Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto
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Saner opposition leaders, however, knew the religious issue was ex-plosive and avoided expanding on it. For all the spiritual muckraking going on, they knew the PPP’s adherence to Islam was unquestionable. It was my father who had given the country its first Islamic Constitution in 1973, and he who had created Pakistan’s first Ministry of Religious Affairs. It was his administration which had printed the first error-free Holy Quran in Pakistan, lifted the quotas past governments had set to limit the number of Pakistanis permitted to travel to Mecca on pilgrimage, and made Islami-yat - religious education - compulsory in primary and secondary schools. My father’s government had instituted Arabic language programmes on televison to teach Pakistanis the language of the Holy Quran, and a Ruet-e-Hillal, or moon-sighting committee, to end confusion over the beginning and end of the Ramazan fast. Under my father, the government had even insisted that Pakistan change the name and symbol of the Red Cross to the Red Crescent to commemorate its connection to Islam instead of Christ-ianity. I was therefore not too disturbed when I read about the fundamentalist elements of the opposition campaign. The vast majority of the people, I thought, knew that implementing the fundamentalist interpretation of Shariah would turn back the gains Pakistanis had made in human rights and economic development one thousand years. Banking would have to be abolished altogether, for example, for strict interpretation of Islam sees the charging of interest as usury. And women would lose every step forward my father had encouraged them to take. He had opened the Foreign Service, the Civil Service, and the police
He had encouraged my mother, as well, to take a more active role. In 1975 she had headed Pakistan’s delegation to the United Nations’ inter-national conference on women held in Mexico City. I had been very proud when she was elected Vice President of the conference. Now she was standing for election to the National Assembly, a symbol of my father’s positive attitude toward women in politics. But, as election day drew near, the PNA’s attacks against the PPP only grew wilder. Asghar Khan was promising to send his least favourite PPP leaders to concentration camps when he took over the government on March S. And he was boasting of killing my father. ’Shall I hang Bhutto from the Attock Bridge? Or shall I hang Bhutto from a Lahore lamp post?’ the opposition leader was saying. That truly jolted me. Asghar Khan had been rumoured to have relatives among the junior army officers who had staged an unsuccessful coup attempt in 1974. Was he working up factions in the army again? I felt so far away in Oxford. My father had worked to bring democracy to Pakistan. But not all the people, it was turning out, had learned the self-discipline that democracy requires. In one Karachi neighbourhood, a PNA candidate sprayed a poster of my father with machine-gun fire, killing a young child standing by. ’The opposition has behaved quite badly, so much so that even a politi-cally apathetic cabbage like myself has been jolted into taking notice,’ a school friend wrote to me from Karachi in February. ’. . . Now, more than ever, all of Pakistan realises how desperately we need your father. God forbid, if anyone else were to even come close to taking over the reins, I think it would destroy us as a nation.’ On election night I joined Mir in his rooms opposite Christ’s College to wait by the phone. The Pakistani Ambassador in London and one of my father’s ministers had both promised to ring as soon as they had any news of the results. Mir was predicting .that the PPP would win between 150 and 156 seats in the National Assembly. When the phone rang, it was my father, his voice hoarse from campaigning, calling with the news that the PPP had won 154 of 200 seats. ’Congratulations, Papa. I am so happy for you,’ I yelled into the phone. I was as excited by the PPP victory as I was relieved that the election tension was over. But it wasn’t. True to the coalition’s threat, the PNA claimed the national election results were rigged and announced it would boycott the Provincial As-sembly elections scheduled three days later. And the agitation increased.
