Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto
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’You will be leaving here at 2.30 am,’ the superintendent said, coming to my cell on the night of the 12th. He looked frightened. ’Be ready.’ ’Where are you taking me?’ I asked. There was no reply. ’Where is my mother?’ I asked. Again there was no reply. For the first time, I felt afraid. I had heard rumours that the jail auth-orities sometimes took controversial prisoners into the desert at night and simply killed them. Their bodies were buried before their families were notified that their relatives had either been killed while trying to escape or had suffered mysterious and sudden heart attacks. When I first arrived at the Rest House I’d written a letter to the Sindh High Court challenging my arrest and asking either to be allowed to conduct my own defence in court or to have a lawyer sent to me. Now I was desperate that the letter should reach its destination. ’You must send this letter to the court,’ I urged one of the jailers while I waited for the regime’s officers to arrive in the early hours of the morn-ing. He quietly took my letter and stuffed it into his pocket. Thank God for that. If he delivered it, at least there would be some record of where I was and where I had been taken from. A van load of policewomen came for me at 2.30. So did trucks full of police and army personnel. We raced through the empty streets at break-neck speed in a car with darkened windows, as if we were expecting an ambush. Suddenly the car lurched to a stop and there was much whispering and talking back and forth on two-way radios. 150 SOLITARY CONFINEMENT IN SUKKUR JAIL `Isolate her on the tarmac,’ I heard the instructions come through. I was relieved. At least I was at the airport. But where were they taking me? I knew the plane schedule by heart by now, and there were no flights to anywhere in Pakistan at this hour. Perhaps to Larkana, I consoled myself. Perhaps in their concern for secrecy they had arranged for a special plane. I kept waiting for one to land, but none came. Instead I sat and I sat and I sat for four hours until I saw the dawn break. At 6.30, an ordinary passenger plane appeared on the tarmac. I was loaded onto the flight, a policewoman in the seat beside me, two behind me, and two across the aisle. ’Where are we going?’ I asked the air hostess. The policewoman cut off her answer. ’You are under arrest and can speak to no one,’ she said. What was going on? I hadn’t seen a paper during my five days in Karachi Jail and had no idea why my mother and I were being treated so harshly. It was the formation of the Movement to Restore Democracy and our challenge to Zia, I was sure, that had brought on these last waves of arrests. The newspapers had been filled with little else for the week before I was arrested. But what was allowing the regime to treat us so severely? And why was there such fear on the faces of the other passen-gers, even on the faces of the policemen? The air hostess passed me a newspaper. It was dominated not by news of the MRD, but by news of the hijacking. Calling for the release of fifty-Eive Pakistani political prisoners, the hijackers had ordered the plane to Kabul, Afghanistan, where they had shot one of the passengers, an army officer named Major Tariq Rahim who had once been an aide-de-camp to my father. The pilot had then been forced to fly to Damascus in Syria. I caught my breath as I read on, half of me refusing to believe the newspaper report, half of me dreading it was true. The hijackers were claiming to be members of a resistance group called Al-Zulfikar. Al-Zul-fikar was said to be based in Kabul, where my brothers were living. The group’s leader, the article claimed, was my brother Mir. Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three. Seven strokes to go with the hair-brush. Ninety-seven, ninety-eight. Count to one hundred while brushing the teeth. Walk now for fifteen minutes in the open courtyard. Discipline. Routine. I must not deviate. Up and down the open sewer running through the dusty prison yard, along the empty, barred cells facing my own cell in the locked enclosure. The prison compound, the jailers tell me, has been entirely emptied because of me. The regime has placed me in utter isola-tion. Besides the jailers who unlock my cavernous open cage in the morning to bring me a cup of weak tea and bread for breakfast, weak lentil soup, THE YEARS OF DETENTION
