Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (34 page)

A case was filed in Zia’s courts against the two brothers and Suhail, carrying with it the death penalty. In fact, all three men were honourably acquitted of the hijacking charges in 2003 – the case had never been quashed, the charges never investigated beyond Zia’s dogged insistence that the hijacking was part of a Bhutto plot to wreak havoc. It is, to this day, a stain on the Bhutto brothers. After they were acquitted, posthumously, by the same courts that had brought the charges against them, the file on the hijacking was put in a bottom drawer somewhere. It was as if it had never happened.

Salamullah Tipu, in time, began working openly for the Pakistan
government. His role in leading the hijacking operation didn’t seem to stand in his way at all.

Della hadn’t heard from Murtaza for several months. On 20 April she called him at the Kabul number, but he’d long since stopped picking up the phone. Days later, she received a letter from him postmarked

25 April 1981 and handwritten on his personal stationery. ‘Maybe it has now become clear to you why I was forced to write that letter,’ he said. ‘I am now hunted down not only by the Pakistani police and the Afghan rebels, but also by Interpol. It has become virtually impossible to travel. My lifestyle is no longer what you knew it to be. I am literally a fugitive and a person wanted dead or alive. I am forced to live in secrecy and under heavy protection . . . I believe you have tried to phone here. It is useless. They will never connect it.’
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He ended the letter by saying that he hoped they would always be friends and that in time Della would understand why he had to make the decisions he did; they were, he insisted, in her best interests.

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B
y May of that year, Della and Murtaza were no longer in touch. They had separated and Della reacted angrily. She chopped off her long blonde hair, dyed it dark brown and did her best to move on with her life. At the end of the summer, she happened to be in London and ran into an old friend of Murtaza’s. She asked him, after they had danced around the subject, about Mir and the friend told her he was fine. She asked if he had met someone; she always suspected that another woman had diverted his attention, causing him to end things with her so abruptly. The friend answered that he had. Is he happy? Della remembers asking. Yes he is, the friend answered. She knew it. She always had, she supposed.

When Della and I met years later in Greece, she told me that she felt Papa had been with someone else by the time he ended their relationship. Instinctively, I jumped to defend my father’s honour, but then Della mentioned the dates. Counting backwards in my head, it was hard not to notice that Della and my father broke up a year, to the month, before I was born. By the time she found out my father was seeing someone else, I had already been conceived.

My father met my biological mother, Fowzia, by chance. She used to walk her dog, a rarity in Kabul in those days, around the neighbourhood and Papa noticed her. Murtaza began to join Fowzia on her daily dog walks, taking Wolf 2 along for the ride. Kabul was a lonely place, caught in between a civil war and foreign occupation; there was not much for young people to do. Eventually, Suhail, Shah and Murtaza befriended the young Afghani woman, who came from a diplomatic family and wore her long brown hair in a plait that ran
the length of her back. They spent evenings together at her house with her family and, in time, Shah became besotted by her youngest sister, Raehana. Unlike her siblings, Raehana was shy and introverted. She and Shahnawaz, both youngest children, began to see each other and had a wildly tempestuous courtship. Raehana was a mujahideen supporter and Shah was benefiting from communist hospitality, so they fought and joked and pushed the universe around them to breaking point until it was decided that they would marry. Raehana married Shah first; her sister and Murtaza’s nuptials came later; by that time Fowzia was already pregnant with me.

‘There wasn’t a large gap between their marriages,’ Suhail remembers. ‘They had a joint reception where they wore their khaki uniforms and
keffiyehs
, Mir’s red and Shahnawaz’s black, and Mir asked all of us to wear ours too for the party.’ He laughs softly, almost to himself, and then switches gear, becoming more serious. ‘You know, when I went to invite Dr Najibullah to the wedding reception, he pulled out a file in front of me.’ Most ominous stories seem to start this way, furtively and with the presence of some file or another. Dr Najibullah, the head of Intelligence, member of the governing politburo and future President of Afghanistan, was a difficult man to read. He had a reputation for brutality and there had been ups and downs in his relationship with the Bhutto brothers since their move to Kabul, but he had always ensured their safety and had granted them every protection while maintaining a distance, for most of the time, that allowed them to operate freely.

Suhail wasn’t sure what was about to be revealed in the file, but like the patient messenger and emissary that he had become, he waited to hear the worst. Dr Najibullah asked Suhail why he hadn’t come to him with the news of the brothers’ relationships before, as if their private lives were a matter of consequence to the state. He opened the file and said that the girls’ family, the Zias (a macabre irony), had contacts with the mujahideen. Their father had worked in the foreign service, often travelling abroad to countries like Indonesia. Najibullah paused and reminded Suhail that General Zia’s regime was supporting the mujahideen through Pakistan’s Inter-Service
Intelligence and supplying them with arms and funds funnelled through the CIA.

It wasn’t out of turn for Dr Najibullah’s attention to be piqued by the brothers’ romantic affairs. When Murtaza had been with Della the Afghan Intelligence service had been convinced that Della was a CIA agent. In his last letter to Della, Murtaza wrote:

I think Shah has explained to you our position here. Though I know it is not true, our friends are absolutely convinced that you are working for the Americans. I explained to them the factual position, but they were not convinced. They are conducting a complete and thorough investigation into you, your background, friends, travels, contacts etc etc.

Murtaza added that he was convinced the letter would be censored before it reached Della, though in fact it seems to have been left untouched.