THE YEARS OF DETENTION Swarms of young men on motor scooters were suddenly reported to be racing through Karachi, leaving cinemas, banks, shops that sold alcohol, and any houses flying the PPP flag burning in their wake. Thirteen mem-bers of one family were put to the torch in one home and, when in his final agony one of the victims asked for water, the hooligans responded by urinating in his mouth. A PPP member was lynched, his body left to hang from a public lamp-post until the police cut it down. Death threats were issued to innumerable other PPP ministers and parliamentarians, as were threats to kidnap their children from school. A nightmare was unfolding in Karachi. Every morning I rushed to the common room in St Catherine’s College to snatch up the English papers before collecting the Pakistani papers from my mailbox. Mir and I pored over them in disbelief. We had seen democracy in America and England where political opponents did not often resort to such terrorist attacks and goondaism, and both of us found the PNA’s tactics apalling. We also grew increasingly suspicious about their implications. It was obvious that the PNA had no interest in elections. Perhaps their continued agitations were paving the way for some intervention in the government, like an army take-over. The Army was the key. But there was no reason to doubt the loyalty of the armed forces. My father was very popular among the army and his selection of Zia as Army Chief-of-Staff over six more senior officers seemed to ensure Zia’s support as well. In our culture, one does not betray one’s benefactor. Still, Asghar Khan was trying to win over the army, circulating a letter he had written to the armed forces implicitly calling on them to take over the government. But it fell on deaf ears. Instead the Chiefs-of-Staff - Navy, Air Force, and Army - released a statement supporting my father’s elected civilian government. The PNA was getting nowhere. After almost three weeks of unrest in Karachi and Hyderabad, the PNA tried to carry the rioting and looting to Lahore. Again, packs of twenty to thirty men on scooters were dispatched, this time to the bazaars where they pelted shoppers with stones, forcing merchants to pull down their shutters in fear. At times the hooligans doused banks and buses with petrol and set them on fire before riding off. Reading the papers at Oxford, Mir and I were becoming increasingly disgusted at the PNA’s attempts to stir up agitation. Instead of accepting a democratic defeat, these old-style politicians were resorting to violence and rumour. ’Begum Bhutto has fled with her suitcases,’ one such PNA rumour went. ’Bhutto will follow soon.’ My father was so sure of the PPP’s strength that he offered to hold new provincial elections and, if the PNA won a majority, to re-run the general elections, but the leaders of the PNA refused even to sit down
The PNA’s terrorist tactics even reached me at Oxford. I was startled one afternoon in late March to find a member of Scotland Yard waiting for me when I returned from the Bodleian Library. ’I don’t wish to alarm you, Miss Bhutto, but there have been reports that you may be in some danger,’ the British officer told me. I didn’t think Scotland Yard would bother to send anyone all the way to Oxford to tell me something if it were not in my best interest. So from that day until I left Oxford in June I followed his instructions carefully, looking under my car to check for any explosives before opening the door, and inspecting the lock to see if it had been tampered with. I also followed Scotland Yard’s instructions to vary my schedule and not to follow a routine. If I had a ten o’clock class, I would leave for it as early as 9.30 or as late as 9.55. I still use some of the security measures Scotland Yard taught me today. In Pakistan, the PNA’s agitations were fizzling by early April. The trouble seemed to be over when the news from home took a new and ominous turn. People had fistfuls of American dollars and were leaving their jobs, my friend Samiya wrote, including my cousin Fakhri’s servants and those of their friends. ’We get better pay by demonstrating for the PNA,’ the servants claimed. Since March, she wrote, the flood of American currency had driven the value of the dollar in the black market down by 30 per cent. Without apparent financial loss, private truck and bus drivers had gone on strike in Karachi, forcing a factory slowdown because the em-ployees couldn’t get to work. Those same trucks and buses, however, were available to transport the people to PNA demonstrations. Asians have always been prone to conspiracy theories. But in this case my father and other members of the PPP were convinced that the unrest was due to American involvement. I could see for myself when the truck drivers went on strike that the pattern of economic dislocation was similar to the one in Chile during the CIA-sponsored military overthrow of Presi-dent Allende and his democratically elected government. Our intelligence had also noted frequent meetings between American diplomats and mem-bers of the PNA. The effectiveness of the PNA-sponsored strikes was suspicious as well. When my father came to power, he learned that in 1958 the US had held top secret manoeuvres with the Pakistani army to teach them the art of immobilising a government through strikes. These secret manoeuvres had been called ’Operation Wheel Jam’. Now the PNA was calling for a nationwide strike. Its name? ’Operation Wheel Jam’. 75 THE YEARS OF DETENTION I didn’t want to believe the United States was actively destabilising the democractically elected government of Pakistan. But I kept coming back to a remark Henry Kissinger had made to my father during a visit to Pakistan in the summer of 1976. The issue then had been my father’s determination to move ahead with negotiations with France on a nuclear reprocessing plant; a plant which would give Pakistan energy at a time when skyrocketing oil prices had adversely affected the economies of even the prosperous West. Dr Kissinger had been equally determined to dissuade my father from continuing these negotiations. The US govern-ment evidently saw the plant only in terms of its potential to produce a nuclear device, and the ’Islamic bomb’, as it came to be known, was decidedly not in the best interests of the Free World. The meeting had not gone well and my father had been flushed with anger when he returned home. Henry Kissinger, he told me, had spoken to him crudely and arrogantly. The US Secretary of State had made it clear that the Reprocessing Plant Agreement was not acceptable to the United States. The agreement either had to be cancelled or delayed for several years until new technology excluded the possibility of the nuclear device option. During the meeting Kissinger had claimed that he con-sidered my father a brilliant statesman. It was only as a ’well-wisher’ that he was warning him: Reconsider the agreement with