Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (60 page)

Sattar and Wajahat died in police custody, succumbing to their wounds after not being treated in time. All the survivors and witnesses to the murder were taken into police custody. ‘We were taken to Clifton
thana
and questioned,’ Asif Jatoi tells me. I ask him if they were shown arrest warrants or if they were taken for remand at any point in their detention, which lasted three months, exactly until Benazir’s government was thrown out of power. He laughs bitterly. ‘The government was theirs, what treatment do you think they gave us?’

The survivors and witnesses were arbitrarily held and moved from police station to police station. We did not know where they were. Our efforts to file a First Information Report, the most basic right given to all citizens in the event of a legal grievance, was blocked by Benazir’s government, thus denying us our right before the law. We had to go to the high courts of Sindh for our right to file a police case.

Meanwhile, the police were not stopped from filing cases of their own and immediately filed a case against all the dead men and survivors claiming that they had initiated the gunfire and had attacked the police. It was standard Operation Clean-Up.

In jail, the survivors were taunted and tortured. ‘In the
thana
that night,’ Qaisar tells me, ‘the police beat us and told us, “We’ve killed your leader, now we’re your
sahibs
’ – ‘your bosses’. Asif was also told by Rai Tahir, one of the gunmen that night, ‘We killed your leaders, what do you think we’re going to do to you?’ The police routinely carried out mock executions on the survivors, going so far as taking Asif Jatoi out of his cell in the Clifton
thana
at night in the days immediately after the murder and blindfolding him before putting him in an unmarked car. ‘They covered my eyes and tied my hands and a
sepah
’ – an officer – ‘said to me, “Your time is up. We’re going to kill you tonight.”’ They drove Asif around in circles for twenty minutes before laughing and throwing him back in his cell, still blindfolded and gagged.

The survivors often saw the policemen from that night in jail. Several of them told me, independently, that Rai Tahir, Wajid Durrani and Shukaib Qureshi were constant presences. They ran the questioning, supervised their torture – which included beatings with
sachoos
, a Sindhi term for the leather paddles with sharpened nails that tear out the skin and flesh – and carried out intense psychological tauntings, like the mock executions. Asif Jatoi told me how once a lower-level constable in charge of cell duty had ignored the policemen’s instructions not to give the prisoners anything to eat or drink and had brought them water. ‘Rai Tahir beat this
sepah
. He told him, “I don’t care if they die from thirst, no water goes to these men.” The constable was a kind man though, and he gave us water again, facing worse punishment from Tahir.’

Using the details that Asif Jatoi gave me, I managed to track down the constable. He was a Sindhi policeman who was posted to cell duty during the late hours of the night, often ending his shift between five and eight in the morning. When we began to speak, I asked the officer if he minded me using his real name. ‘
Aap ke marzi
,’ he replied, it’s up to you, I’m at your mercy. ‘Whatever is best for your work,’ he added. People in far less sensitive positions had asked me to treat them as anonymous sources, but this officer didn’t. I will not name him. He is still a salaried employee of the police, and has been for the last twenty years. When we met, he was accompanied by his young son, who depends on his father’s continued employment. When the wounded survivors, all blindfolded, were brought to the
thana
, he brought them some water, whatever small scraps of food he could find, and something to sleep on. ‘Rai Tahir beat me first,’ he says, wringing his hands in his lap as he speaks, ‘and then Zeeshan Kazmi’ – one of the most brutal policemen who served on the Operation Clean-Up taskforces and was later murdered in Karachi – ‘found out that the witnesses were being given water. He went into a rage and beat up a Punjabi constable who told him that he had not been the one to give the water to the men, that it had been me. I was on a break, having some food at a small stall called Ali Baba near the station. Zeeshan Kazmi had me picked up, blindfolded, and
brought back to the
thana
. He beat me, knocking out my front teeth, and asked me why I had helped them. “What are they, your fathers?” He took away my gun and suspended me without pay as further punishment.’
¹¹

None of the survivors were released until Benazir’s government fell three months after Papa’s assassination. In one of my last phone calls to her, I asked my aunt why her government had arrested all the survivors while the police were free – they had been honourably exonerated by an internal review of any wrong-doing and were back on their beats, not missing a day’s pay. ‘You’re very young, Fati,’ Wadi told me, bristling at the questioning. ‘This isn’t the movies, this is government and we have our own ways of doing things.’ She never answered my question.

