Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto
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wedding. The next morning the police returned me to my seventh month in solitary confinement. Sanam took my mother to the airport on November 20, 1982, after the doctors on Zia’s own medical board verified her need for cancer treatment abroad. ’There is nothing the matter with Begum Bhutto,’ Zia insisted. ’If she wants to go abroad to do some sightseeing, then she can apply for that . . . .’
_-,otJ.t-!~ - _--_- Years of exile: In J (Opposite) My Washington (below), I brother Shah died in thanked Peter agony only hours Galbraith and after Sanam took this OFFICE OF THE CHIEF MARTIAL LAW ADMINISTRATOR last photo of him in Senator Pell for their efforts on my behalf. Cannes. Our grief In Pakistan, General PAKISTAN was unfathomable Zia confirmed the when we took Shah death sentences Confirmation min.te in respect of accused home to be buried (right) of four other ~uhamma A u6 Ma 1 ,A dul ~as~r_Ha a pear my father in our Mu7~amma --and bait U s K a political prisoners ten Kara° . ancestral family days before his graveyard. rubber-stamp court I do hereby confirm the sentence of death
announcement public. a. Accused Muhammad Ayub Malik s/o Ghulam Sarwar Malik,Karachi. h. Accused Abdul Nasir Daluch s/o t9a11 Muh,unmad 8aluch,Karachi. c, Accused Muhammad Essa a/o Faia Muhammad Baluch,Karachi. d. Accused Saif Ullah Khalid alias Sain , Khalid alo Muhammad Ali Jauhar,Karachi. Rawalpindi. Return to Pakistan: Over a million people greeted me in Lahore in April, 1986. Supporters showered my jeep with rose petals as I toured the four provinces. ’Zia jahve!’ the crowds roared. ’Zia must go!’ Shortly after President Reagan praised the regime for making ’great strides towards democracy’, Zia’s henchmen gunned down peaceful demonstrators marking Pakistai Independence Day. The police were just as brutal to those protesting at the attack on my jeep in January, 1987. My marriage to .Asif Zardari on December 18, 1987, was ’arranged’ by our families. 200,000 people danced and cheered at the People’s Reception (below) in Lyari, giving Asif his first taste of the love and support of the masses for the Pakistan People’s Party. TWO MORE YEARS IN SUB-JAIL I had been in detention for so long that I was suspicious of everyone and everything. The thought of putting my life into a stranger’s hands, even those of a British surgeon, made me apprehensive. To double-check whether or not I needed an operation, I smuggled my medical records to Dr Niazi in London. He concurred with the medical diagnosis. Yet
I still felt in deep conflict. Thousands of political prisoners remained in unspeakable conditions in jails throughout Pakistan, many facing death sentences. While I was incarcerated too, I felt I was a source of inspiration and comfort to them. I shared their suffering, their pain, their defiance. They were there for me, and I for them. Would they feel orphaned if I left them? Would they feel deserted? As December passed, I felt sure the regime would have to release me soon. I had heard nothing from the authorities during the rebellion in Sindh. I knew they wouldn’t release me at the height of the troubles, knowing I would take the news abroad. But now the rioting had subsided. They no longer had any excuse. I was also strong enough now to make the journey. Though the doctor had planned to insert a drainage tube in my ear to allow me to fly, he now said I would be all right taking decongestants and chewing-gum during takeoff and landing. The stress and anxiety which had contributed to my bad reaction during my earlier ear treatments had lessened with the regime’s decision to allow Sanam to visit me every day. The doctor had insisted to the authorities that it was impossible for me to regain my health if the regime continued to refuse me human contact. Towards the end of December, the authorities asked Sanam and me for our passports, our visa forms, our foreign exchange forms. ’Make reserva-tions,’ we were told. But when the day came for our departure, no one would come for us. I spent the time tying up my personal affairs, arranging to have the houses managed in my absence, straightening out my taxes. Another flight came and went. Our next scheduled flight was for the early hours of January 10, 1984. Without warning,.the authorities arrived at 70 Clifton at 11.30 pm. ’You’re leaving tonight,’ they said. ’You have a few hours to pack.’ I heard their words in disbelief. Hastily, I typed up a last message for the people. ’Brave Party Workers and Dear Countrymen,’ I began. ’Before embarking on this journey in connection with ill health, I seek your leave, your prayers and your blessings . . . .’ I felt numb as I gathered up my things, and put my cat in a travelling case. After all that had happened to me in the last seven years, even the good things seemed unreal. Sanam was waiting for me in the courtyard in an unmarked car. There was no one on the roads as we were sped to the airport and put in a side room by ourselves. I didn’t allow myself the slightest bit of excitement. I had just finished reading Oriana Fallaci’s The Man. Air force planes had been sent to 213 THE YEARS OF DETENTION bring the protagonist back to the airport after his flight had taken off. We were taken out to the Swiss Air plane by the police. As I walked up the passenger stairs, I saw the smile on the stewardess’s face. I’ll never forget it. It wasn’t the smile of a policeman or a Martial Law or prison official. It was the smile of a civilian, another human being. The door to the plane closed. At 2.30 am, Sanam and I took off for Switzerland. No planes came after us. I had no idea until I talked to Peter Galbraith later why, after seven years of Martial Law, Zia had chosen this moment to release me.
