Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto



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DAUGHTER OF THE EAST BY BENAZIR BHUTTO
HAMISH HAMILTON - LONDON

1988


HAMISH HAMILTON LTD
Published by the Penguin Group

27 Wrights Lane, London WH STZ, England

Viking Penguin Inc, 40 West 23rd Street, New York, New York IOOIO, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street, Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R IB4

Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, I82-I90 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand


Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published in Great Britain 1988 by

Hamish Hamilton Ltd


Copyright © 1988 by Benazir Bhutto
13579108642
All rights reserved.

Without limiting the rights under copyright

reserved above, no part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system

or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior

written permission of both the copyright owner and

the above publisher of this book.


Bhutto, Benazir

Daughter of the East.

1. Bhutto, Benazir 2. Politicians

- Pakistan - Biography

I. Title

954.9’105’0924 DS385.B4/

Richard Clay Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

In loving memory of my father, my brother, and

all those who lost their lives in opposing General

Zia’s Martial Law in Pakistan

CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ix

Editor’s Note xi

Introduction I

I The Assassination of My Father 3


THE YEARS OF DETENTION
2 Imprisoned in My Own Home 21

3 Reflections from Al-Murtaza: My First Taste of Democracy 41

4 Reflections from Al-Murtaza: The Dreaming Spires of Oxford 61

5 Reflections from AI-Murtaza: The High Treason of Zia ul-Haq 80

b Reflections from AI-Murtaza: The Judicial Murder of My

Father 98

7 Release from Al-Murtaza: Democracy’s Challenge to Martial

Law 138


8 Solitary Confinement in Sukkur Jail 148

9 Locked in My Mother’s Old Cell at Karachi Central Jail 175

~`

IO Two More Years Alone in Sub-jail 194


TAKING ON THE DICTATOR
II The Years of Exile 217

12 The Death of My Brother 242

13 Return to Lahore and the August 1986 Massacre 266

Epilogue: Married From My Father’s House 303 ’`

Postscript 317

Index 323


ff
vii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


between pages 116 and 117
My grandfather, Sir Shah Nawaz Khan Bhutto. My father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. At my mother’s knee. Our family with Chen-Yi and Chou En-lai. My father. (UPIlBettmann Newsphotos) Student at Radcliffe. My father speaking for democracy. (Black Star) President of the Oxford Union. (AP/Wide World Photos) Zia and my father shortly after the coup. Public lashings. My mother beaten by the police. My father being

taken to court. (Flandrin/Black Star) On a morale-raising tour of Sindh. Shah and Mir linking arms with other marchers protesting against our father’s unfair trial. (UPIlBettmann Newsphotos) Mobbed by a crowd on my way to Larkana after my father’s death. Laying rose petals on my father’s grave. Mourning my father in Karachi.


between pages 212 and 213
Formal portrait of my mother, Sanam and me: Sanarri s wedding. Karachi Central Prison. My mother leaving Pakistan for medical exile. (API Wide World Photos) A lawyers’ protest march, 1983. A women’s rights protester being tear-gassed and beaten by police-women. Zia confirms four death sentences before the court announcement. With Senator Pell and Peter Galbraith in Washington. Last snapshot of my youngest brother, Shah Nawaz.

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BY
BENAZIR BHUTTO
HAMISH HAMILTON - LONDON

HAMISH HAMILTON LTD


Published by the Penguin Group

27 Wrights Lane, London WH STZ, England

Viking Penguin Inc, 40 West 23rd Street, New York, New York IOOIO, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street, Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R IB4

Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, I82-I90 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand


Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published in Great Britain 1988 by

Hamish Hamilton Ltd


Copyright © 1988 by Benazir Bhutto
13579108642
All rights reserved.

Without limiting the rights under copyright

reserved above, no part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system

or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior

written permission of both the copyright owner and

the above publisher of this book.


British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
IDRSM LIBRARY

Q.uaid-i-Azam lJnlvrts1l1

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Bhutto, Benazir

Daughter of the East.

