Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto

to Karachi, where his progress through the massive crowds was measured not in city blocks, but in inches. What was normally a half-hour trip from the train station to our home took my father ten hours. His car was dented and scratched by the time it arrived at 70 Clifton. My brothers, sister and I didn’t dare go outside the gates to greet him for fear of being crushed. Instead, we went up on the roof to watch his arrival. And, though we had seen impassioned crowds before, we’d never seen a crowd like this one. So many people were straining to see him, to touch him, to get close to him, that the twelve foot cement wall surrounding our house collapsed under their weight.

’Oh, Papa, I’m so glad you’re free,’ I told him when we all gathered in my mother and father’s bedroom that night.

’Free for the moment, anyway,’ my father said.

’Zia wouldn’t dare arrest you again,’ I said. ’He’s seen the size of the crowds.’

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’Don’t,’ my father cautioned me, moving his finger in a circle to show me that the room was probably bugged.

I pressed on stubbornly. ’Zia is a coward and a traitor. He has committed high treason!’ I said loudly, hoping my words were being picked up, foolishly believing that my father’s massive support would protect him.

’You are being careless,’ my father said to me sharply. ’You are not in the democracy of the West now. You are home under Martial Law.’

The shadow of Martial Law became darker when all of us accompanied my father on a visit to our hometown of Larkana. Once again the crowds tumed out to welcome my father home, giving me a sense of false security and adding to my joy at having my father back with the family. As we gathered in my parents’ bedroom at Al-Murtaza, everything seemed fam-iliar and normal. But it wasn’t. One of my father’s relatives came in with a message from a senior bureaucrat in Islamabad. The regime, the bureaucrat said, was preparing to implicate my father in a case of murder.

Murder? A chill ran around the room. My mother and father looked at each other for a second in silence. ’You should start making arrangements now for the children to return to school abroad,’ he told her. ’All their papers and bank books should be in order. God knows what will happen.’ She nodded in agreement as Papa turned to me. ’Pinkie, you too, should think seriously about leaving Pakistan for a while. Take graduate courses abroad if you want until the situation here is resolved.’ I looked at him numbly. Leave Pakistan? I had just arrived home.

’The servants too, may face hardship,’ my father continued. ’No one is safe under Martial

Law.’ In the morning, he summoned the staff. ’There may be suffering ahead for all of you,’ he said. ’If you would like to leave our employ now and return to your villages until the trouble passes, I will understand. I may not be able to offer you my protection under General Zia.’ Not one of the staff chose to leave. Nor did I. And my father moved on to Lahore.

Jiye, Bhutto! Jiye, Bhutto! The crowd in Lahore, the capital of Punjab and the stronghold of the army, was estimated at three million, the largest turnout ever in Pakistan. There was no way that Zia could diminish my father’s support politically. And a second message came in. ’Sir,’ an intelli-gence officer said, slipping into the former Chief Minister’s house where my father was staying. ’General Zia and the Army are determined to kill you. They are torturing the public servants under detention in order to prepare a false case of murder against you.’ The officer was trembling. ’In God’s name, leave the country, Sir,’ he begged my father. ’Your life is at stake.’ But my father was not one to give in to threats or terrorist tactics. ’I may not be free for long,’ was the only hint he gave of this latest message when he phoned home from Lahore that night.

When he returned to 70 Clifton, the political meetings went on non-
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stop. Zia had scheduled the elections for October 18, and was allowing one month of campaigning, due to start on September 18. While my father had meetings with party leaders downstairs, I was in the upstairs dining room being tutored in Urdu. ’You need to brush up on your Urdu,’ my father had told me. ’I may need you to speak for me.’ Every day for two hours in August, I poured over Urdu language newspapers and learned political vocabulary from a tutor. ’How’s she doing?’ my father would say, coming to the door of the dining room during breaks from the political meetings downstairs.

In late August, I flew with my father to Rawalpindi. Hoping to prevent huge turnouts like the ones my father had drawn at the railway stations in Karachi and Larkana, Zia had issued a military order forbidding politicians to travel by train. In Rawalpindi, he had taken the extra precaution of ordering military patrols to block all approaches to the airport. But many people managed to evade the barricades, lining the route to the airport and thronging around the car.

