Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto
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soon find out, however. ’What time are you going?’ an MRD representative phones me to ask. ’We’ll be leaving at 2.00,’ I tell him. Shortly thereafter, I receive word that the police are coming to arrest me at 2.00 pm, though they have no grounds. The Home Secretary hasn’t announced a ban on the rally. We decide to leave at 1.00 and the journalists gather. At Harvard, I remember ruefully, I used to occasionally read the column in Life called ’Life Goes to the Movies’. Now Life is going to a confrontation with the Pakistani police and my certain arrest. I am worried about Anne Fadiman. Ross Munro, Time’s bureau chief in New Delhi, is used to politics on the sub-continent. No one knows what will happen when we leave 70 Clifton. ’Qul Huwwa Allahu Ahad - Say He is One God,’ I read from the Holy Quran in the doorway of the house. Anne Fadiman, Ross Munro, the BBC television camerman, a few members of the PPP and my f end Putchie get in one Pajero jeep. I get in my own one, covered with political stickers, with its public address system, cassettes of PPP songs, and PPP flags mounted on the bonnet. Samiya travels with me, as do a few other political workers and photographer Mary Ellen Mark. As the gates swing open, I stand up on the back seat through the sun-roof. ’Marain gai, mar
TAKING ON THE DICTATOR jain gai, Benazir, ko lahain gai - We’ll beat them, we’ll die, but we’ll bring Benazir,’the crowd chants in Urdu, crushing around the Pajero. My guard of honour has swelled to five thousand. Whoosh. The police fire the first round of tear gas as we near MidEast Hospital, the first of 3,000 tear gas shells that will be fired that day in Karachi, 300 of them on the road to Clifton alone. The next barrage comes at the roundabout where the police on their way to arrest me at home, are sandwiched in the crowd. The police try to beat their way through the crowd to get to the Pajero, firing tear gas. Someone in the Pajero pulls me down and closes the sun-roof as we cough and choke. We put salt and lemons on our tongues, and cover our faces with the wet towels we’ve brought with us. I worry about the PPP officials and the journalists in the other van. Anne Fadiman:
gas, which we found out the next day, was made in America by Smith and Wesson. Ross had been tear-gassed before and knew what to do. We cupped water in our hands and soaked our eyes, and held wet handkerchiefs to each other’s eyes, but it was really bad. Putchie who had asthma had luckily gotten out of the Pajero as soon as the tear gas had started and gone home. But the rest of us suffered from the tear gas for weeks. I had steroid shots when I got home to ease what the doctor called a ’deep inhalation dose’. I was lucky. Bashir Riaz, I heard later, was ill for several months.
Ross Munro: A crowd of as many as ten thousand was seething around the motorcade 292 RETURN TO LAHORE when it arrived at Chakiwara Chowk, an expansive public square in Lyari. Benazir scored at least a symbolic victory by reaching the site and speaking for a few minutes. ’You are all my brothers and sisters,’ she shouted in Urdu through her public address system. ’Zia must go.’ This Independence Day had a particular irony, she said, because Pakistanis did not have enough political independence to demonstrate freely. Smoke billowed from a burn-ing bus only two hundreds yards away as she spoke. Anne Fadiman: I didn’t see a single act of violence committed by the PPP. All the violence was coming from the police who were beating the crowds to disperse them. The young men held up their arms to ward off the blows from the lathi sticks. When they saw Benazir’s Pajero, they struggled to press their bloody forearms to the windows, showing Benazir that they were willing to sacrifice themselves for her. I suddenly saw the BBC Karachi cor-respondent Iqbal Jaffery, running along the edge of the crowd. ’There is such violence,’ he called out to me. ’I just saw a ten-year-old boy beaten to the ground by the police for wearing a PPP sticker.’ The police moved in with more tear gas in Lyari when they saw Benazir. Duck! Duck! I hear someone shout. Someone pulls me down in the Pajero just as a tear gas shell hurtles by my head. It is just like the attack against my mother and me at Qadaffi stadium. The police are using the tear gas shells as weapons, not to disperse the crowd. More and more police cars are arriving. ’We can’t allow the party leader to be arrested in the street,’ one of the PPP activists shouts. The cry goes up. ’Stop the police. Stop the police!’ Barricades are thrown up. Tyres and piles of litter are set on fire. We whizz off again down the back alleyways of Lyari, our eyes and throats burning from the tear gas. The people pelt the pursuing police cars with stones. ’This way! This way!’ the people shout, saving us from going down dead-end streets. When we momentarily lose the police, we flag down a taxi. There are clouds of smoke from the tear gas and the bonfires. People are screaming. Police sirens are wailing. My Pajero takes off again, Samiya sitting in the front seat with my dupatta on to draw the police. Our taxi driver is so terrified he starts to take off with the door open. ’What’s the hurry?’ I ask him. He drives very fast through the narrow streets, but he can’t lose the lone police motorcycle following us. I consult quickly with the PPP.leaders in the car. We need to have a press conference, but where? Various sites are suggested, but I finally insist on returning to 70 Clifton. Though I will be walking right into the hands of the police, I want to address the press in my own home and if I have to, be arrested from there. But the motor-
