Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto
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282 RETURN TO LAHORE` us, forcing the on-coming traffic onto the side of the road. Thousands walked by the truck through the entire night, like a giant guard of honour. I stayed on the top of the truck, waving to the people. ’Throw flowers all over and put pearls on the paths because Benazir has arrived,’ the people sang. ’Oh God, bring those days back when the poor suffering people have happy days!’ It was a very humbling experience for me and the other PPP officials. ’Give us the courage and the wisdom to fulfil the people’s expectations,’ we prayed together on the truck as we inched along. The sun was rising over Faisalabad when we finally arrived on the outskirts of the industrial city. Once again we were half a day late for the public meeting at the sports field where I had nervously delivered my first speech nine years before. Again I was sure that the grounds would be empty. But, as the truck pulled through the gates, a roar went up from hundreds of thousands of throats. ’Qawm ke takdir? Benazir, Benazir! - Who is the fate of the people? Benazir, Benazir!’ The excitement didn’t subside when we left the sports field. The factory workers hadn’t forgotten the party which had given them dignity and job security. Though many of the factory owners in Faisalabad had closed their factory gates, even locking them so the workers couldn’t get out to show their support for the PPP, the men jumped over the walls to join us. Jhelum, where many in the army were recruited. Rawalpindi, a city of government servants. Even in these cities where the people were more predisposed either to ignore or play down the PPP challenge to Zia, the turnouts were tumultuous. The foreign journalists and television crews could not believe the size of the crowds that they were recording for their countrymen. My countrymen would see nothing. Though Martial Law had supposedly been lifted, the regime had forbidden my image to appear on Pakistani television. Neither this tour, nor any other public political appearance I’ve made since my return to Pakistan, has ever been broadcast on television. Press conferences. Condolence calls. Party meetings. I don’t know where the energy came from. The people’s reaction to my return acted as a tonic, but there were moments when I was engulfed in sadness. I kept picturing Shah’s body lying on the carpet in Cannes, and my father in his death cell. How I wished they could come back for just one moment to see this vindication of their suffering. As children we had been taught that no price was too high to pay for our country. But the personal price to our family had been high. To ease my sadness, I asked that the route into Rawalpindi be altered so I wouldn’t have to pass Rawalpindi Central Jail where my father died. But I could not avoid the tragedies and sacrifices of others. At Gujranwala I visited the grave of Pervez Yaqoub, the first to immolate himself in
TAKING ON THE DICTATOR protest over my father’s death sentence. In Rawalpindi I paid a condolence call on the family of one of the three young boys hanged in August, 1984. So many lives lost, so much tragedy. This boy, like the others, had been only sixteen when he was arrested and nineteen when he died. ’Look at all these crowds,’ his mother said to me. ’There was a time when people were too frightened to speak to us.’ We moved on to Peshawar in the Frontier province, the President of the PPP in Punjab handing me over to the Frontier PPP President at the border. Again the road was completely blocked by people, and we arrived at night. The regime had blacked out all the street lights so ’no one could see my arrival, but the people shone torches and home video lights at the truck to illuminate me. My security chief was very apprehensive as we moved slowly through the narrow streets of this ancient trading city an hour east of the Khyber Pass and Afghanistan. There were three million Afghan refugees in Pakis-tan who were being supported by Zia and many of them lived in or near Peshawar. We had heard rumours that the regime was going to get the Afghan mujahideen to kill me. Though I didn’t know it, the chief of security had asked the women on the truck, including his own wife, to cluster tightly around me so I would be less of a target. Bathed in the only light in the dark streets, however, I was absolutely vulnerable. But there was no attack. ’I salute the brave Pakhtoons just as my father did,’ I said to the con-tinually clapping crowd in a stadium flooded with lights run by our own generators. I was at a disadvantage in Peshawar, as one of my helpers had lost the notes to my speech. But it was important to reintroduce myself to this very conservative society whose threat to break away from Pakis-tan and form the independent nation of Pakhtoonistan was very real. It was also necessary to convince the male-dominated Pathan society that a woman could lead them. ’People think I am weak because I am a woman,’ I called out to the crowds, 99 per cent of whom were men. ’Do they not know that I am a Muslim woman, and that Muslim women have a heritage to be proud of? I have the patience of Bibi Khadija, the wife of the Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him. I have the perseverance of Bibi Zeinab, the sister of Imam Hussein. And I have the courage of Bibi Aisha, the Prophet’s favourite wife, who rode her own camel into battle at the head of the Muslims. I am the daughter of martyr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the sister of martyr Shah Nawaz Khan Bhutto and I am your sister as well. I challenge my opponents to come and meet me on the field of democratic elections.’ The clapping fumed into a cheer. ’Zia za!’ I cried out, using the Pashtu word for ’go’. ’Za! Za!’ the people roared in response. After addressing the Peshawar Bar Association the next day, we re-