1. Bhutto, Benazir 2. Politicians

- Pakistan - Biography

I. Title

954.9’105’0924 DS385.B4/


piJ1,4,ij’D y ISBN: 0241 123984

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In loving memory of my father, my brother, and

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Zia’s Martial Law in Pakistan

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CONTENTS


ist of Illustrations ix

Editor’s

Note xi

Introduction I



I The Assassination of My Father 3
THE YEARS OF DETENTION
2 Imprisoned in My Own Home 21

3 Reflections from Al-Murtaza: My First Taste of Democracy 41

4 Reflections from Al-Murtaza: The Dreaming Spires of Oxford 61

5 Reflections from AI-Murtaza: The High Treason of Zia ul-Haq 80

b Reflections from AI-Murtaza: The Judicial Murder of My

Father 98

7 Release from Al-Murtaza: Democracy’s Challenge to Martial

Law 138


8 Solitary Confinement in Sukkur Jail 148

9 Locked in My Mother’s Old Cell at Karachi Central Jail 175

~`

IO Two More Years Alone in Sub-jail 194


TAKING ON THE DICTATOR
II The Years of Exile 217

12 The Death of My Brother 242

13 Return to Lahore and the August 1986 Massacre 266

Epilogue: Married From My Father’s House 303 ’`

Postscript 317

Index 323


ff
vii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


between pages 116 and 117
My grandfather, Sir Shah Nawaz Khan Bhutto. My father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. At my mother’s knee. Our family with Chen-Yi and Chou En-lai. My father. (UPIlBettmann Newsphotos) Student at Radcliffe. My father speaking for democracy. (Black Star) President of the Oxford Union. (AP/Wide World Photos) Zia and my father shortly after the coup. Public lashings. My mother beaten by the police. My father being taken to court. (Flandrin/Black Star) On a morale-raising tour of Sindh. Shah and Mir linking arms with other marchers protesting against our father’s unfair trial. (UPIlBettmann Newsphotos) Mobbed by a crowd on my way to Larkana after my father’s death. Laying rose petals on my father’s grave. Mourning my father in Karachi.
between pages 212 and 213
Formal portrait of my mother, Sanam and me: Sanarri s wedding. Karachi Central Prison. My mother leaving Pakistan for medical exile. (API Wide World Photos) A lawyers’ protest march, 1983. A women’s rights protester being tear-gassed and beaten by police-women. Zia confirms four death sentences before the court announcement. With Senator Pell and Peter Galbraith in Washington. Last snapshot of my youngest brother, Shah Nawaz.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


At Shah’s grave.

Welcomed by a huge crowd on my return to Pakistan in 1986. (Reuters/

Betfmann Newsphotos)

On tour, being showered with rose petals.

A PPP supporter ’gunned down at a demonstration, 1986.

Police beat demonstrators after an attempt on my life.

With my husband, Asif Zardari.

At the People’s Reception in Lyari. (Michel PhilippotlSygma)


EDITOR’S NOTE
Hours before this book went to press, General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq and thirty-one others were killed when their C-I30 Hercules transport plane exploded shortly after take-off from Bahawalpur in the eastern

part of Pakistan. Also killed in the crash on August 17, 1988, was the United States Ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, and ten senior officers of the Pakistan armed forces, including the Chairman of the joint Chiefs-of-Staff and the Vice-Chief-of-Army-Staff.

Under provisions of the Pakistan Constitution, the Chairman of the Senate, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, became acting President. Stating that ’sabotage cannot be ruled out’, he launched an investigation into the accident and declared a state of national emergency.

Acting President Khan also declared that the general elections set for November Ib, 1988, by his predecessor were to be held as scheduled. At the time of writing it is not known whether the elections will actually take place or, if so, whether political parties will be allowed to participate.

In Karachi immediately after the accident, Benazir Bhutto endorsed the civil transition of power. Speaking for the Pakistan People’s Party, she told the press, ’We think that it is a positive development that the constitu-tional path has been followed.’ She did not hide her shock at General Zia’s death. ’It is unbelievable that this entire shadow of death and threat we have lived under for so long is actually gone,’ she said. ’I would have preferred to defeat Zia at the polls, but life and death are in God’s hands.’