TAKING ON THE DICTATOR cycle is still behind us. We have to lose it. ’Turn right,’ I suddenly tell the driver as we pass the lane leading to the Metropole Hotel. He screeches in, around the hotel, and out the other side. We’ve lost the motorcycle. As we near Clifton, there are police blockades and police everywhere. The driver panics and jams the car into reverse. ’Just drive ahead normally. Keep to a steady speed,’ I tell him. ’The police are not looking for a yellow Toyota.’ The poor man is quivering as we drive through the police lines. I have Samiya’s dupatta over my face and the police don’t spot me. We stop briefly at the house of a party official to wash away the tear gas. ’What’s the fare?’ I ask the driver, getting out my wallet. ’I’m not a taxi driver. This is my own car,’ he says, still trembling. ’You’re not a taxi driver?’ I say to him in disbelief, remembering how I’d ordered him around. ’No. I’m just a PPP supporter,’ he says. He refuses to take any money and leaves. The press are already at 70 Clifton when we arrive. In the middle of the press conference, I get a message that the police have arrived. ’Let them in,’ I say. Three policewomen sheepishly enter the room under the eyes of the foreign press and give me a thirty-day detention order, charging me with unlawful assembly. After I collect my clothes and toothbrush, I am taken to the police station in a huge convoy of police vehicles, followed by equally large numbers of PPP vehicles. At the police station I learn that six people have been killed at the Independence Day rally in Lahore and scores wounded. Once more the regime has sent its henchmen to do their deadly work. The dead and wounded have been shot by sitting members of Parliament, firing Kalashni-kovs into the crowd. The MPs were never charged. Nor, I learn later from a Dawn reporter in Lahore, were the police who stormed the emergency ward at the hospital and beat the wounded as they lay on stretchers and handcuffed to beds. A maulvi who was washing the tear gas out of the eyes of supporters in a mosque was also not spared. The police stormed the mosque and beat him. The toll is high in Sindh as well: sixteen dead and hundreds wounded. There have been police attacks against peaceful demonstrators not only in Lyari, but in rural cities all over the province. In the Frontier, too, Zia’s forces have attacked the demonstrators. And all for attending, on our part, peaceful rallies on the anniversary of the birth of independent Pakistan.
International disapproval of the regime’s brutal crackdown on political expression quickly followed from England and Germany. In the United States, Senators Kennedy and Pell expressed their concern, as did Con-gressman Solarz who was working particularly hard on my behalf. ’If the government continues to detain opposition leaders and refuses to allow peaceful political meetings, then friends of Pakistan will be hard pressed in Congress to seek additional US aid ... in the months ahead,’ warned Solarz, the head of a House subcommittee on Asian-Pacific affairs. But the Reagan administration stood by Zia and his ’civilian’ Prime Minister Junejo. ’He [Junejoj had the courage to face down the opposition and ride out the foreign criticism,’ said a member of the State Department. Zia was quick to lend his voice to salve any criticisms from the all important US Congress when he returned from Mecca in late August. ’Miss Bhutto is not the problem,’ he told New York Times correspondent Steven Weisman on August 26. ’It is Miss Bhutto’s unnecessary, im-practical ambitions and her attitude towards acquiring power which is ob-jectionable.’ My case was to come up in the Sindh High Court on September 10. I was being held without charge. The Independence Day rally had been legal. And I hadn’t broken any laws. As thousands of people trekked from Interior Sindh towards the court house on September 9 for my scheduled appearance the next day, the regime caved in. ’I’ve got a surprise for you. You’re free,’ the jail superintendent said, coming to my cell at 9.30 pm. But I wasn’t surprised. I was already packed and ready to go. Emotions ran high in the session the PPP held after my release to decide what to do next. Some were keen to push ahead with the move-ment, wanting to avenge the blood shed by the regime. For the first time, they pointed out, the regime had killed PPP demonstrators in the Punjab. The momentum to topple Zia had never been higher. We couldn’t break it now. ’We have promised peaceful change through political means,’ I argued successfully, urging restraint. ’But the regime has resorted to force. Continu-ing the protests now means more bloodshed, chaos, perhaps a loss of control to extremists. Let us take August as a moral victory, and stick to