It was so hot in Larkana that I put ice cubes on my head and shoulders under my dupatta during the trip from the airport to the sports stadium where ten months before the men had massed in the final prayer ceremony for my brother Shah. The crowds were so thick we had to change our route to get to the stadium before sundown. I stood the whole time in the scalding heat, first through the sun-roof of my Pajero jeep and then on a truck, intermittently sucking on lemons and salt. The PPP President of Larkana succumbed to the heat. ’Don’t let me faint,’ I kept praying, knowing that all our foes would love me to collapse. And I managed to get through the public meeting. Rumours of death threats and meeting disruptions preceded me every-where on the nineteen-city tour, becoming particularly pressing in Balu-chistan where my security guards spotted three Afghan mujahideen squat-ting on their haunches in the front of the crowd with automatic weapons concealed under them. It wasn’t the weapons that were alarming. Most men in Baluchistan openly carried guns. It was the fact that these weapons were concealed. The guards told me nothing about the suspicious Afghanis and instead positioned themselves right in front of them during my speech so that they would take the bullets and not me. I was concerned enough about getting dizzy on the revolving stage built for the occasion so that everyone in the enormous crowd would be able to see me. But, as I looked out over the masses of people, many of whom were poor and noticeably thin, I forgot my apprehension. Baluch-istan was and is a poverty-stricken and quite backward province; the tribal chieftains resist any progress that would loosen their control over the people. Until my father’s time, there were dirt tracks but no made-up roads in Baluchistan, no electricity, little fresh water, and limited crops from the unirrigated, unforgiving soil of the desert. For generations, the people had been exposed to nothing but hardship.
TAKING ON THE DICTATOR I had been in Baluchistan once with my mother when she had been surrounded by women and children whilst seeking shade under a tree. Her security guards tried to chase them away, but she told them to stop and let the women come to her. In wonder they began to touch my mother’s hair which was smooth and clean while theirs was gnarled and dirty. They didn’t know what combs were. My father’s government had done much to improve the lot of the people in Baluchistan, in spite of the tribal heads who had launched an insurgency against the PPP govern-ment. ’The Pakistan People’s Party believes that the well-being of the nation is in the well-being of the people,’ I called out from the slowly revolving stage. ’If the man in the street has the security of work, if he has access to good health care and his children can get education and prosper, then the country will prosper. It is not the law of God that our people should live in poverty. The destiny of our nation is not slums. If we have the power to transform it through efficient use of our country’s resources, then we must.’ The people in the audience rose and started clapping, including the three Afghanis in the front row. My security guards heaved sighs of relief. The danger was over. But it was not. In the rest of the country, it was just beginning. On May 30, less than two weeks after I returned to Karachi, the police entered a youth hostel in Hyderabad to ambush and kill Faqir Iqbal Hisbani, the PPP president of the Sindh Students’ People’s Federation and our chief of security for the whole province. His companion and fellow PPP member, Jahangir Pathan, was permanently paralysed in the attack, the policemen’s bullets shattering his spine. I felt the blood run out of me when Dost Mohammed woke me in the early hours of the morning with the news of Iqbal Hisbani’ s murder. More black armbands, more black headbands, black dupattas, black flags. Another funeral for a young man whom I’d trusted literally with my life. Another condolence call to a mother who’d lost her only son. She gave me a prayer she had written out for her son to replace the one he’d lost in the me16e of my procession into Hyderabad. ’You take it,’ his mother said to me. ’This is a present to you from Iqbal.’ I still carry the prayer with me in my handbag. How many more good people were to die at the hands of the regime? Peaceful demonstrations were held all over Pakistan to protest at Iqbal Hisbani s murder. But the regime remained intent on violence. At one protest meeting in Kashmor, a member of Zia’s Provincial Assembly fired a Kalashnikov into the crowd to break it up. Luckily no one was killed, but it signalled a new and dangerous directive from the regime. Control your areas with bullets. Control it with injury and death. But control it. 286 RETURN TO LAHORE Within weeks, two more members of the PPP were dead: the President of the Dokri PPP and a party worker shot down in Tando, Mohammed Khan. Another member of Zia’s Provincial Assembly was suspected in the first death and, in the second, a police inspector using an automatic weapon not issued to the police. ’A Minister in the Sindh Cabinet gave it to me to kill the PPP dogs,’ the inspector was reported by local people to have said at a tea shop. The regime was now arming lesser politicians and other subordinates to do their dirty work for them. We were on a collision course with the regime. We knew it. And they knew it. No policy decisions were being taken, all the regime’s energies being focused on the actions of the PPP. When the government released its budget in June we countered with the People’s Budget. When they thought we were going to launch a movement in Sindh after the end of Ramazan, they declared a State of Emergency in the province. When we didn’t in fact do this, they deferred their State of Emergency. With the regime off-balance, it was time to launch the second phase of our campaign to force Zia to hold elections in the autumn. July 5, 1986. The ninth anniversary of the coup. We called it ’Black Day’ and planned public meetings in all the district headquarters of Pakis-tan, from the Khunjrab Pass into China to the Arabian Sea. No one knew if the political structure of the PPP was strong enough yet to coordinate such simultaneous demonstrations. ’Black Day’ was almost a rehearsal to see if the local and regional party officials were organised enough to manage the massive civil protests we were planning for the autumn to force the regime to hold early elections. To ensure the effectiveness of the autumn demonstrations, we needed to recruit over 100,000 ’Doves of Democracy’, PPP sympathisers who would be willing to court arrest by staging hunger strikes and sit-ins. Every detail had to be worked out in advance. As July 5 drew near, I criss-crossed the country to help with the organisational details. And ’Black Day’ went remarkably well. 150,000 PPP supporters turned out in Karachi, more than 200,000 in Lahore. August 14, the anniversary of Pakistan’s independence, was the next important date on the calendar. Stung by the outpourings of support for the PPP during my tour of Pakistan, Zia’s hand-picked Prime Minister, Mohammed Khan Junejo, announced that the regime’s official Muslim League party would hold a rally on August 14 at the Minar-i-Pakistan in Lahore. As soon as Junejo announced his intentions, we announced that the PPP, too, would hold a rally in Lahore on Independence Day, knowing our crowds would be much bigger. The regime moved to pre-empt our crowds by reserving all the buses in Punjab to transport their own sup-
