Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto

My father’s address, my mother told me, was brilliant. Over the four days allowed him by the court, he refuted the charges against him of complicity in the murder case, citing the irregularities and contradictions of the ’witnesses’ in the Lahore trial; of the charges that he was a Muslim in name only; of the charges that he had personally rigged the elections. ’I am not responsible for each and every thought and idea born in the minds of officials or non-officials of our fertile Indus Valley,’ he said. Speaking extempore and without notes, my father once more cast the spell of his intellect and oratory over the spellbound crowd.

’Everyone who is made of flesh has to leave this world one day. I do not want life as life, but I want justice,’ he said. ’. . . The question is not that I have to establish my innocence; the question is that the prosecution has to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt. I want my innocence to be established not for the person of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. I want it established for the higher consideration that this has been a grotesque injustice. It puts the Dreyfus case in the shade.’

My father’s performance was even more remarkable considering the conditions he’d been kept in. He had been kept awake by the army for nights on end. He had not seen the sun for more than six months, and had been without fresh water’ for twenty-five days in his death cell. He was pale and weak, Mummy told me, but he seemed to gain strength as his address went on. ’I feel a little dizzy,’ he admitted in the courtroom. ’I can’t adjust myself to the momentum and the people.’ He looked around the packed crowd. ’Yes, it’s nice to see people,’ he said with a smile.

People in the court-room rose in respect every time he entered or left. And he insisted on appearing before the public as he always had, the impeccably dressed and stylish Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Urs had brought him the clothes he requested from 70 Clifton and he appeared on the first day in court in a tailored suit, a silk shirt and tie, with a colourful

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handkerchief in his pocket. Only the loose fit of his trousers indicated the amount of weight he had lost.

At first the authorities allowed him to enter the court-room freely down the centre aisle. But when they saw how the people reached out to shake his hand, and how he responded to the first affection he’d received in over a year by smiling and touching them back, the security guards formed a human barrier around him. For the last three days of his appear-ance, he was kept inside a tight circle of six security men, their arms linked around him.

The appeal was completed on December 23. My mother and I applied for permission to visit him on December 25, the birthday of Pakistan’s founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah. This was denied. We were not permitted to see him either on New Year’s Day or five days later on his 51st birthday.

On February 6, 1979, the decision came down from the Supreme Court. By a vote of four to three, the death sentence was upheld.

My mother and I heard about the decision at 11.00 am, soon after it was announced. We had hoped for a miracle from Zia’s packed bench. But the four Punjabi judges from the military heart of the country - two of them had been appointed ad hoc, and their tenure was confirmed by the military regime after the verdict - had voted to uphold the lower court, while the three senior judges from the minority provinces had voted to overrule. The reality of my father’s death sentence made me feel physically ill.

My mother was about to leave for her regular Tuesday visit to my father when the Martial Law authorities arrived at our rented house with a detention order for her. But she thwarted them. Before they realised what was going on, my mother rushed out the door and got into her car, a fast-moving Jaguar. ’Open the gate,’ she commanded the police guards stationed around the house where I had been in detention since my arrest at Multan airport. Not realising that detention orders had been issued for my mother as well, they obeyed. At high speed she drove herself to Rawalpindi Central Jail, outdistancing the pursuing army jeeps. Because they were expecting her, the jail authorities let her in.

She got through one steel gate. Then another. She was just ahead of her detention order being relayed to the prison, thereby cancelling her permission to visit. She rushed on. The interior courtyard was right in front of her. Steadily she moved through the army tents and

the arsenal of weapons surrounding my father’s compound. The last gate finally opened.

My father was in his death cell. ’The appeal has been rejected,’ she managed to tell him before the jail authorities and police caught up with her. Her face was remarkably serene when she was returned to the house. ’I made it,’ she told me. ’I was not going to give them the perverse
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satisfaction of telling your father the verdict.’ Once more we were both locked up. And there was only a week to appeal against my father’s sen-tence.