Now Najibullah was making the same insinuation about the Zia sisters. Suhail wearily repeated what had become a standard response: ‘You’re welcome to come to the house any time and present this to the boys.’
¹
When he came to the house though, Dr Najibullah saw that Murtaza, already married by this point, was wearing a wedding ring. He didn’t bring up the file. As he left, Suhail walked him to the door and asked: ‘Dr
sahib
, why didn’t you say anything?’ ‘What can I say now?’ Dr Najibullah replied, disappointed.

I was born in Kabul under curfew around 3.45 on the morning of 29 May 1982. Labour started around seven or eight in the evening and Fowzia was taken into a government hospital under heavy protection. The mujahideen insurgency in Kabul was at its peak and there were constant attacks all around the city, necessitating lock-downs at curfew time. The government, under Dr Najibullah’s orders, placed special troops around the hospital in anticipation of my birth, worried that
the hospital might become a mujahideen target, allowing them to hit the Bhutto family and the regime in one go. Fatan, Dr Najibullah’s wife, was there at the hospital to look after the arrangements. Ehsan Bhatti, a member of the Al Zulfikar Organization and a dear friend of Murtaza and Shahnawaz, was placed outside the delivery room in his khaki uniform and Palestinian
keffiyeh
, which he was asked to remove by Fatan on the grounds that it was ‘too conspicuous’.

‘Mir was so anxious,’ Suhail told me, ‘so Dr Najibullah’s number two, Jamil Nooristani, who had become a friend of ours, took us and Shah back to his house to wait till the news of your birth came.’
²
Nooristani, I remember my father teasing me, had tried to distract him from his jitters by suggesting traditional Pashtun names for his future child, names like Gulabo or Gulrukh, all starting with the prefix Gul.

At four in the morning, Papa received the news that I had been born. It was not an easy birth and eventually the doctors were forced to resort to forceps. Papa celebrated with a toast and an earnest discussion began about my name. ‘The first names that came to him were your paternal great-grandmothers’ names,’ Suhail recalled, recounting a story I have heard my father tell many times before, ‘Fatima and Khurshid.’ Thankfully, Papa went with the former and I was named after my Iranian great-grandmother. Suhail always clucks his tongue at me when I register horror at the possibility that I might have been called Khurshid. ‘It means sun in Urdu, you know,’ he always tells me.

‘Mir was really happy,’ Suhail says, smiling. ‘He took to you immediately, like you were put on earth for him.’ There is a black-and-white photograph of me soon after my birth, my little mouth is open as if I’m talking. ‘About four weeks old,’ my father has written in blue on the back of the photograph. ‘Tall like me.’ I was tall, until the age of twelve when my growth curiously slowed and then stopped, leaving me for ever at 5'3", a full foot shorter than my father.

Three months later, almost to the day, Shahnawaz became a father too. He also had a daughter and named her Sassi, after the tragic heroine of a popular Sindhi folktale. Two brothers married two sisters
and both had daughters. It almost seemed as though life was turning around for the Bhutto brothers.

In fact it carried on as dangerously as before. After the hijacking, Al Zulfikar made its most daring attempt at confronting the regime. A group of three people attacked Zia’s plane as it took off from Chaklala air base in Rawalpindi. They were armed with a Samsix heat-seeking missile and narrowly missed hitting the aircraft as it gained height. On board the plane, the pilot and passengers were aware of the attempt on their lives. Sharing the flight with General Zia was Ghulam Ishaq Khan, the then chairman of the senate – and the man from whom Benazir would take her oath as Prime Minister to his presidency in 1988 – and Mahmood Haroon, whose signature featured prominently on Zulfikar’s death warrant, and who in another absurd placing would be appointed by Benazir as the governor of Sindh under her first government. It seems unthinkable that of the three junta leaders on board the aeroplane, Benazir would work with two of them, negotiating with but narrowly missing her chance to work with the third. The three men managed to escape, but the Samsix attack intensified the regime’s fury towards the Bhutto brothers and their Kabul-based organization. ‘It was the most daring, direct attempt we made,’ Suhail tells me.
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But it was irresponsible nonetheless. The attempt on Zia’s life, carried out soon after the PIA hijacking, only created a space, and a legitimate one at that, for Zia and the junta to react against the Bhuttos. Suhail says that eighty-four charges of treason were made against Murtaza and Shahnawaz by the junta, all carrying the death penalty. (I remember the number of charges being higher, in the nineties somewhere. Other people place them in the mid-hundreds.)

The junta didn’t just bring charges against the Bhutto brothers. It began to actively fight them. I ask Suhail if there were direct attempts on their lives while they lived in Kabul. He begins and ends a sentence several times. He smokes and drinks his tea; he tries to change the subject. Finally, he tells me that there were. Tribals from Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt were sent to Kabul to assassinate the brothers. He doesn’t want to talk about it, not with me. But I know something of the matter. I remember marks on my father’s body and on his face.
I remember scars on his back, near his heart, and on his nose. I remember that he couldn’t talk about them easily and that when, as a little girl, I asked what they were from, he would only tell me that they were from people who had tried to hurt him.

It’s a difficult history to contend with. Murtaza and Shahnawaz were young men, they were following their father’s dying wishes, but it was that wish that eventually cost them their lives. For Zulfikar to have placed his sons, his heirs, in direct danger was maddeningly irresponsible. For him to have ended his children’s chance of a peaceful, safe, ordinary life was vengeful; it would destroy his sons. Zulfikar should have known that. But they were wrong to have followed him too. There are signs, a changing of course over time, that suggest they understood that.