Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto

The air was light in France when I arrived to give my deposition, but my heart was heavy. It was to get heavier as I learned the details of Shah’s death and Rehana’s arrest.

Rehana had gone to the police station to pick up her passport on October 22, her passport having been confiscated by the French police shortly after Shah’s death. After months of inconclusive questioning, during which Rehana had repeated her claims to both Interpol and the French police that she had neither seen nor heard anything while my brother was dying, her lawyer had argued successfully that her passport should be returned. Rehana had been all set to leave France when she called at the police station. Instead, she had dropped a bomb-shell.

Reversing her earlier claims, Rehana had confirmed what so far the police only knew from the autopsy report - that Shah had not died instantaneously. The police had questioned her further, charged her with failing to assist a person in danger and sent her before a magistrate. Instead of receiving her passport, Rehana had received an arrest warrant and had been sent to Nice Central Jail.

The family was devastated at the disclosure about Shah’s

death. The poison which both my brothers carried, Shah had told me, worked in-stantaneously. Mir’s vial of poison had been examined by both the French and Swiss police, confirming Shah’s claim - if taken undiluted, the poison
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worked immediately. That Shah had died quickly and painlessly had been-a source of comfort to all of us. Our grief deepened greatly with the news that he did not.

For a week, I had nightmares. ’Help me!’ Shah called to me. ’Help me!’ In other dredms, he was shivering with cold and I would try to bring him blankets. During the day, I ran frequently to the bathroom to throw up. The unanswered questions surrounding Shah’s horrible death plagued us. Why hadn’t Rehana gone for help? And why was she con-tinuing to claim that Shah had committed suicide, a particularly painful accusation for Muslims who believe that God alone should give and take life? We knew Shah’s strength and joie de vivre. He would never have committed suicide. And no one would voluntarily have chosen the pro-longed, painful death he had apparently experienced.

We were convinced as a family that Shah had been killed and filed charges of murder against unknown persons. At the Carlton, I met un-officially with one of the police officers investigating the case. The police, too, were stymied. ’Can you find out more about the poison?’ he asked me. ’There wasn’t a trace of it left in the body.’ I followed up every lead I had, finally obtaining the details of the poison on a confidential basis. The description still haunts me.

’The poison works instantaneously if taken undiluted,’ the report stated. ’If diluted, its nature changes completely. After thirty minutes the victim loses stability and is afflicted with a headache, a feeling of exhaustion and severe thirst. Within an hour the body starts shaking uncontrollably, ac-companied by pain around the heart and stomach, then cramps throughout the body. Rigor mortis sets in before death, leaving the victim conscious during the onset of paralysis. Phlegm fills the throat, making breathing laboured and speech difficult. Still conscious, the victim feels cold. The time of death varies, between four and sixteen hours.’

The agony of Shah’s death spread through the whole family, starting with the break-up of Mir’s marriage to Fauzia. Sassi, too, was lost to us. When I arrived in Nice for the deposition, Rehana was in jail and Sassi was with Fauzia who refused to let us have access to her. Our pain seemed unending. Sassi was our blood. Sassi was our flesh. She looked just like Shah, especially her eyes. Sassi was all we had left of him. And we were losing her.

We had

tried to work out a legal family settlement with Rehana. Sassi would live with her for nine months of the year and with us for three months, while we paid for all her expenses and education. But Rehana hadn’t been interested. We were forced to turn once again to the court, though the legal procedings did nothing to relieve our feeling of loss.

In February, 1988, the court awarded my mother the right to see Sassi

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at weekends, but the judgment could not be implemented. Rehana had sent Sassi to California to stay with her grandparents. Who knows where she is now or how she is? I get a physical pain in my heart when I think of her. If only we could be assured that she is all right, that she is healthy, that she is happy. But we are told nothing. In the meantime, I cling to the dream that someday Sassi will come to us. Like her namesake, she will cross the deserts and the mountains to find the family who loves her. We will wait for her always.