Several days after my father’s assassination, Ali Sonara was shifted from his secret detention centre in Karachi to another police cell in Hyderabad, three hours away. No charges had been filed against him and they wouldn’t be for several more weeks. Warrants for his arrest had not yet been produced and no judge had approved his illegal transfer out of Karachi. Sonara was kept a prisoner of the Karachi police till 2003. One year after his release, he was killed in Lyari.

Papa’s body was taken to Larkana in an Edhi Foundation helicopter. As it tried to take off from an empty plot of land near the city’s Jehangir Kothari Parade, several men attached themselves to the airborne helicopter, clinging on to the doors and landing gear as it struggled to lift off. The funeral in Larkana was intense and cities across the country marked a three-day mourning period in solidarity. Thousands of people, supporters and mourners alike, came to the gates of 70 Clifton to escort Mummy, Zulfi and me to an adjoining helicopter, shielding us from having to make our journey alone and unguarded. They stayed with us, keeping a protective eye on us, for weeks. We would have been so vulnerable, to Benazir, to the state, to the police, if it had not been for the strangers in those crowds who came to protect us. When we landed in Larkana, thousands more met us there and carried Papa to the grounds of Garhi Khuda Bux to lay him in his final resting place. Papa was
buried in the original People’s Party flag. I think he would have liked that.

Joonam arrived from a foreign trip that day to find her second son murdered. No one had told Joonam, who was beginning to suffer from Alzheimer’s, that her beloved elder son had been killed. They told her only minutes before her car had pulled up at the 70 Clifton gates. In the helicopter ride to Larkana, Joonam beat her chest in the Shiia style of mourning and wailed uncontrollably. She never recovered. The day after the burial she walked up and down the corridors of Al Murtaza calling her son. ‘Tell Mir he should change his
kaffan
, his burial shroud, it’s full of blood.’ On the third day of mourning, Benazir came to Al Murtaza under cover of darkness to evade the protestors who had been attacking her motorcade. She said she wanted her mother to be with her for a few days and swept Joonam out of our house. We never saw our grandmother again. Joonam is now held incommunicado by the Zardaris in a garish house in Dubai. Benazir never allowed us to see her again, save for a brief forty-minute visit in Islamabad six months after Papa had been killed. Joonam looked ghostly, pale and haggard. She was being given medicine, I didn’t know what for. She cried when she saw Zulfi and me – Wadi said the meeting would be called off if Mummy came with us – and we clung to her when we were told our time with our father’s only family member who truly loved and was loved by us was over. We are not permitted to speak to our ailing grandmother, not allowed to visit her and not allowed to care for her as she wastes away alone, minded by maids and strangers and various Zardari clan members. Sanam, my father’s younger sister, entered the political fray after Papa’s death when she filed a case against Zulfi, then nine years old, Mummy and me (I had just turned eighteen) for the ownership of 70 Clifton. She comes to Pakistan every once in a while for some official presidential function or other and gives interviews against Papa, Mummy, my brother and me. I miss the Aunty Sunny I used to know as a child, I haven’t seen her in a long time either.

Having arrested the witnesses to Papa’s murder, and not the perpetrators, Benazir’s government prohibited us from filing a criminal case against the police officers involved and instead set up a tribunal – which would have no legal authority to pass sentence – to look into Murtaza’s murder.

‘It was not a court, it was just an inquiry’ Justice Nasir Aslam Zahid, one of the judges and a former Chief Justice of Sindh selected to sit on the tribunal bench, tells me.
¹²
‘Our job was to find who was the aggressor and who a police case should be registered against. We made it clear in our report that the police were the aggressors.’

The tribunal, though not empowered to pass legal sentence, made several important rulings in its final report. It concluded first that Murtaza Bhutto’s death was a premeditated assassination, and that there was no shoot-out and no crossfire. ‘Who turned the lights off?’ Justice Aslam Zahid asks. ‘The police, Wajid Durrani in particular, claimed they didn’t notice the street lamps were off! But we found that it was done on purpose, because only one street, yours, had been affected and once the firing was over, the lights were turned back on.’