Locked up in my cell in Sukkur, I didn’t yet know about Zia’s efforts to link the PPP, and particularly my mother and me, to Al-Zulfikar. Instead, I concentrated on getting released. I felt relieved when my lawyer, Mr Lakho, visited me at Sukkur to draw up an appeal against my detention. Once again I’d been helped by an honest jailer. The letter I’d written to the Sindh High Court had been delivered after all. But both the jailer’s efforts and those of Mr Lakho would prove to be fruitless. On March 23, three or four days after Mr Lakho’s visit, the military regime issued a ’Provisional Constitutional Order’. ’General Zia shall have, and shall be deemed to always have had, powers to amend the constitu-tion,’ it read. Using the new Order, Zia immediately struck down the authority of the civil courts to hear challenges to Martial Law sentences. The appeal I’d filed through Mr Lakho, and that of every other political prisoner, was now irrelevant. We could be arrested, tried, sentenced and executed by a military court without any legal recourse at all. Zia also used the new Provisional Court Order to purge the courts of any judicial opposition. All judges were now required to swear an oath upholding the supremacy of Martial Law and Zia as Chief Martial Law Administrator. The judges who refused to take the oath were dismissed. Others were dismissed before they had the chance to take the oath. One quarter of Pakistan’s judiciary was eliminated by the regime’s new order, including all the judges who had been overruling the verdicts of death and rigorous imprisonment for political prisoners. ’If it is a question of
’Can you bring me Time or Newsweek?’ I asked the jail superintendent on his weekly visit. ’They are communist publications and are not allowed,’ he told me. ’They are hardly communist, but from the centre of capitalism,’ I argued. ’They are communist.’ ’What books do you have in your library?’ I tried. ’We have no library here.’ As March turned into April, I began to dread the arrival of the news-paper. The hijacking continued to be front page news. So did the involve-ment of my brother Mir. In one interview I read, Mir took responsibility for the hijacking of the PIA plane. In another, he denied it. All the govern-ment papers insinuated, however, that AI-Zulfikar was the armed wing of the PPP. What a fraudulent charge. The whole premise on which the PPP was based was to effect change peacefully by political means, to work within a legal framework. Why else had we pressed so hard for elections, entered the elections in spite of every trick Zia had thrown at us, continued to press for elections in the face of his Martial Law guns? The hearts and loyalty of the people could never be captured by force. Even Zia must have known that. Still the regime was continuing to twist whatever truth there was about Al-Zulfikar to destroy the MRD, the PPP, and the Bhut-tos. Alone in my cell at Sukkur, I was becoming convinced that the auth-orities were preparing to kill me. One jail official told me nervously that I was going to be tried secretly by a military court right here in the prison and sentenced to death. Another said that the death cells in another courtyard were being emptied in preparation for my transfer. Security at Sukkur was being stepped up, he reported, following rumours that my
THE YEARS OF DETENTION brothers were going to try to rescue me following my death sentence. There were other rumours, too, that I was about to be moved to a torture centre in Baluchistan to extract a ’confession’ of my involvement in the hijacking of the PIA plane. ’There are terrible days ahead for you,’ one whispered sympathetically to me. ’You should pray for your survival.’ The Inspector General of jails carne to Sukkur on his inspection rounds and confirmed the rumours. ’They are torturing people to get them to involve you in AI-Zulfikar,’ the kind-looking grey-haired man whispered to me, trying to caution me of the dangers that lay ahead. ’But I am innocent. They cannot implicate me,’ I said naively. The Inspector General shook his head. ’I have seen a boy from your own home town of Larkana with his toe-nails pulled out,’ he said, tears filling his eyes. ’I don’t know how many can put up with that without breaking.’ I didn’t want to believe him or the jail staff. In order to survive, it was important not to accept reality. To accept reality was to accept the threat. Subconsciously, however, my body registered the tension. My internal problems worsened. As there was no privacy in my cell, the jail matron had learned of my gynaecological condition soon after my arrival at Sukkur and a doctor had been summoned. But I had been told nothing about her diagnosis. I began to push away the food the jailers brought to me, finding it difficult to swallow. I ate almost nothing, yet I became convinced that I was getting fat. My stomach seemed to extend. My rib cage felt larger. I realise now that I had become anorexic.
