Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto

His dim, damp cell is only six feet by nine feet. There is no gauze netting over the bars in his cell door as there is over the guards’ doors in the cells next to his. The air is thick with flies and mosquitoes. A sleeping bat clings to the ceiling while pale, colourless lizards scuttle up and down the walls.

We look at his bare metal cot. ’Didn’t they give you the mattress I sent you two weeks ago?’ my mother asks him. ’No,’ he says. My father’s back has sores and bruises from the thin jail bedding. He’s had two bad cases of influenza, and severe stomach problems from unboiled water. On three different occasions he has vomited blood and bled from the nose as well.

Unbelievably he is quite cheerful, though very thin. But then he always seemed fine to me. Perhaps I just didn’t want to see otherwise.

’I want you to go to Larkana for Eid and pray at the graves of our ancestors,’ he is saying.
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’But Papa, then I’ll miss my next meeting with you,’ I protest.

’Your mother is still in detention. There is nobody else to go but you,’ he says.

I swallow hard. I had never been to our family graveyard on Eid, or to receive the traditional visits from the villagers and family at the nearby house in Naudero. The men in the family had always officiated, my broth-ers accompanying my father if the end of Ramazan fell during their school holidays. I felt a shiver of loneliness. I hoped my father would soon be free.

’Go to pray at Lal Shahbaz Qalander,’ my father also urges me. ’I never got there last Eid.’ Lai Shahbaz Qalander. One of our most renowned saints. My grandmother had gone to pray at his shrine when my father became very ill as a baby and nearly died. Would God be able to hear a daughter’s prayer for the same person?

We sit in the courtyard for a precious hour, our heads close together so that the three jailers under orders to listen to us cannot. But they are sympathetic this

time and do not press in on us.

’You are twenty-Five now,’ my father jokes, ’and eligible to stand for office. Now Zia will never hold elections.’

’Oh, Papa,’ I say.

We laugh. How do we manage it? Somewhere in the jail stand the hangman’s gallows which shadow our lives. The army, my father tells us, is trying to bait him into an outburst. Every night they climb up on the roof of his cell and clomp around in heavy boots, the same ruse they had used during the imprisonment of Mujib ur-Rahman during the civil war in Bangladesh. The hope is that the prisoner will lose his temper and use strong language with the guards, giving the army the excuse that some trigger-happy soldier had been provoked into shooting him. But my father knows their tricks and instead includes the harassment in his legal de-fence.
I returned to Flashman s followed by the now familiar convoy of two or three military vehicles which, in time, would swell to seven, eight, some-times ten different military trucks. The people in the streets stared at the convoy as I passed. Some looked on in sympathy. Others lowered their eyes as if they didn’t want to believe what was happening.

An eerie silence had fallen over the city, over the whole country. The entire nation was in suspended animation. It was said over 100,000 had been arrested. ’Zia won’t carry out the sentence against the Prime Minister. It’s not possible,’ people whispered among themselves. The only topic of conversation was my father’s trial, his death sentence, his Supreme Court appeal.

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In spite of my father’s reluctance, we had brought an appeal before the Supreme Court of Pakistan in Rawalpindi. ’I am obliged to respect the views of my wife and daughter, not only because of the relationship, but for a loftier reason,’ my father had written to Mr Yahya Bakhtiar, the former Attorney General of Pakistan and the leader of my father’s legal team at the Supreme Court. ’Both have played a heroic and gallant part in these dangerous times. They have a self-evident word and political claim on my decision.’

The court had begun hearing the case in May. Though in other cases, the accused was given a month to bring an appeal before the Supreme Court, my father had only been given a week. My father’s lawyers were staying at Flashman’s where we had set up an office to follow the appeal as closely as possible. Yasmin Niazi, Dr Niazi’s teenage daughter, had joined in the work, keeping my appointments straight, as had Amina Piracha who was working as a liaison to the foreign press for the team of lawyers. In addition, my old friend from Oxford, Victoria Schofield, who

had succeeded me as President of the Oxford Union, had come to Pakistan to help.