At Flashman’s, the lawyers worked non-stop on the review petition. They had requested four copies of the Supreme Court’s 1,500 page decis-ion, over 800 of the pages written by Anwar ul-Haq. They received only one copy. A secretary was dispatched to photocopy it. In the midst of the copying process, he was arrested as was the owner of the photocopying machine.

Somehow the defence team managed to procure its own photocopying machine and move it into Flashman’s. This was very risky. Since the beginning of the year, the regime had restricted the sale of typewriters and photocopying machines to commercial businesses so that the equip-ment could not be used by the PPP or any other political organisation to produce underground literature. Just using a typewriter or a photocopying machine was now deemed ’anti-state’, while anyone selling us any new equipment risked arrest. The lawyers worked on.

Locked up with my mother in Islamabad, I

felt trapped in a never-ending nightmare. Another sweep of arrests followed the Supreme Court decision. Schools and universities were closed. Zia was bent on sup-pressing any disturbance before it could occur. He quickly mopped up outbreaks of protest before they could spread.

The repression unleashed by military regimes has a numbing effect on people. When the danger or tension becomes too high, people turn to their own survival. They detach themselves. In silence lies safety. They seek refuge in apathy. They don’t want to reach out for fear that they, too, will become victims.

But I was not so fortunate. I could not detach myself from the relentless momentum towards my father’s death. When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t recognise myself. My face was red and blotchy from acne caused by stress. I’d lost so much weight that my chin, jaw and eyebrows jutted out. My cheeks were sunken, my skin tightly stretched.

I tried to keep up a regimen of exercise, jogging in place for fifteen minutes every morning. But I kept losing my concentration and stopping. If only I could sleep. But I couldn’t. Mummy gave me Valium. I took two milligrams, but I

kept waking up, my mind in a turmoil. ’Try Ativan,’ my mother suggested. It made me cry. I tried Mogadon instead. Nothing.
February 12, 1979. Sihala Police Camp.

The authorities came in the morning to tell Mummy and me that we were being moved to a police training camp in Sihala a few miles from my father’s prison in Rawalpindi. We were taken to a remote building

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surrounded by barbed wire on the top of a barren hill. Nothing was provided for us, no blankets, no food. Nothing. Ibrahim and Basheer, two of our household staff from Al-Murtaza, had to make the long trip back and forth every day with provisions.

February 13, 1979. The lawyers finished writing their petition at 5.00 am, the morning it had to be submitted. The court granted my father a stay of execution while the petition was reviewed. On February 24, the court hearing began. Meanwhile appeals for clemency flooded into Pakis-tan once more from heads of state around the world. ’All the politicians are asking to save a fellow politician but not many non-politicians have asked me for clemency,’ Zia scoffed, describing the pleas from the heads of state as nothing more than ’trade union activity’.

I visited my father from Sihala at the beginning of March. I don’t know how he kept going. He had refused all medical treatment since the death sentence had been upheld, and had stopped taking any medication. He had also stopped eating, not only because of the pain in his gums and teeth, but as a protest against his treatment. He was being kept locked in his cell now, unable to use the commode the prison officials had set up for him in another cell.

As usual, I was looking forward very much to seeing him, even more so that day because I had a surprise for him. Before my mother’s latest arrest, she had gone to Karachi and brought back my father’s dog, Happy, to keep me company in detention. I loved Happy. We all loved Happy, a fluffy white mongrel my sister had given to my father. ’Now you be quiet,’ I whispered to Happy when I arrived at Rawalpindi Central Jail with him under my coat.

At the search area at the first barrier, I found to my great luck that the jail superintendent wasn’t there. Nor was Colonel Rafi, the head of the army contingent posted inside the jail who always stood around watching our every move. Happy and I moved on to the second barrier. Luckily the policewomen searching me didn’t object. We don’t have orders to search for a dog,’ one of them said sympathetically. I stepped inside the final prison enclosure. ’Go and find him,’ I said to Happy, letting him loose.

Happy put his nose to the ground and dashed from

cell to cell. I heard him yapping with excitement when he found my very surprised father. ’How much more loyal dogs are than men,’ my father said when I caught up with the two of them.