TAKING ON THE DICTATOR our commitment to peace.’ Shortly after the meeting I began another tour of the country, taking the new message of cautious advance to the people. I felt confident as 1987 dawned. I always feel that a new year will be better than the last year, and there were many optimistic signs. I was free in Pakistan for the first time in six years. And after the long ban on political activities we were increasing the strength of the PPP as a political institution. Launching a membership drive, we enrolled a million members in four months, a remarkable figure for Pakistan where the literacy rates are so low. We held party elections in the Punjab - an unheard of pheno-menon in the sub-continent - in which over four hundred thousand mem-bers voted. We opened a dialogue with the opponents of the Muslim League in Parliament and continued to highlight the human rights vio-lations of the regime. Zia consistently claimed we were out for revenge, particularly in his talks to the army where he used that theme to spread fear of a PPP return. But our party was speaking out not for vengeance, but for nation building. And everybody knew it. I called for Pakistan’s need of a professional army disassociated from politics. I continued to criticise Zia’s handling of the Siachin Glacier inci-dents with India, where Pakistan had lost more than 1400 square miles of territory over the last three years. The crowds we drew seemed more and more receptive. On a December visit I’d made to Lala Moosa to condole with the family of a PPP activist murdered on Independence Day, members of the army in this heartland of military recruitment had openly made the PPP’s victory sign and waved to us as we passed. Once more, I was cutting too close to General Zia’s quick. ’We have information that the regime is planning an action against you,’ a PPP supporter and former Brigadier in the army told me when I went to Larkana on my father’s birthday. ’We want to have a practice drill at Al-Murtaza to test your security.’ Thousands had come to participate in my father’s birthday on January 5, a day that had gone very smoothly, and I did not feel any more threatened than usual. ’The security at Al-Murtaza is fine,’ I assured the Brigadier. ’It should be checked,’ he cau-tioned. I was not alarmed. ’There is no need, Brigadier,’ I told him. Another warning came in from Rawalpindi. Then another from Lahore. ’The regime practised a mock assassination,’ a sympathetic member of the administration told me. ’The ”assassin” came right up to you, then reported back that it was simple, that anybody could get close to you.’ I tried not to be alarmed. Though death was always a possibility, I did my best to focus on political issues instead. The warnings escalated along with pleas from party sympathisers to
Within one week in January, 1987, there were two attacks on people close to me. In the first, one of my security guards was fired on after the car he was riding in was forced into a dead-end lane in Karachi. It was only be-cause he was accompanied by men with arms who drove off the attackers that Munawwar Suharwardy escaped with his life. An MRD leader, Fazil Rahu, was not as fortunate. On January 11, he was axed to death in his home village. At the same time, Bashir Riaz, my press officer and former edi-tor of Amal in London, started getting threatening phone calls in the middle of the night. Were all these warnings from the regime for me? ’Get in touch with the authorities,’ I told my lawyer. ’Let them know that if anything happens it is their responsibility. We are giving them advance warning.’ The attack came on January 30. I was planning to return to Larkana for a visit but my departure was delayed by a last minute appointment. I normally drove to Larkana in the Pajero, but I also made plane reservations as a fall-back position in case something came up. It was good security as well to have several different travel plans. I often made plane reservations which I didn’t keep, sometimes even double-booking to cities I wasn’t going to to keep Zia’s intelligence agents in the dark. Often I didn’t even tell my own staff my travel plans so there would be no inadvertent slip. ’Bibi Sahiba, it is getting late,’ one of the staff said to me around noon. ’If you want to get to Larkana before dark, the cars should leave.’ ’You all go ahead,’ I told Urs. ’I have a meeting and will come later.’ The cars never made it to Larkana. I was in the middle of the meeting when one of the staff came in with an urgent note. I saw only two words - ’shots’ and ’Pajero’. Ironically, I had just been talking about the attacks on my security guard and the murder of the MRD leader. The timing seemed almost staged. ’Excuse me for a moment,’ I said to my guests. ’There has just been an attack on my car.’ Quickly I gave instructions to the staff to call the police and my lawyers and, pulling my nerves together, went back into the meeting. The story got uglier over the next few days as the facts unfolded. The two vehicles were proceeding along the road near Manjhand in broad daylight when a man waiting at the side of the road suddenly gave a signal. Four other men immediately appeared and started firing at the passenger side of my Pajero. Urs accelerated quickly and the Pajero, which was already going at 70 mph, sped through the hail of bullets. When the staff looked back, the men were still firing at my Pajero and had stopped the second car. The security guards and staff in the second car were taken away at gunpoint. 