Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (46 page)

‘Have we not treated you well?’ President Assad asked Murtaza. At their farewell meeting he assured him gratefully that he had protected him and his family at their time of need. ‘Then why must you leave?’ replied Assad, who always treated Murtaza with a fatherly affection and ease. Murtaza said that he had a duty to return home now. ‘Why are you in a hurry?’ Assad asked. It was a good question. Murtaza replied that he had to return to his country. In that case, answered the President, if we cannot convince you to stay, please accept my help in your return. He offered Murtaza the use of his presidential aeroplane, knowing that Murtaza’s security was going to be an issue in the days to come.

Papa was excited and nervous. I don’t remember him sitting still in those heady days. All those years of ‘one day’ were finally over. Suhail was going to fly back to Karachi with his comrade and old friend, but the day before the departure, plans were changed and Suhail was to stay behind in Damascus with us. ‘Just in case,’ Papa said, and left it at that.

On the night of 2 November our small flat was full of friends coming to bid Murtaza farewell. It wasn’t a sad goodbye, but one filled with laughter and music and joy. After all the farewells were said and done, Frank Sinatra was playing on the stereo, and Ghinwa and Murtaza were alone together at last; it was the end of a long, emotional night. Ghinwa turned to her husband and said, ‘So, you did it your way finally?’ But Murtaza didn’t laugh. He smiled softly and shook his head ‘No. I did nothing my way. If I had, things would have been very different today.’

The next morning I woke up crying. I was so attached to my father, I felt sad every time he travelled, and this time my emotions were multiplied a hundredfold. I was scared for him. And I didn’t want to go to school. I wanted to be at home with Mummy and Uncle Suhail, listening to the news so that I knew Papa was OK. In the hallway, bright and early, my father, who hadn’t slept a minute all night, hugged me and wiped away my tears with his thumbs. ‘Be brave,’ he told me. ‘But you’re going to be arrested,’ I wailed. The newspapers and reports from Pakistan would not let us forget it.
A story three days earlier had claimed that Benazir’s government was holding ‘in readiness non-bailable warrants of arrest for Murtaza on arrival’,
⁴
while another article helpfully pointed out that a seasoned criminal like Murtaza was still legally entitled to seek ‘protective bail before arrest’ since he was a member of parliament, if the notion of jail didn’t tickle his fancy.
⁵

That Papa would be arrested was something we took for granted. He had packed several magazines –
Newsweek
and
The Economist
and
Vanity Fair
, his favourite – to read in jail. He had pen and paper to write letters – which he promised he would have someone fax across to me – and books to keep him company. He was so relaxed about jail, for my sake I’m sure, he made it seem like nothing more frightening than a spa weekend away and even joked that he planned to lose a few pounds while incarcerated.

I left for school shortly after Papa set off for the airport. We were having a soccer tournament for the regional American schools at DCS and we had the morning off to cheer on our home team. I saw Nora, my best friend, as soon as I walked into the campus gates. She was quiet. ‘May he come back to you exactly as he left you,’ she said, uncharacteristically stoic. Nora is half Armenian and half Syrian; she said it was a traditional saying. I was miserable and moped around school for much of the day, quietly wondering where my father’s plane had got to and trying not to worry. ‘Your father’s making history, you know,’ a teacher who had heard about Papa’s return on the BBC World Service said to me as I stood with Nora by the football field. I felt uneasy all day.

Hafez al Assad’s presidential plane had received clearance from all the countries it had to fly over, except one – Pakistan. The Syrian Ambassador in Islamabad was dispatched to the Foreign Office to facilitate the landing of the presidential plane and was rudely rebuffed. The government would not allow the plane to land, a move that would have caused a diplomatic incident had Assad not anticipated Benazir’s actions. She was petty, this he knew; it was partly why he had offered Murtaza his plane in the first place. Eventually the aeroplane landed at Dubai International Airport, where Murtaza was received by senior
UAE officials, arranged by President Assad, and continued his journey home on board an Ethiopian Airways flight.

‘It was such a complex operation,’ Suhail remembers. ‘I was on the phone for twenty-four hours that day – hectic efforts were being made to get Murtaza on a connecting flight to Karachi. We were anxious to get him there on the third as crowds had been gathering at Jinnah Airport. They had been waiting for him since the morning.’
⁶
Hameed Baloch, who had once been an office bearer in the party under Benazir’s leadership, was in Karachi that day and out on the roads outside the airport since the morning. ‘There were Rangers, police vans, we even saw some military vehicles – there were thousands of us workers at the airport to receive Mir
baba
and it seemed that the job of all the officials there that day was to keep us away. Every couple of hours they would try to confuse us by saying that his flight was landing at the old Karachi airport terminal, fifteen minutes away, and once we had walked there we would be told the flight was landing at the new terminal that we had just left.’
⁷

In Damascus, we heard the news of the police contingents at the airport. No one had expected the state to put on such a show of force. Murtaza was a Pakistani citizen, he was on board a commercial airliner, and he had said, repeatedly, that he was prepared to face the charges against him. ‘We weren’t worried about his travelling from Damascus to Karachi,’ Suhail says, ‘but we were worried about his security on the ground once he reached Karachi.’ To make sure things were under control, Murtaza’s mother Nusrat was at the airport throughout the day. But she too was being shunted back and forth between terminals along with the rest of the workers who had flocked to see Zulfikar’s eldest son return home. And after four hours of being held at bay, she snapped. Nusrat presented herself at the new airport terminal after having wasted the morning and afternoon driving back and forth between terminals being harangued by officials. Unfortunately, the police officer who made the last feeble attempt to restrict her entry received a smart slap on the face.