The authorities were furious when they found out about the dog. Happy was never allowed to visit my father again. But at least I had been able to give my father that one moment, a reminder of life when we were a normal family: a mother, father and four children living under one roof, with dogs and cats in the garden.

THE YEARS OF DETENTION
During the first weeks of March, our lawyers flooded the court with more grounds for review. They were exhausted by the enormity of their burden. When Mummy and I tuned in to the BBC evening news at Sihala at the beginning of March, we heard that Ghulam Ali Memon, a member of my father’s defence team and one of Pakistan’s most highly respected lawyers, had died at his desk at Flashman’s of a heart attack. Allah, Ya Allah,’ he had reportedly said in the midst of dictating what was to be his final legal attack against the majority decision of the Supreme Court. Another victim of Martial Law was claimed. We turned off the radio. What could we say?

On March 23, the anniversary of the day Pakistan’s founder Moham-med Ali Jinnah called for the establishment of an independent Muslim state, Zia announced that he would hold elections in the autumn. The next day, the Supreme Court announced its decision. Though my father’s petition was dismissed, the Court unanimously recommended that the sentence be commuted to life. Once again, hope surged. The decision now rested solely with Zia.

Seven days. There were seven days for somebody, anybody, to per-suade Zia not to send my father to his death. And Zia had every reason to spare him. A split decision, especially such a close one of four to three like my father’s, had never resulted in the death sentence in Pakistan. No executive government in judicial history had refused to accept the unani-mous recommendation of the highest court in the country to commute the death sentence. And no one in the history of the sub-continent had ever been put to death for conspiracy to murder.

There was pressure on Zia, too, from abroad. Messages were pouring in again from foreign heads of state. Prime Minister Callaghan of Great Britain appealed to Zia for mercy for the third time. Saudi Arabia, the seat of fundamentalist Islam, appealed again. Even President Carter joined in and appealed this time. But there was no reply from Zia. The minutes ticked by towards my father’s fate.

No date of execution was announced, giving the people false hope. No one wanted

to accept what my father had always known, preferring to cling to the unanimous recommendation of the court and Zia’s promises to Muslim governments to commute the sentence to life. A plea from my father or his immediate family, Zia had also let it be known, would give him a way to save face and commute the sentence. But my father, who had accepted the inevitability of his death long before, continued to refuse. ’An innocent man does not appeal for mercy for a crime he did not commit,’ my father insisted, forbidding us to appeal as well. His oldest sister, one of my aunts in Hyderabad, went ahead and appealed anyway, delivering her petition at the gate to Zia’s house an hour before the deadline was to expire. But there was still no reply from Zia.

The signs were increasingly ominous. In Rawalpindi Central Jail, what
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pitiful pieces of furniture there were in my father’s cell were taken away, including his bed. He was left to sleep on the floor on his roll of bedding. They even took away his razor, leaving my usually cleanly-shaven father with a stubble of grey beard on his face. He was ill and very weak.

In Sihala, I was served with another detention order, restricting me for another fifteen days on the grounds that I would ’resort to further agita-tional politics as a final bid to secure the release of [my] father, posing a serious threat to peace and tranquillity and to the efficient conduct of Martial Law.’

Nobody knew what was going to happen. Would Zia actually go ahead and hang my father in spite of world condemnation and the recom-mendation of the court? If so, when? The answer seemed tragically clear on April 3, when my mother and I were taken to our last meeting.

Yasmin! Yasmin! They are going to kill him tonight!

Arnina! You here, too. It’s tonight! Tonight!

The lawyers drew up another review petition. Amina flew to Karachi where she and one of my father’s lawyers, Mr Hafiz Lakho, tried to submit it to the court. The registrar refused to accept it. Give the petition to the judges, the registrar told them, but the judges wouldn’t accept it either. One judge even slipped out of the back door of the court house to avoid them. Amina and Mr Lakho went to the senior judge’s private house and pleaded at the gate. The judge refused to see them. Broken-hearted, Amina flew back to Islamabad.