I planned my visit to Pakistan so as to make Karachi the last stop. This time the US Embassy was extremely helpful. The decision on whether I was to be granted permission to see Benazir, I was told, was being made by General Zia himself. I arrived in Karachi late in the evening on January 9. Not having received any response to my request to see Benazir, I had made an arrangement to see Sanam the next day. I was very disappointed, and once more wrote Benazir a long letter. Early the next morning I received a call from the US Consulate to come right over. When I arrived, the deputy Consul-General told me that Benazir had been taken to the airport shortly after midnight and put on a Swiss Air Flight. Sanam had gone with her. I couldn’t believe it. I had a Consulate car take me to 70 Clifton. The ever present police guards were gone. The house was all shut up. Benazir was free.
DICTATOR
II THE YEARS OF EXILE ’Mummy!’ ’Pinkie! You’re free. How I’ve dreamed of this day!’ I look at the horizons, the unending space as we step out of Geneva airport. After three years of being constrained by walls, my eyes take time to adjust. I can’t believe I’m free. The telephone is already ringing when we arrive at my mother’s flat. ’Yes, yes, she is really here,’ my mother says over the phone to Mir and Shah. ’What you heard on the BBC about her release is correct.’ Mir. Shah Nawaz. My brothers’ voices and mine interrupt each other in our excitement. ’How are you?’ I shout over the line, pressing the receiver to my good ear. ’Thank God you’re alive,’ Mir shouts back. ’I’m coming to see you tomorrow.’ ’Stay for a week, so I can come too,’ Shah adds. ’Oh Shah, I can’t,’ I tell him. ’I have to go to London to see the doctor.’ We make a promise to see each other as soon as possible. The phone rings constantly from Los Angeles, London, Paris - my mother’s friends and relatives calling to congratulate her on my release. I wasn’t ready to talk to anyone yet, and only spoke to Yasmin and Dr Niazi in London. Ardeshir Zahedi, a friend of my parents and Iran’s former Ambassador to the United States, arrived with caviare. Mummy, Sunny and I stayed up talking through the night. It all seemed so unbelievable. Yesterday I had been a prisoner. Today I was free, with my mother and sister. We were together. We were all alive. Mir! A littlQ brown-haired girl pulling at my coat! ’Meet your niece, Fathi,’ Mir told me, standing in my mother’s flat on my second day of freedom. Was my brother really standing in front of me? I saw his lips moving, heard my own voice responding. The noise of our reunion must have been deafening, but I can’t remember a thing we said. At twenty-nine, Mir looked so handsome, his dark eyes flashing one minute, gentling the next as he lifted his eighteen-month-old daughter to give me a kiss. ’Wait till you see Shah,’ Mir laughed. Shah had been eighteen the last time I’d seen him, just a boy. Now he was twenty-five with a longed-for moustache. I watched the sun come up over the Alps, felt the cold clear air bathe my face. It felt wonderful although my ear was blocked and numb. Traffic
TAKING ON THE DICTATOR was beginning to stir and I scanned the street below. There were no intelligence vans parked near the building, no agents hiding in doorways. Was it really true? Was I truly free? My discomfort was a reminder of why I’d come abroad. Meanwhile, word of my release was spreading among the Pakistani exile community scattered around Europe and highly concentrated among the 378,000 Pakistanis living in England. When Sunny and I flew on to London that afternoon, a crowd of Pakistanis had gathered to greet me at Heathrow airport. From the sound of political slogans in the air, I felt as if I were back in Karachi. Yasmin Niazi, Heathrow Airport:
policeman asked me as he and another policeman struggled to control the crowd. ’She’s our political leader,’ I told him. ’A politician?’ he said in amazement. ’Have you come into exile?’ the press asked Benazir when she finally came through the gate. Her answer was a great relief to the Pakistanis thronged at the airport as well as the millions who heard it later over the radio or read it in the newspapers. ’Exile? Why should I go into exile?,’ she said. ’I am only in England for medical treatment. I was born in Pakistan and I’m going to die in Pakistan. My grandfather is buried there. My father is buried there. I will never leave my country.’ Her words brought great hope to all her countrymen, especially the poor. ’I am not giving up on you,’ her message said. ’I will stay by your side until my last breath. The Bhuttos keep their promises.’ that I could see I rubbed my ear. Flowers and fruit baskets filled up Auntie Behjat’s small flat in London’s Knightsbridge area where Sunny and I shared a guest bedroom. Journalists and old friends from Oxford called asking to see me, as did party leaders and supporters. London was the centre of political activity for PPP mem-bers in exile: my own brothers had lived here, and it was the base for many PPP leaders who had fled Pakistan after the coup. The phone rang constantly with their requests for appointments. ’I’ll only take ten minutes of your time,’ one after another said as they streamed in and out of the flat. Others among the large population of Pakistanis in England simply came to the front door, ringing the doorbell and clustering outside in the street. Auntie Behjat and her husband Uncle Karim were very gracious, but the situation was impossible. It grew more complicated when Auntie Behjat spotted a car full of Pakistani men parked all day outside the 218 THE YEARS OF EXILE building. ’This is a free country. You don’t have to put up with that,’ Auntie Behjat told me when the car started following me wherever I went. She called Scotland Yard and, miraculously, the car disappeared. We felt a small triumph in being able to force Zia’s agents to leave me alone. But my apprehension remained. For all that I was free, I dreaded going out of the flat. Every time I stepped out of the front door my stomach, my neck and my shoulders tensed. I couldn’t walk two steps without fuming around to see if I was being followed. After all the years of living alone behind prison walls, even the crowded streets in London seemed threatening. I wasn’t used to people, to voices, to noise. I leapt into the first taxi I saw instead of taking the tube to go to my doctors’ appointments. When I reached my destination and was forced to get out in the street, even for a short distance, my heart would start pounding again and my breathing got shallow. Adjusting to real life was very difficult. I put on a veneer of self-confidence and hid my anxieties from everyone. I had to. My years in detention and my family’s treatment by the military regime had elevated me in the eyes of many Pakistanis to super-human status. The publicity surrounding my release and my arrival in England had catapulted me into being a public figure there as well. It would hardly have been seemly or inspiring for someone who had challenged Martial Law to suddenly succumb to an anxiety attack on Hyde Park Corner. Breathe deeply, I told myself whenever I was forced to go out. Move steadily. Don’t panic. A few days after I arrived in London, I received an unexpected visitor. Peter Galbraith had just arrived from Karachi and wanted to have lunch with me, Auntie Behjat told me. I had no idea of the role he had played in my release, and was merely excited to be able to see an old friend. Sum-moning my courage, I left the flat and took a taxi to the Ritz Hotel. Peter Galbraith: I wasn’t altogether comfortable when I called her. It was one of those funny situations where you haven’t seen someone in seven years, com-pounded by the very different experience she’d been through compared to my own. I waited for her somewhat nervously in the lobby of the Ritz where people gather for tea. She looked surprisingly well when she arrived and we went into lunch. I didn’t have any particular set of expectations, but she certainly seemed different. She had a new kind of self-confidence, a much more relaxed self-conEidence than she’d had the last time I had seen her at Oxford in 1977. She’d always been attractive, but now she seemed striking. And she was very focused. There was no aspect of ’I can’t believe this is happening to me’. She picked up in mid-stride. I filled her in on developments in
TAKING ON THE DICTATOR Washington, and told about the efforts of Senator Pell and others on her behalf. I also brought her up to date on some of our mutual friends and showed her pictures of my son. As we walked back to her aunt’s apartment after lunch, I urged her as a friend to give up the dangerous life of politics. ’In Pakistan you risk im-prisonment or even assassination,’ I told her. ’Why not come to America and get on with your life? Perhaps you could get a fellowship at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs.’ ’I’d love the chance to read the books on the Bhutto years and on the years of Martial Law to see other peoples’ interpretations,’ she told me. ’But my first obligation is to the party. In political terms, it makes more sense for me to be here, where the Pakistani community is larger and less dis-persed.’ She did, however, seem excited by my suggestion that she come to America for a working visit. She knew foreign influence and publicity could be important in securing the release of the political prisoners still in Pakistan. The only problem as we walked and talked was her ear. I kept forgetting which ear she was deaf in. I kept talking into the wrong ear.
I recovered slowly with my mother at a temporary flat she had taken in the pretty, tree-lined area of Collingham Gardens. For weeks I lay flat in bed, unable to sit up for more than ten minutes without my head pounding and being racked by bouts of nausea and dizziness. When I finally could sit up, it was difficult to bend my neck to read a book or to write without the pounding coming back. My head often felt as if it was going to explode. ’Your reaction isn’t unusual,’ Mr Graham assured me on my regular visits to have my ear examined and my hearing checked. I was startled, though, by his news at my six-weeks check-up. ’There’s the possibility you’ll need another operation in nine months to a year s time,’ he told me. Nine months to a year? I’d no intention of staying in London that long. I was already toying with the idea of going home to Pakistan, though my mother, Auntie Behjat, Sunny and Yasmin were all urging me to stay on in Europe.