While our car was being mobbed in Rawalpindi, Bashir Riaz, a journalist and PPP supporter was in Karachi alerting my mother to yet another threat to my father. ’I beg of you, tell Bhutto Sahib to leave the country,’ Bashir Riaz said to my mother.

’One of Zia’s confidants who is a friend of mine told me to forget Bhutto Sahib, that he will never come back to power. ”Zia has decided to execute him on a murder charge,” he told me. ’He offered to buy my loyalty with a blank cheque, but I refused.’

And Zia tightened his noose, for the first time extending it to me. The next day in Rawalpindi I attended a tea at the Khokhars, a large family of PPP supporters, which around one hundred women went to. ’Say a few words,’ the three Khokhar sisters urged me: two of them were PPP officials and the other, Abida, one of my mother’s former secretaries at the Prime Minister’s residence. ’Howsla rakho,’ I told the assembled women in the two-minute speech in Urdu I had learnt by heart. ’Keep your spirits up.’ When I left, I was surprised to see a large contingent of police, including policewomen, waiting outside the gates. ’They are here because of you,’ one of the sisters told me.

I was even more surprised later that night to be served with a notice from General Zia, the Chief Martial Law Administrator, signed if I re-member correctly by General Arif, warning me not to indulge in political activities. Just a month and a half after the imposition of Martial Law, I had received my first official warning from Zia. But I didn’t take it at all seriously. ’Imagine,’ I laughed to my father, slipping into his bedroom. ’They consider me a threat to Martial Law for attending a tea.’ ’It’s not a laughing matter,’ my father said quietly. ’Martial Law is a deadly and dangerous business.’

And the deadly business escalated. It was obvious to everyone by then

THE YEARS OF DETENTION

that there was no way the opposition was going to defeat my father’s Pakistan People’s Party fairly at the polls. Two weeks before the cam-paigning was to begin, Zia sent his agents to arrest my father again.
September 3, 4.00 am. 70 Clifton, Karachi.

I am asleep in my bedroom when I hear the loose step on the stairway creak. As it is the fast of Ramazan, I think it is one of the staff bringing me the pre-dawn meal. Instead five men suddenly burst through my door, dressed all in white. I recognise them immediately as commandos of the Pakistan Army with their crew cuts and strong physiques. How often I had seen them on duty at the Prime Minister’s House. But why are they in plainclothes?

They point their machine guns at me while a sixth jumps around the room, sweeping everything off my dressing-table, yanking my clothes off their hooks, throwing my books off the bookshelves, smashing my table lamp and ripping the wires out of the telephone on my bedside table.

’What do you want?’ I ask, terrified.

Men never come into the room of a Muslim woman like this. ’If you want to live, keep quiet,’ says their leader. He and his team move to the door, leaving my room in a shambles. ’Are you going to kill my father?’ I ask the man who had jumped around my room. For a second he seems to take pity on me. ’No,’ he says, after a moment’s hesitation. Then his face hardens. ’If you know what’s good for you, don’t move,’ he says, waving his pistol at me. And he slams my door and is gone with the others.

Quickly I throw on some clothes over my T-shirt, snatching anything from the pile on the floor. My sister rushes in in a panic. ’Don’t! Don’t! Where are you going? They’re going to kill all of us,’ Sanam cries.

’Keep quiet,’ I snap at her. ’I have to get to Papa.’

I rush out of the room followed by Sanam to find the hall swarming with army commandos all dressed in white clothes and waving their guns round. Immediately they herd us downstairs into the reception hall where there are even more of them. I bolt for the front door, intending to cross the compound to the small annexe where my brothers live, but the com-mandos surround me and force me at gunpoint to sit on the sofa with my sister. The men are ordered to stand in pairs in front of all the doors leading into the room, their guns raised.

I have to get to my father. He is in danger. I must reach him. The commandos had chosen to break into our house in the middle of the night, without wearing their uniforms. It was all so unnecessary. My father could have been taken away quietly any time with an arrest warrant or a Martial Law order. Instead they were trying to intimidate and insult us. What were they up to? Perhaps they didn’t want the people to know
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what they were doing to my father. But I was determined they weren’t going to keep it from his daughter.