’Why?’ I asked. ’Your health is poor. We are taking you to Karachi.’ At Karachi airport, the police told me they were taking me home. I was ecstatic. 70 Clifton. Pure, cool water instead of the yellow jail water. My own bed instead of the rope cot. Four solid walls instead of bars. I thought my ordeal was over. It wasn’t. ’This isn’t my home,’ I protested when, exhausted after the journey, I was taken inside a house I’d never seen. ’We want you to see another doctor first,’ my police escort explained. ’Then we will take you to your house.’ I looked at the unfamiliar woman coming towards me. ’Why don’t you
The doctor had a kind face, at least. ’The doctors in Sukkur think you have uterine cancer,’ she told me quietly, after examining me. ’I’m not sure. We’ll have to do an exploratory operation.’ Cancer? At twenty-eight? I looked at her disbelievingly. Was the threat of cancer real? Or were they just trying to disorient me again? She, like all the doctors I had seen, was chosen by the regime. As we talked, she was scribbling on a pad. ’Don’t worry. I am a friend and sympathiser,’ read the note she passed me. ’You can trust me.’ But could I? I didn’t have one reason to trust anyone. ’You said you were taking me to 70 Clifton,’ I told the police when we continued on through Karachi in the jeep. ’This is not the way.’ ’You’ll go home later,’ they told me. ’First we are taking you to visit your mother in Karachi Central Jail.’ I got very excited. I hadn’t seen my mother or heard from her since our arrests over a month ago. I needed to talk to her badly about my condition, about the state of the MRD, about the charges of high treason I was sure the regime was going to lodge against us. ’Mummy! Mummy!’ I called out as I rushed into the Rest House. ’Mummy, it’s Pinkie. I’m here!’ There was no answer. Another lie. My mother was being held in an-other ward, one jailer told me in secret. I applied to see her immediately. I never received a reply. The next day, instead of taking me to 70 Clifton, the police took me to a large public hospital. Its corridors were deserted, without the crowds of family who usually accompanied their relatives right up to the door of the operation room. I felt so alone without my own family. When I woke up after the operation, I was relieved to see my sister Sanam there. At least the regime had given her permission to come. But she was very upset by her visit: Sanam:
’Please, can you help me?’ I asked one person after another in the endless halls. Go here. Go there, they told me. Suddenly I heard a woman scream-ing. ’My God, it’s my sister,’ I said to the woman next to me. ’That’s not your sister. She’s just here for a little operation,’ replied the woman, who must have been an intelligence agent. ’The woman who is screaming is in labour.’
IMPM _’ THE YEARS OF DETENTION I knew it was Pinkie. I just knew it. I rushed after the sounds of the screaming to find her being pushed rapidly down the hall from the operat-ing room on a hospital trolley, surrounded by policemen. There were tubes coming out of her arms and her nose. ’They’re going to kill me! They’re going to kill Papa!’ she was shouting, still half under the an-aesthetic. ’Stop them! Somebody, stop them!’ I saw one white hair on her head. To me that was the limit, the last straw. She’d been locked up for so many birthdays, locked up without a single human soul. And what had she got for it? One white hair. I sat by her bed in the ward until she woke up. I thought they’d let me spend the afternoon with her. They only let me stay half an hour. On the way out, I saw her doctor. ’Tell your sister she’s all right,’ the doctor said. But I never got the chance. That afternoon they took her back to Karachi Central Jail.
say. ’You’re lying,’ they yell at me, going through my handbag and my few items of clothing. Their anger increases when they find nothing. ’Get up. Hurry,’ two policewomen shout at me the next morning. I feel too weak to stand. ’The doctor said I shouldn’t be moved for forty-eight hours,’ I try to protest. The police pay no attention, throwing my few things in a bag. As they hurry me into a car and then onto a plane, I feel myself sinking. Their voices seem to come from far away. Waves of darkness roll towards me. Please don’t let me sink into them. I don’t want to faint. But I fall into blackness. When I start to regain consciousness several hours later in my cell at Sukkur, I hear voices. ’She’s alive,’ I hear someone say. Another voice breaks in. ’She shouldn’t have been moved so soon,’ it says. I sink back into the darkness, but this time it is more peaceful. I have survived. I didn’t know then how lucky I was. Jam Sadiq Ali, a former minister in the PPP government living in political exile in London told me years later that he’d received a desperate call from Pakistan during my brief hospitalis-ation. ’Do something,’ he was told. ’They’re planning to kill her on the operating table.’ He had held a press conference and disclosed the threat 156 SOLITARY CONFINEMENT IN SUKKUR JAIL on my life, thereby pre-empting whatever plans the regime might have had to kill me. For weeks after the operation, I remained tired and anaemic at Sukkur, too depleted to walk. The junior jail staff became much more open in their sympathy. At great risk to themselves, they smuggled me a pen and a new notebook, as well as a few copies of Newsweek. One even brought me some fresh fruit. I spent as much time as possible recording events taking place outside the Sukkur walls, writing in my notebook, on the margins of newspapers, on every scrap of paper I could find. The jailers took the papers away with them every night in case there was a surprise inspection. If anything was found, they would lose their jobs. I waited impatiently for the papers to be returned in the morning. Notes from jail diaries: April 20, 1981: ’The regime-backed Urdu newspaper Jang headlined a BBC interview with Mir Murtaza Bhutto who said that he was in Kabul at the time of the hijacking but he did not know about it until after it had occurred. Mir Murtaza said his mother and sister who are in Pakistan, had not given their agreement to Al-Zulfikar. He was not working with the Pakistan People’s Party and had had no contact at all with his mother and sister.’ April 21: Dawn. ’Radio Australia last night quoted Mir as having said in Bombay recently that his Al-Zulfikar organisation, also known as the Pakistan Liberation Army, could ”turn Pakistan up and down” and was now pledged to violence to oust the administration. Al-Zulfikar, Mir said, had conducted at least fifty-four other operations inside Pakistan, including the bomb explosion in the stadium at Karachi before the Pope arrived there. Asked about reports that his organisation’s headquarters were in Kabul, he replied: ”We do have a presence there, but our headquarters are inside Pakistan.”’ My heart sank as I recorded the news items. If only I could talk to Mir, see him. It had been five years. I only knew what he and Shah Nawaz looked like now from pictures in the press. As much as I understood Mir’s frustration and anger, his statements, whether real or misconstrued by the regime, were making it far more dangerous for me and other members of the PPP. Zia could use them as a pretext to finish the PPP off. He couldn’t get to my brothers, but he could get to us.