April 3, 1979.

Tick. Tick. The Martial Law forces are cordoning off our family grave-yard, cutting off all the roads to Garhi Khuda Bakhsh. Tick. Tick. Amina goes directly to the Niazi’s house from the airport, not wanting to be alone. Tick. Tick. ’It’s tonight,’ Dr Niazi is

saying quietly into the phone over and over again, as Yasmin and Amina lie silent and wide awake in the darkened house. Tick. Tick.

An army truck pulls away quickly from Rawalpindi Central Jail in the early morning. A short time later, Yasmin hears a small plane fly across Islamabad. She convinces herself that it belongs to one of the Arab leaders who has got into the prison and is spiriting my father away to safety. But the plane she hears is taking my father’s body home to Larkana.

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RELEASE FROM AL-MURTAZA:

DEMOCRACY’S CHALLENGE TO MARTIAL LAW

As the first anniversary of my father’s execution nears on April 4, 1980, people are pressing past AI-Murtaza towards my father’s grave in Garhi Khuda Bakhsh. Now in our sixth month of detention, my mother and I apply to the regime for permission to visit his grave but I know this won’t be granted. The regime is so apprehensive about any public dem-onstration of support for my father’s memory and the PPP that the roads leading to our ancestral village have been blocked for a hundred miles radius.

No matter how many guns the regime levels at the people, Zia con-tinues to be haunted by my father’s ghost. In his lifetime, my father was admired as a statesman and social visionary. By his murder, he has been elevated in the minds of his followers to the rank of martyr, and to some, a saint. No two forces are more powerful in a Muslim country.

Miracles are being reported from my father’s burial ground ten miles away from Al-Murtaza. A crippled boy walks. A barren woman delivers a son. In the year since my father’s execution, thousands have made the pilgrimage to our family graveyard to hold a rose petal or a piece of mud from my father’s grave on their tongues while they pray. The local adminis-trators have torn down the sign pointing to the graveyard isolated in the desert. But still the people come.

Police and army patrols harass them, demanding their names, writing down their number plates if they’ve come by car or truck, their addresses if they’ve made the journey on foot. Often their food is confiscated and the jugs of water put out for them by local villagers smashed. But still the people come, heaping framed photos of my father and strings of roses and marigolds on his grave in the desert.

Eight days after the anniversary of my father’s death, the court hearing challenging our detention finally comes up in Karachi. When our lawyer mentions the letter I’d written protesting against the disrespect of Captain Iftikhar during Sanarri s attempted visit the month before, the Advocate General claims to have no knowledge of any

such letter. But I have the signed receipt from the jailer, and our lawyer asks for a day’s adjournment so we can produce it. To prevent a letter from reaching the court is

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contempt, punishable by six months imprisonment. They know I have the proof. The authorities have to do something to pre-empt the contempt charge.

That night my mother and I are abruptly freed. I never see the jailer again. Later I hear he was denied promotion and given a ’punishment post’.

Freedom. But who knew for how long. My mother stayed in Karachi after our release from Al-Murtaza while I flew to Rawalpindi to catch up on the developments during our six months of detention. The pressure in my ear was almost unbearable during the flight, especially during the descent into ’Pindi. When I woke up the next morning at Yasmiri s house, the pillow case was splattered with stinking pus and blood. My friends rushed me to the hospital. ’You’re very lucky,’ the doctor told me at the emer-gency room after cleaning my ear. ’The air pressure in the plane forced the infection to burst outwards. It could have burst inwards and caused serious damage.’

I didn’t know what to think. First the regime’s doctor at AI-Murtaza had insinuated that I was imagining the discomfort in my ear, then had accused me of perforating it. Now this doctor, after telling me how lucky I’d been, simply gave me a note advising me to have my ear checked every two weeks by my doctor in Karachi. Were the doctors inept or were they deliberately ignoring my condition? No one told me that I had a serious mastoid infection which was slowly melting the delicate bones of the middle ear. That’s what was causing my partial deafness. Without surgery, I Teamed later, the chronic inflammation could lead to permanent deafness and facial paralysis. But I was told nothing.