In June of 1988, after more than two years of legal proceedings, the French Court ruled that Rehana would have to stand trial for failing to assist a person in danger, a charge punishable by one to five years in prison. To our disappointment, the court also ruled that there was insuf-ficient evidence to uphold our charge of murder against unknown persons. But the stigma of suicide, at least, was removed from Shah’s name. Shortly after the court’s decision, the BBC reported Rehana’s lawyer as say-ing that Rehana, too, now accepted that Shah had been murdered.

Sassi, like the rest of us, may never learn the truth of how her father died. In July, 1988, we learned that Rehana had left France to join her family and Sassi in America. The French authorities, it turned out, had returned Rehana’s passport to her for ’humanitarian reasons’. It seemed that Rehana had no difficulty, our lawyers told us, in obtaining a visa from the American consulate in Marseilles. Her trial, we are advised, will not take place before 1989, if it takes place at all. In any case, our lawyers doubt that Rehana will return to France to be present at the proceedings.
Another Bhutto dead for his political beliefs. Another activist silenced. We go on, of course. Grief will not drive us from the political field or from our pursuit of democracy.

We believe in God and leave justice to Him.

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AND THE AUGUST 1986 MASSACRE
Martial Law was lifted on December 30, 1985. I was still in Europe and saw the news on a hotel wire service. But what should have been a moment of great relief was not. The ending of Martial Law was

nothing more than a publicity stunt for the West. It was not a return to true civilian rule, for Zia still retained the offices of both Army Chief-of-Staff and President, making it impossible to say that the Army had disengaged itself from the political process. The role political parties could play in elections was left unresolved, underlining the regime’s fear of returning Pakistan to a true democracy.

Zia’s new ’civilian government’ was in fact a charade. Shortly before the lifting of Martial Law, Zia’s puppet Parliament had rubber-stamped the scan-dalous Eighth Amendment Act which indemnified members of the regime not only for their past actions under Martial Law, but also for any actions taken in the three remaining months of Martial Law. Thus guaranteed that no judicial review could take place to determine the fairness of their actions, the military courts had rushed to sentence hundreds of people to long terms in prison so that as many political dissidents as possible would be safely behind bars - and remain there - when Martial Law was lifted.

The end of Martial Law did nothing to erase its legacy. Since 1977, Zia had been systematically destroying the institutions my father’s govern-ment had installed - an independent judiciary, a structured economy, a parliamentary form of government, a free press, religious freedom, the guarantee of civil rights to all under the 1973 Constitution. Because of the lack of any legal order and the sense of impermanence in everything, life in Pakistan had become a free-for-all.

Bribery and crime had become nationwide industries. Under Martial Law, the most sought after jobs among the brightest young people were in customs, because the pay-offs were highest. A new class of ’entre-preneurs’ was - and is - smuggling in everything from air-conditioners to video equipment, paying their way through customs, and then selling the items on the black market. A recent report from the State Bank revealed that nearly one-sixth of Pakistan’s economic growth was due to smug-gling. The country receives no tax revenues from the black economy.
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The Soviet move into Afghanistan had cast an even longer and more ominous shadow. US arms destined for the mujahideen ended up in new and flourishing Pakistani arms markets. Kalashnikovs from the Soviets found their way into the hands of Pakistani craftsmen who copied them and sold them for as little as forty dollars on the black market. It was said that one could even rent a Kalashnikov by the hour in Karachi. In parts of interior Sindh people no longer travelled after dark, because the roads were taken over by gangs of bandits armed with automatic weapons and

rocket launchers. Large landowners and industrialists all over Pakistan began to maintain private armies to protect themselves, and sometimes to launch attacks on their competitors. At times the regime raised these armies too, providing arms, uniforms and salaries to ’soldiers’ recruited for them by tribal lords. In return, these forces intimidated PPP supporters, at times razing entire villages. Not even the mosques where the villagers took refuge were spared.