297 TAKING ON THE DICTATOR A cold-blooded assassination attempt. Though the regime claimed it was just a normal highway robbery, it was not. Nothing fitted the pattern. The attack occurred a full forty miles from the area frequented by dacoits or highway robbers. Dacoits usually attacked at night, not at 3.30 in the afternoon. And their intent was to stop a car to rob the occupants, not to riddle it with bullets. Disturbances broke out again in the country as the news of the assassina-tion attempt spread. The public outrage was so great that the regime made a great show of sending its own Inspector General of police to recover the kidnapped members of my staff. Meanwhile, more and more information filtered in. A man had been seen at the assassination site with a two-way radio around the time the Pajero had left 70 Clifton. Someone must have radioed ahead to say the Pajero was on its way, assuming I was inside the jeep which has darkened windows. I totally discounted the regime’s claim that the dacoits had launched the attack on their own. Their mode of activity was to stop a group of cars, not just one, and the car just ahead of the Pajero had passed the site without incident. The dacoits also considered it dishonourable to attack a woman. No. This was not a simple robbery attempt. More stories came in. The night before, a car had reportedly approached the dacoits’ secret headquarters and spoken to the chief. ’Tomorrow we have a very big job to do,’ the leader had told the others when the car left. Other stories circulated about the threats the regime had used on the dacoits to make them do their dirty work for them. Meanwhile, whoever was holding the PPP staff members was not even asking for ransom. It was not a normal kidnapping. The men were released some days later as suddenly as they were taken. They were unharmed, thank God. But what they had to say streng-thened our suspicions about the involvement of the regime. ’We are on the staff of Miss Benazir,’ the men had told their abductors, who had already seen my distinctive jeep with its PPP stickers, flags and loud-speakers on the roof. ’We are General Zia’s men,’ their kidnappers had responded. No ’dacoits’ were ever arrested in connection with the crime. Another gauntlet of violence thrown down by the regime in an increas-ingly violent society. The regime had armed the mujahideen, the funda-mentalist students, the secessionists and the Muslim League. To try and retain credibility for his stance of heading a ’civilian’ government, Zia had created private armies to gun down the political opposition for him. Before the first month of 1987 was over, a PPP activist was lashed in jail, in spite of the lifting of Martial Law, and more political dissidents were shot. It grew increasingly difficult for me to restrain the younger members of the PPP from resorting to violence themselves. The situation in Pakistan was rapidly becoming chaotic, the London-
Pakistan was verging on anarchy. Who needed an outside enemy? Zia was destroying the country from within. The minutes ticked by towards the promised national elections in 1990. But fewer and fewer believed that free and impartial elections would ever be held. The local bodies elections held in the autumn of 1987 were a sorry case in point. Forty per cent of the candidates opposing the regime-backed Muslim League and chosen in a secret selection at grass-roots level to avoid disqualification, had their nomination papers rejected anyway by government servants who feared forced retirement. Shortly before an-nouncing the elections, Zia had passed a law giving the provincial govern-ments the power to retire any government servant after ten years of service, the length of time since the coup. The contest, if one can call it that, for the remaining 60 per cent of the seats was even more manipulated by the regime. Polling lists we knew to be false were not only never corrected, but changed from day to day right up to the day before elections. Voting districts were gerry-mandered, with constituencies ranging in size from 600 to 2600 people depending on what would give a victory to the regime-backed Muslim League. The rules changed constantly. The deadline for withdrawing can-didates from the elections was announced for November 19. On the night of November 19, the deadline was extended to November 25. This gave the administration six more days to force and coerce other candidates into withdrawing and to declare the seat an ’unopposed’ win for the Muslim League. The voting itself was even further manipulated. Polling stations had always been set up in public places in the most populous villages and towns. In these elections, the regime announced at the last minute that the election sites would be in sparsely populated areas and even in the homes of Muslim Leaguers where people feared to go. On election day itself the regime changed the locations of some polling stations without informing the opposition, making it impossible for our supporter’s to cast their votes. Many couldn’t get to the stations anyway. Two days before the polls, the Election Commission requisitioned the jeeps, cars and other vehicles of PPP supporters to transport the election staff. The vehicles belonging to members of the Muslim League were left untouched. Yüklə 1,3 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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