INTRODUCTION


. have always believed in the importance of historical record. When the government of my father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was overthrown in 1977, I encouraged many of those who had worked closely with him to write about the Bhutto period. But in the difficult years of Martial Law that followed in Pakistan many from my father’s government were busy fight-ing the persecution and the false cases brought against them by the mili-tary regime. Others had fled into exile, and had no access to their personal papers. My own involvement in the struggle to return democracy to Pakistan, and the years I consequently spent imprisoned without charge, made it impossible for me to write a book on my father’s government myself.

More than a million of my countrymen came out to greet me when I returned to Pakistan after two years of exile in April, 1986, catapulting me into the glare of international publicity. Suddenly I received several offers to write not my father’s story, but my own. I hesitated. It was one matter to write about my father who had become the democratically elected Prime Minister of Pakistan and had lasting achievements to his name, and quite another to write about myself, whose most important political battles were still to be fought. It seemed presumptuous. I thought autobiographies

were written in the autumn of one’s life, looking back.

A friend’s chance remark changed my mind. ’What is not recorded is not remembered,’ she told me. I saw her point. Like many in Pakistan, I had experienced the dark years of Martial Law. Unlike many, I had the opportunity to put those experiences on record. It is important that the world remember the repression we in Pakistan have had to bear following General Zia’s coup d’etat.

Writing the book has been difficult. It has meant reliving the pain of the past. But it has also been cathartic, forcing me for the first time to come to terms with memories I had been trying to escape.

This is my story: events as I saw them, felt them, reacted to them. It is


I

INTRODUCTION


not an in-depth study of Pakistan, but a glance into the transformation of a society from democracy to dictatorship. Let it also be a call for freedom.
BENAZIR BHUTTO June 21, 1988

Karachi, Pakistan


THE ASSASSINATION OF MY FATHER
They killed my father in the early morning hours of April 4, 1979, inside Rawalpindi Central Jail. Imprisoned with my mother a few miles away in a deserted police training camp at Sihala, I felt the moment of my father’s death. Despite the Valiums my mother had given me to try and get through the agonising night, I suddenly sat bolt-upright in bed at 2.00 am. ’No!’ the scream burst through the knots in my throat. ’No!’ I couldn’t breathe, didn’t want to breathe. Papa! Papa! I felt cold, so cold, in spite of the heat, and couldn’t stop shaking. There was nothing my mother and I could say to console each other. Somehow the hours passed as we huddled together in the bare police quarters. We were ready at dawn to accompany my father’s body to our ancestral family graveyard.

’I am in Iddat and can’t receive outsiders. You talk to him,’ my mother said dully when the jailer arrived. She was beginning a widow’s four months and ten days of seclusion from strangers.

I walked into the cracked cement-floored front room that was supposed to serve as our sitting room. It stank of mildew and rot.

’We are ready to leave with the Prime Minister,’ I told the junior jailer standing nervously before me.

’They have already taken him to be buried,’ he said.

I felt as if he had struck me. ’Without his family?’ I asked bitterly. ’Even the criminals in the military regime know that it is our family’s religious obligation to accompany his body, to recite the prayers for the dead, to see his face before burial. We applied to the jail superintendent . . .’

’They have taken him,’ he interrupted.

’Taken him where?’

The jailer was silent.

’It was very peaceful,’ he finally replied. ’I have brought what

was left.’

He handed me one by one the pitiful items from my father’s death cell: my father’s shalwar khameez, the long shirt and loose trousers he’d worn to the end, refusing as a political prisoner to wear the uniform of a condemned criminal; the tiffin box for food that he had refused for the last ten days; the roll of bedding they had allowed him only after the broken wires of his cot had lacerated his back; his drinking cup . . .


3

DAUGHTER OF THE EAST


’Where is his ring?’ I managed to ask the jailer.

’Did he have a ring?’