Drug trafficking had also become a by-product of the invasion of Afghan-istan. Where Pakistan had been drug free before the build-up of Afghan refugees, now more than a million Pakistanis were thought to be addicted, while millions if not billions of dollars worth of heroin and opium rumbled down the roads from the refugee camps in the north to be shipped out of Karachi in the south. By 1983, Pakistan had become the major supplier of heroin to the rest of the world. Huge gaudy mansions paid for with drug money sprang up in Karachi, Lahore and the tribal territories. Again the regime turned a blind eye or took its cut. Many of the shipments, it was said, were transported to Karachi in the army trucks which had gone to the Khyber pass filled with weapons for the mujahideen.

Relatives of high-ranking regime officials, including the son of a military cabinet minister, were intercepted and arrested for drug trafficking by Interpol in America and other Western countries. But, in Pakistan, not one major government figure was arrested. Though he denies it, it was widely rumoured that the kingpin of the drug trade was the Military Governor of the Frontier province, who retained his position for more than seven years while Zia removed and replaced the other Military Governors at will. Almost as notorious was the case of Abdullah Bhatti, one of the two drug bosses the regime did actually arrest in the eight years of Martial Law. After being sentenced by a military court, Bhatti ’escaped’. Several years later, when bad weather caused his plane to divert to Karachi, Bhatti was rearrested. General Zia used his powers of Presidential pardon to set him free, a power he had never used for any political prisoner.

Zia’s policies of ’Islamisatiori had also divided and demoralised the country. Where under my father there had been religious tolerance, under Zia’s ’Islamisatiori there was persecution of all our religious minorities. Most Pakistanis followed the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam, a moderate
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interpretation of our religious beliefs. Our country had been founded on the Islamic principles of unity, mutual support, and tolerance for our

religi-ous minorities: the Ahmadis who had their own religious leadership in England, the Hindus, the Christians, and a small but united population of Parsis, Zoroastrian$ who worshipped fire. ’You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed - that has nothing to do with the business of the State,’ the founder of our country Mohammed Ali Jinnah had declared on the day he was elected President of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan in 1947.

Zia, however, was backing the Wahabbis, a sect close to the reformists in Saudi Arabia who formed the right-wing groups like the Jamaat-e-Islami and believed in a much harsher, less tolerant interpretation of Islam. From the moment of the coup in 1977, the regime had preached Islamisation while the fundamentalists had tried to impose their bigoted minority views on the rest of the country. Christians, Hindus and Parsis woke up to find mimeographed letters slipped under their doors: ’Get out. We don’t need you here: Very quietly, many minorities had sold their holdings and left the country which had been their home for generations. Those who had stayed behind had adopted a lower profile - the Parsi women who in my father’s time often wore jeans, for example, adopting the shalwar khameez out of fear of drawing the wrath of fundamentalist mullahs.

Under Zia, the mullahs became the sword of Islamisation. They provided his repressive rule with the cover of Islam to make it palatable, and he in turn introduced an Islamic tax - two and a half per cent of all income -which he distributed through them. Far more of Zia’s tax went into the mullahs’ pockets than into the hands of the needy for whom it was sup-posedly collected.

The fatwa, or judgment as to what was right and what was wrong, proclaimed by the mullahs in their Friday sermons at the mosques, took on deep significance. One almost comical fatwa in 1984 concerned the actors in a television film who, in real life, were married to each other. In the film, the male actor repudiated his ’wife’, saying ’I divorce you’, three times. The resulting fatwa from the mullahs declared that the married couple was now not only divorced, but that the ’wife’ was subject to rajrn, the practice of stoning a woman to death for adultery. A mob actually attacked the house of the couple in the middle of the night. But the public had become so anaesthetised by the unchecked and unchallenged funds-mentalist view of Islam that the incident went virtually unnoticed.