Secondly, the tribunal ruled that the police used an excessive amount of force and left the injured men to die in the road. ‘We named the police – Wajid Durrani, Suddle and their colleagues – as the aggressors,’ Justice Aslam Zahid continues. ‘When we compared the evidence of the injuries it is amazing that the police claim Murtaza Bhutto’s men were the aggressors when all of them are dead and only one police officer, Shahid Hayat, is hurt from a self-inflicted wound to the thigh and the other officer, Sial, had a bullet in his foot. Then after the fact, they left your father at Mideast. Mideast was not a hospital where doctors sit. They brought him there and then just left him.’

Shahid Hayat has since arranged for a government medical legal board to examine the scars of his thigh wound and claim, by virtue of his stitches, that the wound was not self-inflicted. The bullet still happens to have been fired from a police weapon. When questioned, another private doctor who examined Hayat’s leg said it was against doctor–patient privilege for him to talk about his patients.

Third, the tribunal ruled that the order to assassinate Murtaza Bhutto must have come from the highest level of government.

The criminal case against the police officers Asif Zardari and Abdullah Shah was launched in 1997. It is still in the courts today, though the notion that we will ever receive justice from the corrupt and now Zardari-managed courts of Pakistan is not one I place a lot of faith in. Judges have been constantly changed in our case – sixteen in total, one because she was a woman and the Chief Justice of Pakistan didn’t think she could bear the stress of such a case – and the accused are currently being acquitted in the middle of the ongoing trial, before all the evidence has been heard, before all the witness testimonies have been recorded and before any attempt at presenting the facts has been completed.

Justice Wajihuddin Ahmed, a former Chief Justice of Sindh like Justice Aslam Zahid and the man who bravely contested General Pervez Musharraf’s presidency in 2007, didn’t take a moment to think when I asked him if there was any hope that we would get a free and fair trial. ‘Certainly not now,’ he replied.
¹³

On 5 December 2009 Karachi’s Session Courts acquitted all the policemen accused of the assassination of Mir Murtaza Bhutto and six of his companions. One month after the judgement was passed, former President Farooq Leghari – who sacked Benazir’s second government in the winter of 1996 – came on national television and spoke of my father’s murder. In the interview, aired on Duniya TV, a popular private channel, Leghari claimed that Zardari came to him in the late hours one night during his wife’s term and insisted that Murtaza Bhutto be eliminated. ‘It’s either him or me’ Zardari is alleged to have told the President. President Leghari, now looking frail and old beyond his years, said that both Benazir and her husband, whom he accused of gross corruption, were at the helm of the ‘massive cover-up’ after the murder. ‘He has Murtaza’s blood on his hands’ the former President said ‘and Allah knows how many others.’

Epilogue

April
2009

A
s I finish this book it feels as though the world around me is slowly collapsing. There is a peculiar sense of déjà vu as I write about the death of my father. There is a similar danger, a tangible feeling that we are not safe. Seven months ago, I packed my bags and flew to see my brother off in a foreign country.

Zulfi had enrolled for the start of his A-level year, twelfth grade, at a private school not far from our house in Karachi. Some of his friends had got into the same school. They had made plans for a more relaxed year in which they would be treated like college students. In the autumn of 2008 Zulfi had just turned eighteen and was aware how precarious our situation had become since Asif Zardari had acquitted himself in our father’s murder case. He was aware that because of our history with the man now called President, we weren’t safe in our country any longer. When Zardari announced himself as the PPP’s unanimously chosen presidential candidate we knew he would stop at nothing to reach the pinnacle of power. There was no turning back for him. Against all odds, he was going to rule Pakistan. We made the decision to take Zulfi out of the country. It was a decision we had been avoiding, hoping it would not be necessary, since Benazir was killed in December 2007. But as Zulfi was the only surviving male heir of the Bhuttos, we couldn’t take the risk of leaving him vulnerable. Besides Zulfi, the only Bhuttos remaining are Sassi and I. We don’t live in a country with a free press, we don’t live in a country with an independent judiciary – or any judiciary for that matter. We have no safeguards against a violent and vindictive government.