulfikar’s aide-de-camp and was, since Zulfikar’s execution, a serving diplomat in Iran. As the hijacking unfolded, culminating with the death of Major Rahim, the junta’s public insistence that the Bhutto brothers and PPP stalwarts were behind the operation began to be questioned. Why would the brothers kill their father’s ADC?

Zia’s prisons were full of political prisoners and his reluctant international allies began to squirm at the clear evidence of the junta’s
human rights abuses. There had to be some change, some shift in the dictator’s unrepentant violence – the prisons had to be emptied of democratic activists. But for Zia to simply release those detainees who had actively opposed him would have caused a huge loss of face, a sign of weakness in a country where weakness is not tolerated, least of all by the armed forces.

The hijacking would prove politically expedient for the junta – political prisoners would be released and offered as proof of the regime’s clemency. All at once, the hijacking and its consequences would be a means of discrediting the popular resistance against the junta, thus providing a legitimate excuse to clamp down further on their opposition, notably the MRD movement. The Bhutto brothers would be branded terrorists, ending their ability to travel freely, and numerous charges of treason – complete with death sentences – would be brought against them. It would be a sword hanging over their heads for a very long time indeed.

The hijacking stand-off in Kabul lasted seven days, until the Afghan government came to the conclusion that Zia’s regime wasn’t serious about negotiating an end. At that point, fearful that the Pakistanis were holding out for a serious mishap to happen in Kabul so that they could forcefully intervene, the Afghan authorities requested the hijacked plane be moved elsewhere. The hijackers asked to be flown to Syria, another country they knew had ties to the Bhutto brothers, expecting a sympathetic landing place. President Hafez al Assad of Syria, however, refused permission for the hijacked plane to land on Syrian soil. He held out until an official request came from the Pakistani government asking the Syrian government to allow the plane to land and to give safe passage to the people on board the flight.

Once it reached Syria, the hijacked plane sat on the Damascus airport tarmac for another few days. The whole crisis lasted around twelve days. ‘It was one of the longest hijacking crises in history, I think,’ Suhail tells me carefully. Eventually fifty-four out of the original list of fifty-five prisoners were released in Pakistan and flown to Syria according to the hijackers’ demands and the passengers and airliner were finally released. The prisoners and three hijackers were
kept at the Damascus Airport Hotel and allowed to apply for asylum, facilitated by the United Nations. Dr Ghulam Hussain was one of the released prisoners. He had been the Secretary-General of the PPP and had refused to leave the party and join Zia’s cabinet. For his defiance, he was charged with more than a dozen murders and thrown in jail. Dr Hussain is an elderly man; he looks like Santa Claus, with his clipped white beard and glowing white hair, and is a prolific poet and writer.

‘The hijackers weren’t PPP people,’ Dr Hussain told me in his home in Islamabad. ‘The whole thing was manoeuvred by General Zia! He wanted an explosion in front of the world that would destroy the Bhutto boys.’
¹⁴

Dr Hussain is a gregarious man, he laughs loudly and talks in a melodic lilt. He wears thin glasses with gold frames and orthopaedic footwear. He has a strong, deep voice that’s interrupted with shrill giggles at memories past. He is also a passionate orator. I’ve seen him at political rallies, watched how the crowd listens to him in silence, hanging on his every word. He calls me
sahiba
, or madam, but calls my father and uncle ‘boys’.

Talking to him now, listening to his exuberant manner of answering a question with riddles and poems and laughter, I wonder how he survived Zia’s jails; he was held in eight prisons, regularly shifted and threatened with torture. ‘Every time they shifted me,’ Dr Hussain tells me proudly, ‘I would shout loudly
jiye Bhutto
, long live Bhutto!’ In jail he was deprived of newspapers and books, but was allowed to keep his medical equipment and paper to write on. Dr Hussain had a routine; each time they moved him, he would create a garden in the small patch of dirt outside his cell. He learned how to cook ‘very well actually’ and wrote two diaries for his children, hoping they would be a substitute for his fatherly advice which was being missed at home.