Zia had consistently used Islamic rhetoric to justify his repressive

mea-sures and terrorise certain segments of society. Two weeks after KhomeW s return to Iran in 1979, Zia’s Shariat Courts had issued the infamous Hudood
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Ordinances, which punished crimes such as stealing, adultery and rape using the strictest interpretation of Shariah, the law set down in the Holy Quran and the Hadith, or sayings of the Prophet (PBUI-I). Under the Hudood Ordinances, four Muslim men were now required as witnesses to prove a woman’s charge of rape. Without such evidence, which was obvi-ously almost impossible to come by, the woman bringing the charges could be charged with adultery. The case of Safia Bibi, a blind servant-girl who bore a child after she was raped by her employer and his son became a classic case of fundamentalist injustice. Because neither man confessed and Safia Bibi couldn’t provide four eyewitnesses to the attack - rape rarely being conducted in public - the two men went free while the young woman was charged with adultery and sentenced to a public lash-ing and three years’ imprisonment.

Safia Bibi was saved by a campaign mounted by outraged women who

gave the incident international publicity. Embarrassed, the regime hurriedly acquitted the young woman. A thirteen-year-old girl who became preg-nant after being raped by her uncle was not so fortunate. Unable to
convince the court of the rape, she, too, was sentenced to three years imprisonment and ten lashes. The court suspended her sentence until her newly-born child reached the age of two.

The 1973 Constitution framed by my father specifically barred dis-crimination against women: ’. . . there shall be no discrimination on the basis of sex alone,’ read Article 25 (2). Zia’s political policies of Islamisa-tion not only sanctioned discrimination, but promoted it. At Karachi Uni-versity, where the mosque had been converted into a weapons depot for

the students’ wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the fundamentalist students began to agitate for campuses segregated by sex. ’Women are not safe with men,’ the male students insisted. To prove their point they began to harass the female students who chose not to cover themselves in burqas, dousing a few of them with acid which burned through their clothes. The acid-throwing students were not punished.
Women were singled out for exclusion in all aspects of society. At some official functions, the guests began to be divided by sex, even the highest ranking women being separated from their male colleagues. On television, female newscasters were required to cover their head with dupattas, and those that refused were dismissed. The athletes on Pakistan’s crack women’s hockey teams were required

to keep their legs covered on the field, effectively eliminating them from taking part in international competitions. The regime’s Islamic zeal occasionally reached absurd propor-tions. ’This photograph shows a woman s bare legs,’ a regime censor dressed down a newspaper editor, pointing to a picture accompanying a story on the conclusion of a World Cup tennis tournament. ’That is not a woman. That is Bjorn Borg,’ the editor pointed out to the censor.

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Women had fought back as other regime ordinances systematically diminished their influence and stature. When the regime’s Shariat courts proclaimed in February, 1983, that a woman’s testimony would be worth only half that of a man’s, a coalition of professional women demonstrated in Lahore. The police charged the crowd of university professors, busi-nesswomen and lawyers with lathi sticks and tear gas, dragging seventy to eighty of them off to jail by their plaits. As if that weren’t enough, the fundamentalist mullahs then declared that all the protesters’ marriages were dissolved as aggressive women were outside the parameters of Islam. The women could ignore the mullahs, but not the regime. Despite the protests, Zia’s parliament passed the Law of Evidence in 1984. It remains in effect to this day.

Pending is a law disqualifying women as witnesses in murder cases, as well as one reducing the compensation to be paid to the relatives of a female murder victim. Going on the supposition that a woman’s worth is only half that of a man, the woman’s family would receive half the com-pensation paid for the murder of a male.

For all the talk of Martial Law being lifted, Zia’s Pakistan continued to be repressive and divisive. The poor were demoralised. Women were demoralised. Instead of settling their differences peacefully, or just living with their differences, rival groups all over Pakistan were resorting to kidnappings and gun battles. Violence was especially pronounced in the minority provinces of Sindh, Baluchistan and the Frontier where Zia’s divide-and-rule approach had led to ethnic polarisation and increased talk of secession.