TAKING ON THE DICTATOR porters. ’Go in the regime’s buses,’ we advised the PPP members. ’When you get to Lahore, walk over to our side.’ The MRD, too, joined the fray. Since my return to Pakistan, PPP leaders and I had been holding talks with members of the Movement to Restore Democracy, the coalition of political parties formed shortly before the hijacking in 1981, and had informally agreed to join forces again to put pressure on the regime. On August 10, the nine leaders of the MRD came to 70 Clifton for the first time in three years to cement our agreement. One of the leaders came wearing the white cloth of the Haj around him. The regime had stopped him at the airport on his way to make the pil-grimage. Zia, on the other hand, was out of the country and on the run. In the face of his threatened humiliation and repudiation at the Independence Day rallies, he had left for Saudi Arabia on August 7, taking his whole family with him. A PPP sympathiser at the airport confided to us that Zia had also shipped out three airline containers of furniture, and a gold-plated Rolls Royce given to him in his capacity as President by an Arab head of state. Once more the timing was critical. At the end of our meeting, the leaders of the MRD and I agreed on a basis for organising joint protest meetings within the framework of the law and to press for elections. The next day the MRD announced that the PPP and other opposition groups would hold joint rallies in Karachi and Lahore on Independence Day, and called on Zia to announce the date for elections by September 20. This time, it was Junejo’s nerves which cracked. I was having a meeting with several journalists and party workers on August 12 when I was told that Junejo was about to make an unscheduled announcement on radio and television. We watched as Junejo, citing possible ’confrontation’ between supporters of the Muslim League and the op-position parties, announced he was cancelling the Muslim League’s public meeting on Independence Day. He appealed to the opposition parties to cancel our meetings too. No administrative order was issued banning public meetings. I wasn’t surprised at Junejo’s attempt to save face though I was very angry at his attempt to goad us into violence. The regime had consistently tried to provoke violence at our public meetings and processions, while we remained equally determined to bring about change peacefully through political means. My volunteer security guards didn’t even carry arms. But Zia’s puppet Minister had to create some pretext for curtailing all political expression in Pakistan a full eight months after Martial Law had sup-posedly been lifted. He couldn’t risk exposing the true face of the regime. Junejo had just returned from the United States where President Reagan had praised Pakistan for making ’great strides in the transition towards democracy’. Junejo himself had boasted to Time magazine that he had
’This is a big victory for us,’ I said to the party workers assembled in my office while we watched Junejo call off his own political rally. Junejo claims to be the democratic Prime Minister, but where is his support? He’s cancelled his own meeting because he knows he’ll be shown up by the PPP. The regime is running from the field.’ ’Now we don’t have to hold the August 14 demonstrations at all,’ one person said. ’We’ve won already.’ ’No, we should go ahead,’ another offered. ’Why not hold the public meetings on the 15th.’ ’The 15th is India Independence Day.’ ’Then the 16th.’ ’I’m going to a meeting of the PPP in Faisalabad tomorrow,’ I told them. ’We’ll take a decision then.’ I went right from the informal meeting at 70 Clifton to an emergency meeting called by the MRD. The mood there was very different. The MRD leaders were very angry at me for even suggesting that I consult with other leaders of the PPP about rescheduling the demonstrations. ’You don’t know anything about politics,’ they said. ’We must go ahead with the demonstrations on Independence Day. This is the time. We cannot backtrack now.’ I protested. I knew the PPP was not prepared for a showdown. We’d just had the massive meetings on ’Black Day’ and there wasn’t time or the organisation to prepare the people so quickly for another one. More important, our strategy was not to antagonise the regime directly, but to increase the tempo of political demonstrations over a period of time to erode the regime. With the government paralysed by strikes and sit-ins, business would be affected, the economy would be affected, the entire life of the country would be affected, breeding a greater discontent against the regime. Having a confrontation with the regime now would be counter-productive. The party leaders would probably be arrested. Many party sympathisers could be arrested. And the momentum would be stalled. ’We must go ahead,’ the MRD leaders said. I was caught on the horns of a dilemma. Either the coalition between the MRD and the PPP would be severed or I had to acquiesce. The consensus was that we should participate in the demonstrations. I was the only dissenting vote out of nine. ’All right then, we’ll go ahead,’ I said reluctantly. ’But for God’s_sake, don’t announce the plans tonight. At least wait until tomorrow.’ I needed time, if only a few hours, to tell the party leaders to go underground. If we were all arrested, then the plans for the autumn would come to nothing. The MRD made the announcement anyway.