’Kya aap fauji hain?’ I ask the men at the kitchen door in Urdu. ’AI you soldiers?’ They look at each other but, in keeping with military dis-cipline, do not answer. I take a deep breath. ’Look at these soldiers,’ I say loudly to my sister in Urdu. ’How can they be so besharam, so shameless? It was their Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who brought them back from the camps of India where their Generals had left them to rot. And this is how they repay him, by entering his home and violating its sanc-tity?’

Out of the comer of my eye, I see the men glance at each other nervously. ’Yeh kis ka ghar hai - Whose house is this?’ one of them asks. I suddenly realise that some of them don’t even know where they are - or why. ’Don’t you know you have forced your way into

the home of the Prime Minister of Pakistan?’ I ask them scornfully. Sheepishly they lower their rifles. There is my chance. Quickly I dart up the stairs and into my parents’ room. Nobody stops me.

Papa is sitting on the edge of the bed. My mother is still against the pillows, the covers pulled up to her chin, the ear plugs she wore so that her sleep wouldn’t be disturbed by Papa coming to bed late in her hands. Commandos with drawn weapons surround them. The man who had jumped around my room destroying things is now jumping around my parents’ room, trying to wrestle my father’s crossed ceremonial swords off the bedroom door. ’What are you doing?’ my father is saying to him quietly when I come into the room. My father’s voice never loses its ring of authority and the man immediately stops.

My father motions me to sit down next to him. In an image that seems particularly grotesque, a fat thug of a man is lolling on one of Mummy’s delicate blue and white brocade Louis XV chairs. Who is he?’ I whisper to my father. ’Saghir Anwar, Director of the Federal Investigative Agency,’ he tells me. ’Do you have an arrest warrant?’ my father asks the FIA Director. ’No,’ he replies awkwardly, looking down at the carpet. ’Then under what charge are you taking me from my home?’ my father asks. ’I am following orders to take you to military headquarters,’ Anwar says. ’Whose orders?’ my father asks. ’General Zia’s,’ the man replies.

’Since I was not expecting you at this hour, I will need half an hour to get ready,’ my father says calmly. ’Send for my valet to pack my clothes.’ Saghir Anwar refuses, saying that no one is permitted to see the Prime Minister. ’Send for Urs,’ my father quietly repeats. And Anwar motions to one of the commandos.

Urs, I find out later, was being held at gunpoint with the rest of the staff in the courtyard. ’Be quiet! Hands behind your backs!’ the commandos had yelled at them in English. Those who hesitated, not understanding

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English, were pistol-whipped. Their money was stolen, along with their watches.

’Who is Urs?’asked the commando who had been sent from the house. ’I am,’ Urs replied, and was smashed on the head with a pistol butt for speaking. Farcically, the commando then went down the whole row, asking each if he was Urs. After several people had shaken their heads, he came

valet, who had learned by then just to nod. Urs was grabbed by the throat and feet and carried bodily up the stairs where, at gunpoint, he packed my father’s clothes. When he took the bags t0 the waiting unmarked car, six commandos kept their automatic weapons level-led at his

head and chest.

Upstairs my father takes a shower and dresses. I can’t get over his composure. What a far greater weapon that is than the cowardly arsenal of guns being held all over our house. ’Stay behind!’ one of the commandos yells at me when I start to walk downstairs with my father. I ignore them. They let me pass.

Downstairs Sanam and Papa exchange glances. ’You shameless cow-ards,’ my normally shy sister shouts at his captors as he is taken towards a car. ’You shameless cowards.’

Once again I watch my father being driven away, not knowing where he is being taken, not knowing if I will ever see him again. I waver for a moment, half my heart breaking, the other half turning to ice. ’Pinkie,’ I hear a voice call. I turn to see my brother Shah Nawaz lined up with the staff in the courtyard. ’ Usko choro! Leave him!’ I shout at the soldiers holding him. I am frightened myself at the new tone of my voice. But the soldiers step away.