Nusrat was a tough woman who had faced Zia’s military and had been violently attacked in a Lahore stadium during the dark days of
the dictatorship. She strode into the airport and waited for her son to arrive, leaving the police officer stinging from the slap but unable to stop her going forward. ‘When we heard that the police were mis-behaving with
Begum Sahiba
,’ Hameed says, ‘we were prepared to storm the gates of the airport, but the police began to beat us with
lathis
and lobbed tear gas grenades into the crowds – they were trying to disperse us, to make us leave so Mir
baba
would return to Pakistan without any support. But we stayed, just so we could be there, just so we could see him.’

It was night-time when Murtaza finally landed. The police had become more aggressive after dark, taking several workers into custody and facing down the crowds with riot gear, but the crowds resisted, hurling rocks at the police vans as they stopped them from making their way towards the airport. Murtaza walked down the steps alone, seeing Karachi for the first time under cover of night. He knelt on the tarmac and kissed the ground. Nusrat was there, emotional, crying. He embraced his mother and was led away by the police and taken to Landhi Jail in North Karachi. It would be his home for the next eight months.

None of the workers who had waited under the Karachi sun saw Murtaza that night; he was taken to jail from a side exit. But there was jubilation in the air. He was home, finally.

Benazir was in power once again and this time she was faced with a different opponent, her brother. He wasn’t some ordinary member of a vague opposition party; he was popularly recognized in patriarchal Pakistan as the heir to the Bhutto throne. She was liable to be replaced and the threat came from within her own family.

Maulabux found himself in jail too. ‘A number of Murtaza Bhutto’s supporters were jailed during Benazir’s second government. They were afraid of us politically. We had been fighting for the party all our lives, they knew our strength. And we had left them; they had become so corrupt by then, there was nothing left to defend about them.’
⁸

Over the years I’ve always seen Maulabux and Shahnawaz together. They’re both highly energetic men, even after years spent in jail, and when they speak, their stories often slide into each others. They are
both tall, proud-looking men of Sheedi origin; Shahnawaz is the slimmer, quieter, of the two. He had been doing his master’s in public administration at Karachi University when Benazir’s police, around the time of Murtaza’s return, arrested him. ‘In jail there were no criminal cases against Murtaza Bhutto’s people,’ he says, echoing Mauli. ‘It was purely political – they held us on charges of treason, anti-state activities, those sorts of things.’
⁹
Shahnawaz hired a private lawyer; since he had left Benazir’s PPP he no longer benefited from the party’s legal aid schemes, which he bitterly notes were being put to use defending the new party members who were serving time in jail for corruption, narcotics and extortion.

Most of those men who had formed a loyal core around Benazir in the days before she came to power had abandoned the party after her first government and had begun to work for Murtaza. They were punished for their desertion with prison sentences. ‘I used to meet Ali Sonara in the Karachi Central Jail dispensary,’ Shahnawaz says. ‘They always kept us in separate cells so we used to meet there to relay messages and keep each other informed of what was going on. The word on the block was that that those who the government managed to flip against Mir
baba
were being released then badly beaten by the police and then held up at press conferences as examples of what Murtaza Bhutto did to people who deserted him. It was standard procedure for the government. Once, in the dispensary, Ali – who had been in charge of Benazir’s security – told me that Ghous Ali Shah, the advisor to the Chief Minister of Sindh, had offered him a position in the Minister’s office if he would come out and publicly denounce Murtaza Bhutto.’

The offers were not unattractive, especially considering how Murtaza’s workers were being kept in jail. ‘When I was arrested in 1993,’ Shannawaz goes on, ‘I was kept in illegal custody – there was no warrant for my arrest, no charges were made clear to me. The police used to torture me by putting cigarettes out all over my body.’ I notice the marks on his arms as he speaks. They’re small and dark, angry patches of skin pinched together. What Shahnawaz describes, the warrantless arrests, the lack of judicial procedure, were hallmarks
of Benazir’s second regime. The police were empowered to act as a mercenary force, with no regard for law and order or justice. I know this now, but at the time we learned about the human rights abuses as they unfolded, as neighbours were picked up and failed to return, and from the whispered stories about the police torture cells.

‘When the police finally took me before a magistrate, I was blindfolded and chained – my hands in one pair of shackles and my legs in another set. They started to throw questions at me and I refused to answer. “Remove my blindfold first,” I demanded and they did and I saw the judge before me was a fellow with such a big beard and the
nishan
, the sign from daily prayers, etched on his forehead. My arms hurt so much from the torture, I could barely move. I thought he’d help me, being a religious man, and I told him how the police had tortured me for days – I didn’t know how many, I had lost count. I opened my shirt to show him the scars on my chest. And this magistrate, this devout judge, you know what he told me? He said that the police could continue to hold me illegally without warrant or charges for two more days. He sent me away and told the police to bring me back then. Of course, they never did.’
¹⁰

It is peculiar to hear these stories, to feel so helpless in hindsight and to know that these men before me suffered at the hands of my aunt, for my father, in ways that I cannot bear to imagine. I sometimes wondered, as a maudlin teenager, how I would hold up under torture. It seemed to be a reasonable thing to ponder, given the stories I grew up hearing, but I’ve never had to find out. I haven’t escaped the question though; it is answered for me by others all too frequently, their scars and their families’ pain the evidence of how they fared under torture.

Maulabux was also sent to jail in the first month of Benazir’s new government. I ask him why he was imprisoned, and he thinks back to those years and laughs. ‘The case against me in ’93 was made by a local superintendent of police who claims that I was seen planning a murder in Lyari, our area, at midnight one evening. The man I’m meant to have killed dies the same night, at 12.15, fifteen minutes later, in Malir – two hours away. What am I? Superman? How am I supposed
to have managed that?’ I laugh along with him. I don’t know what else to do.