On some days I had to force myself to get up in the morning. Quickly. Get up. Get dressed. Face the day. More charges to refute. Meet with the few party workers not in jail. Give interviews to the press gathering in Rawalpindi. The regime-controlled press was only reporting the charges against my father. Musawaat in Lahore, which remained open despite the closure of the Karachi branch, and the world press were our only hope of getting the true story out. Guardian correspondent Peter Niesewand and Bruce Loudon of the Daily Telegraph became familiar faces.

The regime issued the first of a series of White Papers’ at the end of July, this one criticising the conduct of the March 1977 elections. At Flashman s we worked constantly on my father’s rejoinder to the false charges, which he wished to file in the Supreme Court in his defence. Every day Victoria and I transcribed the handwritten pages which the lawyers brought us from Rawalpindi Central Jail. My father’s handwriting on both sides of the paper was cramped and difficult to read. It must have been far more difficult for him to write - fasting in his death cell in the August heat of Ramazan. The lawyers took the typed pages back to my father who edited them and sent them back to us for retyping. We sent his finished rejoinder - our code name for it was ’Reggie’ - to a secret press in Lahore.

But before the document was submitted to the Supreme Court the printed copies were seized. In order to reproduce the document for the Supreme Court and distribute it to the foreign press, PPP workers had to stay up all night making photocopies of the three hundred page document. The location of the photocopier we used and the identities of the people who helped had to be kept entirely secret.

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The net was tightening around Flashmari s. One night the police formed an intimidating flank in front of the hotel, arrested one of our assistants, and sentenced him quickly in a military court. We worked under constant threat of not knowing what would happen next.

When the rejoinder. was finally submitted to the Supreme Court, the Chief Justice banned its publication. By this time, however, several copies had already found their ways overseas. The rejoinder was later published in India as a book, If 1 am Assassinated, and became a best-seller.

There were constant rumours that the decision from the Supreme Court was coming any minute. At the beginning of the hearing the Chief Justice, Anwar ul-Haq, had announced that the appeal would be completed as soon as possible,

and my father’s lawyers had been optimistic. Of the nine judges on the bench, five were asking questions and reviewing the testi-mony in a way that seemed dismissive of the Lahore judgment. But, suddenly in June, Anwar ul-Haq had adjourned the court and gone to Jakarta for a conference. We all felt the appeal was prolonged and post-poned until the judge most obviously in favour of acquittal and the only one on the bench with extensive murder trial experience, had been required to retire at the end of July. Despite our request, Chief Justice Anwar ul-Haq refused to allow him to complete the hearing. Another independent-minded judge was forced to drop out in September when a haemorrhage behind his eye left him temporarily dizzy and weak. His request that the court adjourn briefly until he recovered was also denied. That left the balance against us, four to three.

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was as biased as his counterpart on the Lahore High Court had been. Like the Chief Justice of the High Court, with whom he was very friendly, Anwar ul-Haq was also from Zia’s home area of Jullandar in India. And again there was no pretence of separation between the executive and judiciary. When Zia went to Mecca on pilgrimage in September, 1978, Anwar ul-Haq was sworn in as acting President. There was even a hotline from the Chief Justice’s chambers to the office of the Chief Martial Law Administrator.

I learned just how prejudiced Anwar ul-Haq was years later in exile from one of the other Supreme Court Justices, Safdar Shah. Anwar ul-Haq had taken Justice Shah aside during the appeal. We know Bhutto is innocent. But he must be eliminated if Pakistan is to be saved,’ he had told him. Safdar Shah had gone on to vote for my father’s honourable acquittal, and was himself persecuted by Anwar ul-Haq and the regime and forced into exile. Yet during the Supreme Court hearing, both Zia and Anwar ul-Haq continued to claim my father’s appeal was being held in front of an independent judiciary. ’We are going through the evidence with an open mind,’ insisted Anwar ul-Haq.