My mother was very concerned when I returned to Karachi. Write to the regime and request permission to travel abroad for a check-up,’ she urged me. ’Your health has nothing to do with politics.’ I wrote to the regime. We received no reply. The regime wanted to keep us where they could see us.

Military intelligence vans were parked twenty-four hours a day outside 70 Clifton. Whenever my mother or I left the house, they followed us. Whoever came to the house was photographed and their licence plates noted. Our telephone lines were tapped. Sometimes there was a clicking noise. Other times the line just went dead.

Why don’t you go back to Larkana and try to straighten out the farm finances? my mother suggested when I felt stronger. ’No one in the family has been able to check through our accounts for two years.’
Intelligence agents never left my trail as I headed back to Al-Murtaza to see our farm managers and go over the planting and harvest reports. I
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had no idea what to expect or even to look for. My father or brothers had always tended the lands.

While I went over the books, I often felt as if I was back in the kitchen as an eight-year-old struggling with the household accounts with Babu. But it was a relief to have something concrete to deal with and to stop even momentarily the endless whirling in my mind. Every morning before the summer heat became unbearable I drove across the guava orchards and the fields of rice and sugar-cane in a jeep to familiarise myself with my new responsibilities. I roamed the fields in trainers with a scarf or straw hat on my head as protection from the scorching sun, learning about our system of irrigation canals bolstered with tube wells, helping with the summer planting of rice and cotton, and reading up on sugar-cane cultivation and the problems of water-logging and salinisation. The physical exertion became a balm.

The tenant farmers, the kamdars or managers, and the munshis or ac-countants, were greatly relieved to have a member of the Bhutto family back among them. ’There is gold in the step of the owner. Now that you are here we will prosper,’ one said to me. ’We are no longer orphans.’

I loved being on the lands. Still, it felt odd to be working side by side with men in Larkana. Women in the rural areas were very conservative, rarely leaving their homes without wearing burgas and certainly not driv-ing cars. But I had no choice. There were no male members of my family left in Pakistan. My father was dead and my brothers, who would have been arrested immediately if they returned to Pakistan, were living in Afghanistan. So- back and forth I went to the fields every morning. There was little room left in my life, in any of our lives, for tradition.

In a way I had transcended gender. There was not a person who did not know the circumstances that had forced me out of the pattern of landowning families, where young women were guarded zealously and rarely, if ever, allowed to leave their homes without a male relative. Our tradition holds that women are the honour of families. To safeguard their honour, and themselves, a family keeps their women in purdah, behind the four walls and under the veil.

My four aunts, my grandfather’s daughters from his first marriage, formed part of this tradition. With no suitable first or second Bhutto cousins available for marriage, they had been consigned to a life of purdah behind their compound walls in Hyderabad. They had great

status within the family because everyone understood why they had never married. And they always seemed very cheerful, never having known any other sort of life. ’They have no worry lines in their faces,’ my mother would often say in wonder when she came back from visiting them.

To me it seemed a life of boredom, but my aunts seemed happy enough. They learned enough Arabic to read the Holy Quran, supervised the

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cooking, made delicious carrot pickle and sweetmeats, sewed and knitted. For exercise they took walks around the courtyard. Occasionally the cloth man would discreetly leave bolts of new fabric outside the walls for them to pick and choose from. They were the old generation. I was the new.

In the evenings at AI-Murtaza, I had meetings with student delegations and other visitors who brought news of those still in jail and reports about resistance to military rule. We drew up lists of people to visit in prison and of families to console. In the afternoons I finally had the time and freedom to arrange for a shamiana to be built to shade my father’s grave and to fulfil a request from my mother to replace the old wooden windows at Al-Murtaza with glass. ’I’d rather see than be cool,’ she had said during the almost daily power failures we’d experienced in our long months of detention at Al-Murtaza. ’Who knows when we’ll be detained here again? We might as well be ready.’