France or risk being made into ’a horrible example’. Now I couldn’t wipe that conversation from my mind, even though Jimmy Carter had taken office as President of the United States three months before and Cyrus Vance, not Henry Kissinger was now Secretary of State. But changes in the US administration did not necessarily mean changes in all the US centres of power. From my seven years of govern-ment studies I knew that the CIA often acted autonomously and that their policies were not established overnight. Had it been their policy option to get rid of my father if they could not get him to cancel the Reprocessing Plant Agreement? Had my father inadvertently played into their hands by calling elections a full year ahead of schedule? I could just picture the CIA dossier on my father. Here was a man who had spoken out against American policy during the Vietnam War, who had promoted normalised relations with Communist China, who had sup-ported the Arabs during the 1973 war and advocated independence from the superpowers at Third World conferences. Was he getting too big for his boots? Another intelligence report came in, this one a taped conversation be-tween two American diplomats in Islamabad. ’The party’s over! He’s gone!’ one had said, referring to my father’s government. ’Gentlemen, the party is not over,’ my father had responded in an address to the National As-sembly, ’and it will not be over till my mission is completed for this great 76 THE DREAMING SPIRES OF OXFVKu nation.’ Meanwhile the subsidised fundamentalists in the streets were sink-ing to a new low. ’Bhutto is a Hindu, Bhutto is a Jew,’ they chanted, as if the two religions, neither of which my Muslim father practised, were mutually compatible. ’I do not know what to write about the situation here,’ my mother wrote. ’I know what we read in the newspapers and you get the papers there, too. The Morning News is the most correct paper and does not believe in sensationalism, so actually you know as much as I know. ’I have written to Sanam [my sister had entered Radcliffe in 1975] and Mir not to invite any friends this summer. I do not know if they have got my letters as many have gone astray. If you get this letter, let the others know just in case.’ The leaders of the PNA continued to refuse my father’s offer to nego-tiate a peaceful solution. In the face of looting, arson and murder of PPP supporters; my father was forced to detain several of the PNA leaders. Perhaps the temporary silencing of their calls to violence would calm the country. But on April 20, the long-planned-for ’Operation Wheel Jam’ paralysed Karachi’s streets. The truck drivers were on strike, and shops, banks, markets and textile mills remained closed. On April 21, in ac- cordance with the constitution, my father called out the army to help the civil powers restore order in the major cities of Karachi, Lahore and Hyder-abad. The protests subsided. A massive demonstration and nationwide strike called for April 22 never materialised. Nor a week later did the ’Long March’, the PNA’s call for two million people to march to Rawal- pindi and surround the Prime Minister’s House. The failure of the Long March punctured the balloon of the PNA agitation once and for all. My father drove through the streets of Rawalpindi greeted by cheering crowds. But the PNA agitation had taken its toll. Thousands of new cars and buses had been burned. Factories in Karachi were closed or behind sched-ule. Millions of rupees worth of property had been destroyed. Lives had been lost. I breathed a sigh of relief when the papers reported on June 3 that the PNA had finally agreed to talk with my father, while my father seemed amenable to the idea of dissolving his government in preparation for fresh elections. Reason seemed to be returning at last to Pakistan. Four days into the negotiations my father withdrew the army, and a week later the PNA leaders and others detained during the troubles were freed. Following my father’s announcement that he would hold new elections in October, even the most stubborn PNA leaders seemed optimistic about the future. ’I now see a light at the end of the tunnel. Let us pray it is not a mirage,’ one of the opposition was quoted as saying in the June 13 issue of Newsweek after a meeting with my father. 77 THE YEARS OF DETENTION Relations with the United States, too, seemed to be improving. The Pakistani Foreign Secretary Mr Aziz Ahmed flew to Paris for a meeting with the US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. He took with him a fifty-page Foreign Office report containing the grounds of our suspicion about American involvement in the destabilisation of the government. My father told me that Secretary Vance put it to one side. ’No, Mr Aziz Ahmed, we want to start a new chapter with Pakistan,’ the Secretary of State re-portedly said. ’We value greatly the long and close friendship we have with your country.’ Did the Americans play a role in disrupting my father’s government? We will never have proof. I have since tried through friends in America to find out more information through the Freedom of Information Act, but was unsuccessful. The CIA sent back six documents, including an analysis of China’s support for Pakistan during the 1965 war with India when my father was Foreign Minister, and a cable reporting the movement of civilian convoys through Rawalpindi during the same period. Only one document dealt with my father and the PPP, and that only with the resistance to his proposed Constitution of 1973. ’We can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of any CIA records responsive to your request for records pertaining to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto,’ the covering letter read. ’Such information, unless, of course, it has been officially acknowledged, would be classified for reasons of national security. By this action, we are neither confirming nor denying the existence or nonexistence of such records. Accordingly, this portion of your request for documents pertaining to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is denied . . . .’ Whatever happened in Pakistan in 1977 happened because there were people who allowed it to happen. If the leaders of the PNA had acted in Pakistan’s national interest rather than their oven, if my father’s Chief-of-Staff had acted in Pakistan’s national interest rather than his own, the government could not have been overthrown. It was - and is - an import-ant lesson for all of us to learn. The United States was acting in its national self-interest, but we were not acting in our own. Some people take the easy way out by putting the whole blame for the events of 1977 on the USA. Had there not been those among us who collaborated, who looked to their own chance of power rather than that of serving their country, no harm could ever have come to the elected government of Pakistan. But as a student at Oxford, I did not yet understand that.