What could we do? The regime had control of the courts, the army, the
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newspapers, the radio and television. Other conveniently timed White Papers filled with false allegations designed to smear my father’s reputa-tion were being released by the regime in four languages and distributed among the foreign embassies. At the same time, my fathei s accuser Ahmed Raza Kasuri launched on a tour of Europe and America, staying at expensive hotels and holding press conferences about the ’just trial’ my father was receiving

in Pakistan. Kasuri claimed he was paying for every-thing himself, but the financial disclosures he and every other member of the PPP had been required to file under Zia’s Martial Law regulations didn’t support his claim. Where was the money coming from if not from the regime?

’I want you to go on a tour of the Frontier,’ my father told me in Septem-ber. ’We have to keep the people’s morale up. Take my Mao cap with you. It’s in my dressing room at 70 Clifton. Wear it while you’re speaking, then take it off and put it on the ground. Tell them ”My father said his cap should always be placed before the feet of the people.”’

I listened to him carefully, but I was worried about his health. Every time I saw my father in jail he looked thinner. His gums had turned deep red and at places become infected. He often had a fever. Mummy and I used to take chicken sandwiches with us and try to tempt him into eating. We would wrap the sandwiches in a moist cloth to keep them fresh and soft.

But my father paid little attention to food during the September visit, concentrating instead on coaching me on the themes for the speeches I would be making. ’The whole issue of autonomy will be re-opened as a consequence of Martial Law,’ he said. ’Remind the people that I, through democracy, gave them faith in a unified Pakistan. And only the return to democracy will hold the country together.’

His face seemed concerned as I left. ’Pinkie, I hate to put you in any danger. You may be arrested again if they get even more desperate. I’ve wrestled with this problem from the beginning. But then I think of the thousands of others who are being whipped and tortured for our cause . . .’

’Papa, please,’ I said quickly. ’I know you are concerned as a father for a daughter. But you are more than a father to me. You are also my political leader, just as you are the political leader of the others who are suffering.’

’Be careful, Pinkie,’ he called after me. ’You are going into the tribal areas. Don’t forget how conservative they are. Sometimes your dupatta falls off your head while you’re speaking. Remember to put it back up.’

’I’ll be careful, Papa,’ I assured him.

’Good luck, Pinkie,’ I heard him call after me.

I27

THE YEARS OF DETENTION ”’ THE JUDICIAL MURDER OF MY FATHER

Victoria came with me to the Northwest Frontier province and the tribal areas which are bordered by Afghanistan to the west and China to the north. Yasmin accompanied me too, a brave act for a young girl who’d grown up in the traditional protectiveness of a Pakistani family. She’d never spent a night away from her home until I’d asked her late one night to stay

with me at Flashman’s. Her grandmother had agreed reluctantly, not because of the danger from the regime, but because tradition did not permit an unmarried girl to spend a night away from home.

But the Niazis, like many families, were radicalised by the brutality of the regime. At great cost to themselves, the Niazis insisted that I stay with them and have some semblance of a family atmosphere rather than staying at the hotel. In retaliation, the family was constantly harassed. Tax liens were filed against them. The lane in front of their house was filled with intelligence trucks which followed Mrs Niazi to the market and her children to school. Intelligence agents trailed Dr Niazi’s dental patients as well until his practice fell off to practically nothing.

Together with local PPP leaders we travelled to Mardan, once a centre of the Gandharan Buddhist civilisation; Abbotabad, a former British hill station; Peshawar, the capital city of the Northwest Frontier whose walls of ochre brick had guarded against invaders from Central Asia for centur-ies. The words poured effortlessly from my heart at every stop in the Frontier province and the autonomous tribal areas ruled by the Pathans’ strict code: revenge for any insult, and hospitality for any guest. ’The Pathans are famous for their belief in honour. My father is fighting not only for his honour, but for the honour of our country,’ I called to the crowds whose features were as rugged as the nearby mountains of the Khyber Pass. We went on to Swat, with its lush, terraced rice fields, and Kohat, where salt blew in the air from the jagged salt-range in the distance. I spoke in Urdu, not knowing the regional language of Pashtu, but the Pathans listened all the same. There was no resistance to me, either, as a woman, even in these areas where the tribal women were fiercely guarded. The suffering in the country, the suffering of my family, of all of us, had rasha, Benazir rasha!’ the people

risen above the barrier of gender. ’Rasha, yelled back in Pashtu. Welcome, welcome, Benazir welcome!