From the beginning, Zia’s ban on political parties had gone hand-in-hand with his patronage of secessionist leaders. Giving the secessionists’ statements full play in the press, Zia had used them to build mistrust between the minority provinces and the Punjab, perpetuating the myth that military rule was needed to keep the country together. The non-party elections held by the regime had furthered the country’s fragmenta-tion. By banning political parties, the regime forced candidates to cam-paign not on a platform of political

ideals which transcended ethnic and regional boundaries, but on the basis of individual identification. ’Vote for me, I’m a Shiite like you,’ candidates in these elections told their constitu-ents. ’Vote for me, I’m a Punjabi.’

The country was paying the price. Ethnic riots between Pathans and muhajirs, emigrants from India, had erupted for the first time in Karachi in 1985. More than fifty people were killed and more than a hundred woun-ded in the fighting which broke out after a bus driven by a Pathan ac-cidentally ran over a muhajir girl. Angry mobs were soon burning hundreds of cars, scooters and buses. Fighting spread so rapidly that in many neigh-

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bourhoods the regime had been forced to impose curfews lasting over a month, a move which eliminated the symptoms of the problem but did nothing to address its cause. Over the next three years, the injuries, the death toll, and the property destroyed in ethnic rioting would only in-tensify. New political parties based exclusively on ethnic affiliation would gain popularity and fan sectarian tensions higher. Pakistan’s unity was on the verge of breaking down.
’I’m thinking of going home,’ I told the PPP activists gathered in the Barbican flat in January, 1986, when I returned from France. They looked at me expectantly, not sure what I had in mind. ’I’ll probably land in Lahore or Peshawar,’ I continued. Their faces lit up. ’Home’ didn’t mean 70 Clifton. ’Home’ meant the length and breadth of Pakistan. The PPP’s challenge to Zia was about to begin.

’I’m going with you,’ said Nahid and Safdar Abbasi. ’I’ll go back too,’ Bashir Riaz joined in. ’Don’t make hasty decisions,’ I warned them, know-ing that Nahid and Bashir both had cases pending against them in Pakistan. But our small cadre of volunteers was resolved. We would return together.

The timing seemed right. With Zia’s much vaunted lifting of Martial Law, we could force the regime’s hand and put their claims of renewed freedom to the test. If Zia arrested me upon my return, the farce of his democracy would be blown wide open. If he didn’t, I could freely carry the PPP message to the people of Pakistan for the first time in nine years. Psychologically, the timing seemed auspicious as well. Two dictators had recently fallen - Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and ’Papa Doc’ Duvalier in Haiti. The time had come for a third.

It was a major decision. But was it the right one? After my years in detention and exile, I was unable to directly assess the political tempera-ture in Pakistan. So I convened a meeting of the PPP Central Executive Committee in London. ’I think this is the moment

to go back,’ I said to them. ’But it is up to you. There is a good chance that something will happen to me or that I’ll be arrested. What can the PPP do in that event? Is the time right for protests and pressure on Zia for full democracy, or should I delay my return? You all decide.’

’You must return now. We’ll stand by you,’ the leaders declared unani-mously. ’If Zia takes an action against you, he will be taking an action against all of us.’ I was very pleased as some of us sat around my small dining-room table at the Barbican, drawing up possible routes for my tours of Punjab, the Frontier and Sindh. As ever, our strategy was political, not violent: to work within the system to erode it and not give the regime

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any pretext to arrest us. By organising massive political demonstrations all over Pakistan, we hoped to force the regime to announce a date for early elections, possibly in the autumn of 1986.

I kept adding cities to the tour. Rather than planning simultaneous demonstrations in the major cities, I wanted the PPP to hold sequential demonstrations over a period of time in many different cities. That way the people’s confidence could snowball, breaking the fear that Zia had inculcated in the country with his policy of hangings, lashings and whip-pings.

’Can you take so much?’ the leaders asked. ’I can take it,’ I told them over the dinner I’d cooked of chicken and dhal. We agreed that Lahore would be our point of entry into Pakistan. Lahore was the capital of the Punjab, the province from which the army hailed. It was also a bastion of PPP support.