’Even in prison I can be a rallying point against the regime,’ I coun-tered. ’Why not be a rallying point against the regime from here?’ the others insisted. The doctor’s words clinched their argument. But I still felt reluc-tant. Nine long months. How could I best spend my time? As I recuperated, I decided to mount an international campaign to expose the regime’s maltreatment of the 40,000 political prisoners still in jail in Pakistan. Though Pakistan was receiving financial aid from Western European countries as well as from the United States, the democratic countries were paying little or no attention to Zia’s human rights viola-tions. As a prominent and recently released political prisoner in exile, I was in a position to make known the details of what was happening in Pakistan. Perhaps then the democratic countries would use their leverage to help stop Zia from making arbitrary arrests and holding political pris-oners for years without charge or hearings, and sentencing more and more innocent men to death just for their political opposition. Eighteen political prisoners were about to be tried by a military court in Rawalpindi, accused of conspiring to overthrow the government. Fifty-four others were being held in Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore, charged with criminal conspiracy and sedition for their alleged involvement with Al-Zulfikar. The PPP labour leader at the Karachi Steel Mill, Nasser Baloach, was being tried with four co-defendants in Karachi on the false charges of complicity in the hijacking - a charge which could result in a sentence of death. Typical of Zia’s military ’justice’, few people inside or outside Paki-stan even knew the trial was taking place, or what, if any, was the evidence against the accused. I had only learned of the arrest of Nasser Baloach in 1981 from the jail superintendent at Sukkur Jail. It had taken two years for Nasser Baloach and his co-defendants to be brought before a military court. Surrounded by the secrecy of Presidential Order No. 4 which held not only that a man was guilty unless proven innocent, but forbade any disclosure of the court proceedings under the Official Secrets regulations, I had only found out about their trial when I received a note in Karachi Central jail from Nasser Baloach, smuggled in by a sympathetic prison guard. ’The military court is so biased against us that we have already been told that we are as good as dead bodies lying in a grave,’ he had written to me in May, 1983. ’During the eight-hour proceedings we cannot take notes, drink water, answer the call of nature or offer prayers. Our hands and feet are bar-fettered. When our defence lawyer could not attend, the proceedings continued with the remark ”we need only the accused and 22I TAKING ON THE DICTATOR One of them, the house belonging to the family of Khalid Ahmed where earlier I had talked to the foreign press after returning from the Minar-i-Pakistan, had just been ransacked by an Army Major. What an ominous reminder that I, was back in Zia’s Pakistan. The Major had been looking for me. Azra Khalid: I was sleeping when one of the servants woke me. He was bleeding after being attacked in the servants’ quarters by a contingent of army men. Fifteen or sixteen men had climbed over the compound walls, beaten the servants, and were coming to the house asking for Benazir, he told me. Our front door was locked, but the men broke down the door and threw flower pots through the front windows. ’Where is Benazir?’ asked their leader, one Major Qayyum, who was waving a pistol. One of the servants who’d been sleeping outside crept up behind Major Qayyum and hit him on the head with his son’s cricket bat. ’I’m an Intelligence officer, a Com-mando,’ the Major cried out. I called the police, although since Zia you never knew if they were your friends or your enemies. As the police car drew up, the other Army men ran. The police arrested Mayor Qayyum. In his car was a crate of beer and whisky which he was going to plant in our house. And in his diary were the phone numbers of many top Generals and Ministers in the regime. Major Qayyum pretended to be mad. The regime, too, said he was mad and had been working on his own. But we knew Major Qayyum wasn’t crazy. Benaziws reception that day in Lahore had been so incredible the regime didn’t dare touch her. Instead they sent Major Qayyum to either kill her or scare her off from continuing her tour. He was in jail for only a short time. When he returned to his village, he was shot dead for no apparent reason. We think the regime killed him to destroy the evidence. Gujranwala. Faisalabad. Sargodha. Jhelum. Rawalpindi. ’The reception in Lahore was unique,’ our critics and even some of the newspapers declared. ’Benazir Bhutto won’t find such welcomes in other cities.’ They were wrong. We set off from Lahore on our tour of the Punjab at midday on April 12, planning to reach Gujranwala for a 5.00 pm rally. But the roads were so massed with people surrounding the truck for miles that we didn’t reach Gujranwala until 5.00 am the next morning. ’There won’t be anybody at the public meeting,’ I said. ’They’ll all be at home in bed.’ Instead the meeting ground was packed. The people had waited all night long. ’We must try to move faster,’ I said to our volunteer security guards. But it was impossible. There were so many people on the road between Gujranwala and Faisalabad, that the eighty kilometre journey took sixteen hours. 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