TAKING ON THE DICTATOR August 13, 1986. I go to the airport to fly as planned to the meeting of the PPP in Faisalabad. The police meet me at the gate. ’We have orders exteming you from Punjab but, if you want to go, you can,’ they tell me. They are using a new tactic, I realise, trying to provoke me into going despite their orders so that later they can claim I created trouble while they tried to prevent it. I refuse to play their game. Instead I consult hastily at the airport with the PPP members who are with me. I fully expect to find the police waiting for me when I return to 70 Clifton and give my companions last minute instructions, directing each of them to coordinate party ac-tivists in different parts of the country in the event of my arrest. When I return to 70 Clifton, there are no police. Another peculiarity. But Radio India mistakenly announces my arrest and the telephone calls start coming in. There are riots in Lyari protesting against my arrest. The people gathered at the airport in Faisalabad to greet me are being tear-gassed and beaten by the police. So much for the regime’s ’great strides . . . towards democracy’. I continue to wait for the police. Nobody comes. Meanwhile every other PPP and MRD leader is being arrested. For the first time, they are all in and I am out. The regime wants to paralyse the party without touching me, I decide, and thus escape the opprobrium of the world -especially the United States where the new aid package will be voted on in the autumn. For my part, I see the extemment as an opportunity to delay the PPP showdown with the regime to a time of our own choosing. The press swarm to 70 Clifton: Ross Munro from Time magazine, a BBC television cameraman, Anne Fadiman from Life who is an old friend from Radcliffe and is in Karachi with photographer Mary Ellen Mark to do a story on my return to Pakistan, Mahmood Sham and Hazoor Shah, veteran correspondents from Jang and Dawn. By late afternoon, almost one thousand PPP and MRD leaders and workers are in detention. But not me. A reporter arrives from the Karachi Press Club. He has just heard from one of the opposition leaders that the MRD meeting is still scheduled for tomorrow in Karachi and I will be attending it. I am taken aback. No one has consulted me about a change of plan. But the news spreads. That night the BBC announces three times in one broadcast that I’m going to the MRD meeting in Karachi on the 14th. I don’t want to be forced into a provocative position by the regime or the MRD. But what can I do? If I don’t go now, the opposition can claim I’ve lost my nerve. I pass a message to one or two people in the lower echelons of the party to round up everyone who has managed to elude the police and ask
Jiye, Bhutto! My sister, your sister, Benazir!’ When I wake up in the morning, I can hear the political slogans beginning to rise outside the walls of 70 Clifton. There are thousands of PPP supporters massed in front of the house, alerted to my appearance at the MRD rally by other party members and the BBC broadcasts. A message comes in which explains why I still haven’t been arrested. Unable to make a decision, the regime had telexed Zia in Saudi Arabia after the MRD announcement the night before, asking him what to do about me. His answer didn’t come back until 9.00 am Pakistani time. ’Arrest her,’ Zia telexed back. But by that time the police don’t dare. ’All those PPP supporters outside 70 Clifton? They would have lynched me,’ a policeman tells me later. The police are also hesitant to fire into the crowd and start any disturbance around 70 Clifton. The Clifton area is home, too, to many diplomats, and the police do not not want enraged crowds to take out their anger by burning the embassies. The police are also confused about my whereabouts. My friend Putchie had spent the night at 70 Clifton. She had left in a car early in the morning and the intelligence agents can’t work out whether it was me. There is conjecture that I’ve slipped away to Faisalabad in spite of the travel ban. They have no idea whether I am even in the house. They Yüklə 1,3 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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