Back inside the house, my mother’s face is as white as chalk. Her blood pressure has dropped even further and Shah Nawaz, Sanam and I take turns massaging her feet to stimulate the circulation. I try to phone for a doctor, but the lines have been cut. I plead with the guards at the gate to let me fetch her doctor, but that, too, is to no avail. Only when our major-domo arrives at 70 Clifton in the morning and, eliciting the sympathy of a Sindhi guard, manages to find out what has happened, does the word get out about my fathers arrest at all. Dost Mohammed races around Karachi for hours on his motor scooter, alerting the party leaders and my brother Mir at Al-Murtaza, our relatives, the media - and my mother’s doctor. But when Dr Ashraf Abbasi comes to the gate, she is refused entry. A regime-approved doctor finally arrives at noon to give my mother the injection she so desperately needs.

An Army Colonel arrives in the afternoon with a blank paper. ’General Zia, the Chief Martial Law Administrator, has ordered that you and your mother sign this,’ says the Colonel who is dressed in battle fatigues with the name Farooq written on his green and brown shirt. I refuse. ’I’ll make
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you sign it,’ he threatens me, his beady eyes becoming even beadier and his little mouth more cruel. ’You can kill me, but you can’t make me sign it,’ I say in my new tone of voice. ’Even your General Zia can’t make me sign it.’ ’You don’t know what’s good for you,’ he says in a clear and deadly voice. And he turns and walks away.

At 5.00 pm the army is finally withdrawn from the house. Immediately Shah Nawaz and I rush to the PPP office where fear is already setting in among some of the

Party officials. While some members call for a nation-

wide protest strike and other demonstrations, the people at the top of the party call for restraint until contact is made with my father. Contact with my father? Who knows how long that will take?

My mother’s news the next day is even worse. She has talked to my father’s lawyer. The secret warnings my father had received were true. The charge against my father, now, is conspiracy to murder.

Murder? I didn’t even know who my father was being accused of conspiring to murder.

A minor politician. named Ahmed Raza Kasuri who was still very much alive, my mother explained to me. Someone had ambushed the car he and several members of his family were travelling in three years before near Lahore. Kasuri s father, a retired magistrate, had been killed. But Kasuri, a member of the National Assembly elected on the PPP ticket, claimed he had been the real target. The politician, who had since joined the op-position, was known to have many enemies, and was said, unbelievably, to have survived fifteen prior attempts on his life. In this latest attempt, he had said he suspected my father’s involvement and filed a report with the police. Such was the freedom then in a democratic Pakistan, that the police had filed the report against the Prime Minister. The resulting en-quiry by the High Court had cleared my father of any connection to the crime and the whole sorry incident had been forgotten.

Until 1977. Kasuri had rejoined the PPP and had even applied for a PPP ticket to Parliament in the March elections. After the PPP had decided to offer the ticket to someone else, Kasuir had evidently decided to refile charges against my father. Now, two weeks before the new election cam-paign was due to begin, Zia had used the old charge against my father as an excuse to arrest him. But once again, Zia’s ploy backfired.

The Justice who heard the charges found the material on record ’con-tradictory and incomplete’, and saw no reason to believe my father guilty of the offence. He set my father free on bail ten days after his arrest. Again, I was optimistic about the future. ’If the civil courts have released the Prime Minister then I see no reason to detain him under a Martial Law order,’ Zia commented to the press.

My father came straight home to Karachi on September 13, planning to leave early the next morning with Shah Nawaz to join my brother Mir

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in Larkana to celebrate Eid at the end of Ramazan. The pressure was really on now. There were only five days left before campaigning began and my father had scheduled ninety meetings during the thirty days.

As usual, the family gathered in my parents’ bedroom that night, where the conversa-tion took an unexpected turn.

’You know, Nusrat, it’s time for Pinkie to get married,’ my father said suddenly as he lay on the bed, smoking a cigar. ’I’m going to find her a hus-band.’

I sat up bolt-upright on the couch, almost scattering my mother’s game of Patience onto the floor.

’I don’t want to get married,’ I protested. ’I’ve just returned home.’

Sanam and Shah seized the opportunity to revert to childhood teasing. ’You’ve got to get married. You’ve got to get married,’ they chanted.

’In fact,’ my father continued, ’I’ve already seen a boy I like.’
My mother smiled, probably already planning the wedding.