I watched him make a great show of fishing through his bag, through his pockets. Finally he handed me my father’s ring, which towards the end had regularly slipped off his emaciated fingers.

’Peaceful. It was very peaceful,’ he kept muttering.

How could a hanging be peaceful?

Basheer and Ibrahim, our family bearers who had come to prison with us because the authorities did not provide us with food, came into the room. Basheer s face went white when he recognised my father’s clothes.

’Ya Allah! Ya Allah! They’ve killed Sahib! They’ve killed him!’ he screamed. Before we could stop him, Basheer grabbed a can of petrol and doused himself with it, preparing to set himself aflame. My mother had to rush out to prevent his self-immolation.

I stood in a daze, not believing what had happened to my father, not wanting to. It was just not possible that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the first Prime Minister of Pakistan to be elected directly by the people, was dead. Where there had been repression under the Generals who had ruled Pakis-tan since its birth in 1947, my father had been the first to bring democracy. Where the people had lived as they had for centuries at the mercy of their tribal chiefs and landlords, he had installed Pakistan’s first constitution to guarantee legal protection and civil rights. Where the people had had to resort to violence and bloodshed to unseat the Generals, he had guaran-teed a Parliamentary system of civilian government and elections every five years.

No. It was not possible. Jiye Bhutto! Long live Bhutto!’ millions had cheered when he became the first politician ever to visit the most forlorn and remote villages of Pakistan. When his Pakistan People’s Party was voted into office, my father had started his modernisation programmes, redistributing the land held for generations by the feudal few among the many poor, educating the millions held down by ignorance, nationalising the country’s major industries, guaranteeing minimum wages, job security, and forbidding discrimination against women and minorities. The six years of his government had brought light to a country

steeped in stagnant darkness - until the dawn of July 5, 1977.


Zia ul-Haq. My father’s supposedly loyal army Chief-of-Staff. The Gen-eral who had sent his soldiers in the middle of the night to overthrow my father and take over the country by force. Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator who had subsequently failed to crush my father’s following in spite of all his guns and tear gas and Martial Law regulations, who had failed to break my father’s spirit despite his isolation in a death cell. Zia ul-Haq, the desperate General who had just sent my father to his death. Zia ul-Haq. The General who would ruthlessly rule Pakistan for the next nine years.
THE ASSASSINATION OF MY FATHER
I stood numbly in front of the junior jailer, holding the small bundle that was all that was left of my father. The scent of his cologne was still on his clothes, the scent of Shalimar. I hugged his shalwar to me, suddenly remembering Kathleen Kennedy who had worn her fathers parka at Rad-cliffe long after the Senator had been killed. Our two families had always been compared in terms of politics. Now, we had a new and dreadful bond. That night, and for many other nights, I too tried to keep my father near me by sleeping with his shirt under my pillow.

I felt completely empty, that my life had shattered. For almost two years, I had done nothing but fight the trumped-up charges brought against my father by Zia’s military regime. I had worked with the Pakistan People’s Party towards the elections Zia had promised at the time of the coup, then cancelled in the face of our impending victory. I had been arrested six times by the military regime and repeatedly forbidden by the Martial Law authorities to set foot in Karachi and Lahore. So had my mother. As acting chairperson of the PPP during my father’s imprisonment, she had been detained eight times. We had spent the last six weeks under detention in Sihala, the six months before that under detention in Rawal-pindi. Yet not until yesterday had I allowed myself to believe that General Zia would actually assassinate my father.

Who would break the news to my younger brothers who were fighting my father’s death sentence from political exile in London? And who would tell my sister Sanam who was just finishing her final year at Harvard? I was especially worried about Sanam. She had never been political. Yet she had been dragged into the tragedy with all of us. Was she alone now? I prayed she wouldn’t do anything foolish.

I felt as if my body was literally being tom apart. How could I go on? In spite of our efforts, we had failed to keep my father alive. I felt so alone. I just felt

so alone. ’What will I do without you to help me?’ I had asked him in his death cell. I needed his political advice. For all that I held degrees in government from Harvard and Oxford, I was not a politician. But what could he say? He had shrugged helplessly.