’Bravo,’ my father greeted me, standing in the door of his cell and clapping his hands when I returned briefly to Rawalpindi before setting out to tour the Punjab.

Hundreds of PPP activist
s gathered to hear me at the home of a party official in Lahore. In spite of the regime’s harsh punishments, the dedication of the party workers was undiminished. ’The trial is unfair. We’ll protest by courting arrest,’ the PPP loyalists told me. ’Zia will have to arrest all of us before he can go ahead with the death sentence.’ At Sargodha, where feudal landlords still

held sway, more crowds turned out. There was a

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tempo building up, and the regime quickly moved to crush it. Scores of PPP supporters were arrested shortly after my departure from Sargodha, including my host whose only crime was allowing me to use his house. For this he was sentenced to a year’s rigorous imprisonment and a fine of rupees 100,000, or 10,000 dollars.

’The regime is edgy. Let’s not go on to Multan right away,’ some in the party argued back in Lahore. ’We have a momentum going,’ countered others. ’We might as well be arrested while sentiment is high.’ ’If we back off a little now, we’ll be able to gain more time to visit more places and reach more people,’ the discussion continued. The second strategy won, and I returned briefly to Karachi to answer another charge from the regime.

Meanwhile, the people’s commitment to democracy was reaching new heights. One after another, men in different cities began to set themselves on fire, immolating themselves in the ultimate protest against the per-ceived fate of their leader. Looking at their photographs in Musawaat, I realised with a start that I had met at least two of them. One, Aziz, had come to me at Flashman’s with a simple request a few months before: to pose for a photograph with him. Though I was exhausted, I had agreed, a small effort on my part for which I was very thankful when I read that he had burned himself alive.

Another, a Christian named Pervez Yaqub who was the first to im-molate himself, had come to me with a desperate proposal shortly after my father’s arrest in September, 1977. He was going to hijack an airliner and hold the passengers hostage, he told me, until the regime was forced to release my father. ’You mustn’t,’ I’d told him. ’Innocent people might die. And that would make you no different from the lawless thugs in the regime. We must fight by our rules, and not descend to theirs.’ Now he had made the ultimate sacrifice, burning himself to death in Lahore.

Pervez’s life could have been saved by the crowd which had rushed to put out the flames, but the Martial Law authorities prevented anyone from reaching him. They wanted the people to watch his agony, in order to scare any other Bhutto loyalists who might want to do the same thing. But the depth of passion only intensified. Over the next weeks, five more men would bum themselves to death to try and save the life of their elected Prime Minister.

’The regime claims that those who burned themselves to death were paid to do it by the party,’ I wrote in my notes for my forthcoming speech at Multan. ’Can there be such a price on a human life? No. These brave

men were idealists whose dedication to democracy and decency transcended their own pain. We salute them.’ I never got the chance to deliver the speech.
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October 4, 1978. Multan Airport.

The flight from Karachi to Multan to continue our tour of the Punjab is delayed and delayed. Yasmin and I arrive at the airport at 7.00 am. The flight doesn’t take off until noon. When we arrive at Multan, we under-stand why. Instead of taxiing to the terminal, the plane is shunted off to the far end of the tarmac and is immediately surrounded by army trucks and jeeps.

’Where is Miss Benazir Bhutto sitting?’ say two men in plain clothes, boarding the plane.

The steward points to me.

’Come with us,’ they say.

’On what grounds?’

’Don’t ask questions.’

A small plane is standing nearby when Yasmin and I come down the steps.

’You get in the Cessna,’ the officers say to me. ’She stays here.’

I look at Yasmin. Her eyes are huge in her face. Here she is, a young girl in a strange city, alone. God knows what could happen to her. ’Dogs!’ the fundamentalists and the Martial Law authorities have begun yelling at the women all over Pakistan who have left the sanctuaries of their homes for the first time - to demonstrate against my father’s arrest, my mother’s arrest, the arrests of their own husbands and sons and, increasingly, their daughters. Yasmin is also concerned about what will happen to me. There is safety in numbers.