’I don’t want to marry yet, and you can’t get me to say yes,’ I said mutin-ously.

’You can’t say no to your father,’ Papa said, which Shah and Sanam then echoed in chorus.

’No. No. No.’ I said, saved by the arrival of my father’s late night dinner trolley. Mercifully, the conversation changed. But the new subject was even more threatening.

’I am told Zia won’t spare me and I should escape,’ Papa said while he ate. ’One of the PPP leaders asked me for money today so he could flee. Go if you like, I told him, but I’m not a rat who runs. I’m going to stay here and face Zia.’

’And you’re going to win the elections and try General Zia for high treason,’ I said loudly.

’Be careful, Pinkie,’ my father cautioned, motioning again to the bugged walls. But I had forgotten all restraint in my relief at seeing my father out of prison and at home again. On I railed about Zia’s treachery until my father got angry.

’Be quiet,’ he admonished me sharply. ’You don’t know what you are saying.’

We stared at each other across the room. In fury and hurt, I stormed out of the room.

I realise now that he knew just how bad things were going to get, that from the beginning he had seen the realities that I was trying to deny. He knew just how ruthless General Zia was and was trying to keep me from making provocative statements. But I was too headstrong then to see that. How many times since have I thanked God that he woke me before he left for Larkana.

’Don’t take to heart what I said to you last night,’ he said, sitting on the edge of my bed. ’I just don’t want any harm to come to you.’
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He held me in his arms.

’I understand Papa, and I apologise, too,’ I said to him, kissing him good-bye. I remember distinctly the sight of his grey shalwar khameez and the scent of Shalimar. It was the last time I ever saw him free.

September 77, 7977, 3.30 am. AI-Murtaza.

Bahawal, one of the Larkana staff, recounts what happened,

for I wasn’t there.
70 army commandos and policemen scaled the walls of AI-Murtaza around 2.00 am, clubbing the chowkidars and swarming towards the house.

’Open the door,’ they yelled, pounding on the front door while I and the other servants inside held the door closed.

’What do you want?’ we called out.

’Bhutto.’

’Wait. We must wake him up.’

’Open the door,’ they yelled, leaning all their weight against it until it bulged.

Mir heard the commotion and went to wake Bhutto Sahib. ’Tell them it’s not necessary to break the door down,’ his father said to him. ’Allow two officers to enter. I will need time to collect my things.’ But he knew they would come. His suitcase was all packed. So was his briefcase.

Bhutto Sahib was taken away ten minutes later. All of us were forced into the house at gunpoint and locked in. There were security forces posted inside and outside the house. We wept.

Mir baba was very angry. He tried to call Karachi but the phone lines were cut. The next morning I slipped through the guards and ran to another house to call Begum Sahiba. The word had spread by then through the village and hundreds of people were gathered outside the gates of AI-Murtaza. Jiye, Bhutto! they were chanting. Long live Bhutto!

The police arrested them.

My father was taken to Sukkur jail, then to jail in Karachi and then on to Lahore. Zia didn’t dare risk letting the people know where he was. This time Zia was determined to finish off my father once and for all. Again my father was charged with the same old murder. But this time, Zia had arranged to make it stick.
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REFLECTIONS FROM AL-MURTAZA:

THE JUDICIAL MURDER OF MY FATHER
March, 1980. Time, dripping grain by grain through a bottomless hour-glass at Al-Murtaza. I feel as if I am in a living grave, cut off from all human experience. My mother passes many of the endless hours of deten-tion playing Patience. But after five months of being locked up at Al-Murtaza, I am more restless than ever. I have no idea when and if we’ll be released. It all depends on Zia.

The United States government has made its choice. As winter heads towards spring, it becomes clear that the Americans are opting for Zia’s military dictatorship and not the return of democracy. Prompted by the increasing Soviet presence in Afghanistan, President Carter offers Pakistan 400 million dollars in aid in March, 1980, but Zia dismisses the package as ’peanuts’. A growing number of refugees from Afghanistan are entering Pakistan, indicators of the flood which will pour in as the civil war in Afghanistan intensifies. The refugees and the Soviet troops on our door-step