I had seen my father for the last time the day before. The pain of that meeting was close to unbearable. No one had told him he was to be executed early the next morning. No one had told the world leaders who had officially asked the military regime for clemency, among them Jimmy Carter, Margaret Thatcher, Leonid Brezhnev, Pope John Paul II, Indira Gandhi, and many others from the entire Muslim spectrum, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Syria. Certainly none of the cowards in Zia’s regime had announced the date of my father’s execution to the country, for they feared the people’s reaction to their Prime Minister’s murder. Only my mother and I knew. And that, by accident and deduction.

I had been lying on my army cot in the early morning of April 2 when

DAUGHTER OF THE EAST


my mother suddenly came into the room. ’Pinkie,’ she said, calling me by my family nickname, but in a tone that immediately made my body go rigid. ’There are army officers outside saying that both of us should go to see your father today. What does that mean?’

I knew exactly what it meant. So did she. But neither of us could bear to admit it. This was my mother’s visiting day, allowed her once a week. Mine was scheduled for later in the week. That they wanted both of us to go could only mean that this was to be the last visit. Zia was about to kill my father.

My mind raced. We had to get the word out, to send a last call to the international community and to the people. Time had run out. ’Tell them I’m not well,’ I said to my mother hastily. ’Say that if it is the last meeting then, of course, I will come, but if it is not, we will go tomorrow.’ While my mother went to speak to the guards, I quickly broke open a message I had already wrapped. I wrote a new one. ’I think they are calling us for our last meeting,’ I scribbled furiously to a friend on the outside, hoping she would alert the party’s leaders, who in tum would inform the diplo-matic corps and mobilise the people. The people were our last hope.

’Take this immediately to Yasmin,’ I told Ibrahim, our loyal servant, knowing we were taking a great risk. There wasn’t time for him to wait for a sympathetic or lackadaisical guard to come on duty. He could be searched and followed. He wouldn’t be able to take the normal precautions. The danger was enormous, but so were the stakes. ’Go, Ibrahim, go!’ I urged

him. ’Tell the guards you’re fetching medicine for me!’ And off he ran.

I looked out of the window to see the Martial Law contingent consult-ing with each other, then transmitting the message that I was ill on their wireless set and waiting to receive information back. In the confusion, Ibrahim reached the gate. ’I have to get medicine for Benazir Sahiba quickly. Quickly!’ he said to the guards who had overheard the talk of my bad health. Miraculously, they let Ibrahim through, barely five minutes after my mother had first come to me in the bedroom. My hands would not stop trembling. I had no idea if the message would be safely de-livered.

Outside the window, the wireless sets crackled. ’Because your daughter is not feeling well, you can make the visit tomorrow,’ the authorities finally told my mother. We had gained another twenty-four hours of life for my father. But when the compound gates were sealed immediately after Ibrahim had fled, we knew something terribly ominous was about to occur.

Fight. We had to fight. But how? I felt so powerless, locked inside the stockade while the moments towards my father’s death ticked by. Would the message get through? Would the people rise up in spite of the guns


6
THE ASSASSINATION OF MY FATHER .,
and bayonets they had faced since the coup? And who would lead them? Many of the leaders of the Pakistan People’s Party were in jail. So were thousands of our supporters, including, for the first time in Pakistan’s history, women. Countless others had been tear-gassed and flogged just for mentioning my father’s name, the numbers of lashes to be administered painted on their half-naked bodies. Would the people heed this last desper-ate call? Would they even hear it?
At 8.15 pm my mother and I tuned in to the BBC Asia report on our radio. Every muscle in my body was rigid. I sat expectantly forward as the BBC reported that I had sent a message from prison that tomorrow, April 3, was to be the last meeting with my father. The message had got through! I waited for the BBC announcement of our call to the people to rise in protest. There was none. Instead, the BBC went on to report that there was no confirmation of the news from the jail superintendent. ’She’s panicked,’ it quoted one of my father’s former ministers as saying. My mother and I couldn’t even look at each other. Our last hope had died.

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