‘The brain is an organ, na?’ he says in a jolly tone. ‘You have to use it or lose it!’

Dr Hussain spent his time at the Damascus Airport Hotel, which lasted almost a year, writing poetry, a habit he had picked up in jail. ‘The regime was going to use it, the violence of the hijacking, to
balance the violence they had committed against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. But unfortunately for them President Carter had another hostage crisis, in Iran, to deal with and Zia’s attempt was pushed to one side.’ Eventually Dr Hussain was granted asylum in Sweden.

Undaunted, the junta went into overdrive, using any angle it could to pin responsibility for the hijacking on Murtaza and Shahnawaz. Benazir made the mistake of making jubilant phone calls, excited by the prospect of a blow against the junta. ‘We did it!’ she bragged to friends and colleagues alike ‘We finally got them!’ Almost immediately, the police turned up and arrested her and Nusrat on charges of orchestrating the hijacking. Benazir hadn’t spoken to her brothers, she had no idea of the danger they were in. Her phone call compromised her and Nusrat, but it sealed her brothers’ fate. ‘Sessions judge’s report on hijacking concluding it was an individual act,’ Benazir wrote in an undated entry in one of her large dusty registers. ‘Regime calls it PPP hijacking before hijackers even reveal details – March 2 or 3 ’81 . . . PCO order passed so that constitutional justice not available to us for fabricated case. Zia admits PCO passed to “eliminate” elements responsible for hijacking.’ Benazir displays a surprising knowledge of the law as she weighs up the danger against the family caused by her spontaneous braggadocio and the aftermath of their arrest. ‘Broadcast by BBC that
Begum Sahiba
and myself to be tried for hijacking. This is before any charges have been made against us formally and before we have even been questioned by relevant agencies to see if their investigation shows a prima facie case or not.’ In the end, no case was filed against Benazir; only her brothers were indicted.

‘What?’ yelped one of my aunt’s friends in Islamabad when I brought up the question of Benazir’s exultation over the hijacking. ‘No, no, no. Benazir was very opposed to her brothers’ terrorism,’ the friend, who repeatedly asked not to be named, insisted. Through gritted teeth I reminded the friend that they were honourably acquitted in the same courts that accused them of committing said terrorist acts.

It was a nightmare trying to interview my aunt’s friends. They responded to my questions with a Stasi-like façade of revised, stateapproved truths. ‘What was Benazir like before she came to power?’
I asked the friend, a woman who made a career of her friendship, even serving in parliament during Benazir’s first term in power (‘We were like children, the experience was so new to us!’ she exclaimed, adding quickly, ‘But we learned fast . . .’) ‘What do you mean?’ she baulked, eyes aflutter. ‘I mean, before she was Prime Minister, what was she like?’ I clarified slowly. ‘Oh, she was always the same person.’ The friend’s eyes glazed over. ‘Generous, deeply concerned with her country – you could even say obsessed!’ – pause for hearty laughter – ‘Loving, nurturing, she never really changed.’

With others, it was like speaking to a brick wall. Benazir’s role could not be questioned. She made no mistakes. Any suggestion that she might have was denounced as propaganda, vicious lies spread by anti-Bhutto enemies, malicious claims made by the undemocratic army, or misogynists’ vendettas against the Islamic world’s first woman prime minister.

But back to the hijacking. The friend organised Benazir’s defence, to little avail since it was openly recognized that Benazir was arrested, along with her mother, for gloating about ‘our people’ doing the job. Only when she realized that she was playing into the regime’s hands did Benazir begin to see what those around her understood as soon as news of the hijacking was released. Benazir began to backtrack; it wasn’t ‘our people’ who carried out the hijacking. She was opposed to violence, of all kinds. Benazir was the innocent. It was her brothers who had become terrorists. Indeed, she had become a Muslim Aung San Suu Kyi, a Pakistani Gandhi, if you will.