THE YEARS OF DETENTION ’Why have I been detained?’ I asked him. ’Because of Al-Zulfikar,’ he replied. ’I had nothing to do with AI-Zulfikar.’ ’We found the blueprint of Al-Zulfikar in your room which gave away their plans in detail,’ he said. I didn’t know what he was talking about. ’I never even heard of Al-Zulfikar until the hijacking,’ I insisted. ’It is for the court to decide about your association with AI-Zulfikar, the stadium bombing, and Lala Assad.’ Lala Assad? The vice-president of the student’s wing in Sindh? I knew Lala Assad. He was an engineering student in Khairpur. I couldn’t believe he was involved in AI-Zulfikar, if indeed such a group existed at all. But the regime was obviously using Al-Zulfikar as an excuse to rid themselves of as many PPP loyalists as possible. Another man had been arrested as an accomplice of the hijackers, the Deputy Martial Law Administrator told me - Nasser Baloach. I knew him too. Nasser Baloach was the labour representative of the PPP in the gigantic Karachi Steel Mills. ’What I can conclude from the talks this morning,’ I wrote in my diary after he left, ’is that the regime thinks I conspired with Lala Assad and the others in the Stadium blast as part of Al-Zulfikar. I can hardly believe it. It sounds so surrealistic and eerie. The innocent are persecuted. The criminals rule. What a world.’ The world grew infinitely more ominous two days later. ’PAPERS PROVE THAT BHUTTO LADIES HAD KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE PROCEED- INGS’ read the headlines of Jang. My heart stopped beating for a second and a chill crept up my spine. They must have been referring to the ’blueprint’ the Deputy Martial Law Administrator claimed to have found in my room. The regime was obviously preparing the country for another trial of the Bhuttos. ’We seem to be caught in a nightmare,’ I wrote in my diary on April 30. ’First the shock of learning about Al-Zulfikar and Mir. Now the regime’s determination to make us part of what we were not. It seems so fantastic. But then, why should it? They did the same thing with Papa. Now they want to repeat a fraud which the world knew was a fraud. Or perhaps they think the world won’t know it’s a fraud. What matters is the truth. But what opportunity does a military court provide for showing that? Unable to defeat us politically, Zia is seeking physical elimination and destruction.’ What I didn’t know was the depth of brutality the regime had sunk to in its efforts to destroy us. Baldia Centre and Division 555 in Karachi. Lahore Fort and Birdwood Barracks in Lahore. Attock Fort in the north of Punjab. Chaklala Air Force Base outside Rawalpindi. Mach Jail and Khalli Camp, Baluchistan. The 158 SOLITARY CONFINEMENT IN SUKKUR JAIL names of these torture centres were creeping into the lives of PPP sup-porters, as well as into the increasingly concerned reports of Amnesty International and other human rights organisations. And all to implicate the PPP, my mother and me in AI-Zulfikar. It would be years before I Teamed the details of what happened in these torture centres. Chains. Blocks of ice. Chilis inserted into the pris-oners’ rectums. It sickened me to hear the stories of my friends and col-leagues, to have to recognise the cruelty that human beings are capable of. But there has to be a record of the suffering people endured under the brutality of Zia’s Martial Law regime. Yüklə 1,3 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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