’I won’t go without her,’ l say to the police.

’Get in the plane,’ they say, their eyes narrowing.

’I won’t,’ I say, taking a firm grip on Yasmin s hand.

Unbelievably, they move towards me, grab me, and start dragging me across the tarmac. ’Don’t let go, Yasmin!’ I yell to her, as she struggles to hang on to me.

While the passengers in the plane we’ve just been taken from look on horrified, Yasmin and I are pulled along the cement. My shalwar tears. The skin on my legs scrapes and bleeds. Yasmin is screaming. But we don’t let go of each other.

The police’s two-way radios crackle at the steps of the Cessna. As usual, they aren’t sure what to do and are requesting instructions. While the policemen are preoccupied, Yasmin and I dash up the steps into the little three-passenger plane. The pilot informs the police that if he doesn’t take off immediately it will be too dark for him to land. Land where? We don’t know. The Corps Commander of Multan is furious when the pilot’s message is radioed to him. He instructs the police to let us proceed. But the plane still sits on the runway.

’I haven’t had food or water since 7.00 this morning,’ the pilot says
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MURDER OF MY FATHER

quietly to the police. They quickly bring him a lunch box. When we are airborne, he turns - he had heard my request for water turned down by the Corps Commander - and hands it to us. ’I’ve eaten. I got this for you,’ he says.

Five hours later, we land back in Rawalpindi. I only know it is ’Pindi because I recognise one of the policemen who comes to take me from the plane. At least Yasmin is home. As I struggle towards the door of the plane, the pilot turns to me. I can still see the concern on his kind face, the tears that spilled out of his eyes. ’I’m a Sindhi,’ he said. That was all. That was enough.

My mother was delighted to see me when I arrived at the house where she was in her tenth month of detention. ’What a pleasant surprise,’ she said, thinking that I’d come for a visit. Her eyes widened when she saw my torn clothes, my bloody legs. ’Oh, I see,’ she said, her voice tapering off. Both of us detained again.

I wrote a letter to Mir in America where he had gone to appeal to the United Nations to exert more pressure on the regime. ’Papa has asked me to give you some guidelines. He is advising, not criticising. Hence, here we go:

’I. Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion. The press here has said you are living lavishly in London which Papa knows you are not, but he wants me to remind you that your personal life must be most circumspect. No films, no extravagance, or people will say you are enjoying yourself while your father languishes in a death cell.

’2. No interviews to, and keep completely away from, India and Israel. Your interview with an Indian paper has been misconstrued here.’ And on and on. I hated writing Mir such a seemingly bossy letter: I knew how hard he was working. He had sold my little McB and used the money to pay for the printing in London of my father’s rejoinder to the charges against him. He was having meetings with every foreign member of government who would see him and leading demonstrations of the Pakis-tani population in England to protest against my father’s death sentence. I wished so much we could be fighting together, but there was no way he or Shah, both of whom had abandoned their studies to lead the fight abroad, could return to Pakistan without being arrested. We all had to fight on, alone.

December 18, 1978. Supreme Court, Rawalpindi.

The court-room was swamped with people desperate to catch a glimpse of their Prime Minister. After a lengthy court battle, my father’s lawyers

THE YEARS OF DETENTION
had won the right for him to appear before the Supreme Court in his own defence. The court-room seated only 100. 300 to 400 packed themselves in for the four

days of his address, sitting on the radiators, squashed into the aisles, perched on stacks of law books in the well in front of the bench. The thousands who were turned away waited outside behind bar-ricades to watch my father’s arrival in a police van at 9.00 am and his return to prison at noon.

I wanted badly to be there, but I was in detention and my request for permission to attend was denied. My mother, however, had been released by the court in November after almost a year of detention, and so was able to go. My father’s valet, Urs, also managed to get a court pass. So did Mrs Niazi and Yasmin, as well as Victoria and Amina. Later, Victoria would write a book about my father’s ordeal entitled Bhutto: Trial and Execution. It should have been called Judicial Murder.