I was sad at leaving Oxford and so many friends. I was sorry, also, to leave my little yellow car which Mir was planning to sell for me in the autumn. For four years my MGB had served as a bulletin board for messages from my friends as well as parking tickets from the zealous traffic wardens. But I was also very excited about the prospects awaiting me in Pakistan. My father had discussed some of his tentative plans for me, which included working for the Prime Minister’s office during the summer as well as for the Inter-Provincial Council of Common Interests so that I could familiarise myself with common provincial concerns. In September, he told me, he was going to send me to the United Nations as part of the Pakistani delegation which would give me good exposure. I would return to Pakis-tan in November to study for my foreign ministry exams in December. There was my future, all neat, clean and laid out for me. My father was evidently looking forward to my return as much as I was looking forward to going home. ’I promise you that I will do every-thing within my capacity to make your readjustment to Pakistan short and pleasant,’ he had written. ’After that you will swing on your own. Of course you will have to tolerate my nasty sense of humour. Unfortunately I cannot change my temperament at this age although I shall try very hard while dealing with my first-born. The trouble is that you also have a temper and tears trickle from your eyes as readily as they come down from my own. This is because we are of the same blood and flesh. ’Let us make a pact to understand each other. You are a motivated person. How can a motivated person want the desert to be without heat or the mountains to be bereft of snow? You will find your sunshine and your rainbow in your values and in your inner morality. It will turn out to be perfect. Both of us will work together for a laudable achievement. You bet we will make it.’ On June 25, 1977, Mir and I flew to Rawalpindi to join our parents and the rest of the family, Shah Nawaz returning home from school in Switzer-land and Sanam from Harvard. It was the last time our family would ever be together again. 79 RELECTIONS FROM AL-MURTAZA: THE HIGH TREASON OF ZIA UL-HAQ
United States, British Cabinet minis-ter Duncan Sandys. My father often organised shooting parties for his guests, though he didn’t really care for hunting. My brothers, however, were crack shots and occasionally bolstered the guests’ egos by discreetly downing the birds or deer for them. Even on ordinary days Al-Murtaza was filled with laughter and fun. Often my father burst spontaneously into song, giving off-key but enthusi-astic renderings of Sindhi folk songs or his favourite tunes from the West: ’Some Enchanted Evening’ from the musical South Pacific which he’d seen in New York, ’Strangers in the Night’, the Frank Sinatra hit which had been all the rage in Karachi during his courtship of my mother, and his speciality, ’Que Sera, Sera’. I could still hear him singing it - ’whatever will be, will be, the future’s not ours to see . . . .’ Who could have foreseen the dark future which overtook him so sud-denly in the early morning hours of July 5, 1977, the military coup d’etat which began our own personal tragedy and the agony of Pakistan? July 5, 1977, 1.45 am. The Prime Minister’s residence, Rawalpindi. ’Wake up! Get dressed! Hurry!’ my mother called out sharply, rushing through my room to wake my sister. ’The Army’s taken over! The Army’s taken over!’ Minutes later I nervously joined my parents in their bedroom, not knowing what was going on. A coup? How could there be a coup? The Pakistan People’s Party and the opposition leaders had reached a final settlement over the contested elections the day before. And if the Army had taken over, what military factions were staging it? General Zia and
My father is on the telephone, placing calls to his Army Chief-of-Staff General Zia and the Federal Ministers. The first call to come through is from the home of the Education Minister. The Army has been there already. ’The soldiers beat my father and took him away,’ sobs the daugh-ter of Hafiz Pirzada who had left my father just a few hours ago after celebrating the agreement with him. I had seen the glow of their cigars and heard their laughter on the lawn while I gossiped inside with my sister. ’Stay calm,’ Papa is telling Pirzada’s daughter in a steady voice. ’Retain the dignity of your family.’ In the midst of his next call to the Governor of the Frontier, the telephone goes dead. Yüklə 1,3 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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