Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto
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will result in a cornucopia of foreign aid for Zia, eventually making Pakistan the third largest recipient of US aid after Israel and Egypt. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan becomes known in Pakistan as ’Brezhnev’s Christmas present to Zia’. And my mother and I remain incarcerated at Al-Murtaza.
’Even jail rules state that only women police officials can enter a woman prisoner’s room,’ I remind him. 98 THE JUDICIAL MURDER OF MY FATHER ’I will be present,’ he says. ’Then we won’t have the meeting at all. I’ll call my sister.’ Sanam had already gone ahead to my mother’s room, so I keep walking down the corridor to the family quarters to tell her and my mother that the meeting has been postponed. I hear a noise behind me. Captain Iftikhar is still following me. ’Where do you think you are going? You can’t come in here,’ I tell him, momentarily stunned. But he is oblivious. ’Do you know who I am?’ he says loudly. ’I am a Captain of the Pakistani Army and I can go where I want.’ ’Do you know who I am?’ I reply just as loudly. ’I am the daughter of the man who brought you back after your disgraceful surrender at Dacca.’ Captain Iftikhar lifts his hand to hit me. And the rage I have suppressed, the anger I have tried to control, erupts. ’You raise your hand in this house, you shameful man! You dare to raise your hand in this house, near the shadow of the grave of the man who saved you. You and your army fell at the feet of the Indian Generals. It was my father who gave you back your honour. And you are raising your hand to his daughter?’ He lowers his hand abruptly. ’We’ll see what happens,’ he spits out, turning on his heel and stalking off. Sanam’s visit is cancelled. I write a letter to the court where my mother and I had challenged our arrests as soon as we had been locked up at Al-Murtaza. Under Martial Law in 1979, civil courts were still authorised to review arrests made under military regulations. I describe what happened in our family quarters. General Zia had often spoken of the sanctity of Chador and Char Divari, the Veil and the Four Walls, meaning the sanctity of family life. Yet neither he nor Captain Iftikhar seemed to have much regard for it. I give the letter to the jailer who promises to forward the letter to the court and gives me a receipt for it. I have no idea at the time just how valuable that receipt will be.
My father’s imprint on me, however, keeps me going. Endurance. Honour. Principle. In the stories my father used to tell us as children, the Bhuttos always won a moral fight. ’Rupert fell upon me in the forests of Woodstock,’ my father would begin the tale of his encounter near Oxford 99 THE YEARS OF DETENTION with Rupert of Hentzau, the evil character in the novels of Anthony Hope. Rising to his feet, my father would brandish an imaginary sword. ’He slashes me in the shoulder, slices my leg. But I fight back because an honourable man fights to the death.’ While we watched spellbound, Papa would parry. He’d thrust. He’d ignore the blood now seeping from a wound to the stomach. Lunging suddenly, he would finish Rupert off, then sink exhausted into his chair. ’A noble scar,’ he’d say, lifting his shirt to show us his appendix scar. Fortified by this and other Bhutto legends, I saw no reason after the coup to believe that my father would not also triumph over Zia. I had not yet made the distinction between the inspirational challenges my father had made up for us in his stories and the real evil that awaited him. September, 1977. Massive brick walls jagged with barbed wire. Tiny, high-set windows covered with rusted iron grilles. Huge iron gates. Kot Lakhpat Jail. The door in the gate rattled and creaked as I stepped through. I had never been inside a jail before. I faced another steel wall, this one guarded by police carrying guns. All around me men, women and children carrying tiffin boxes of food were pushing towards the one small door in the blanket of steel. There are no amenities in Pakistani jails - clothing, bedding, dishes, even food must be brought by the inmates’ families. Those whose families are too poor to supply these ’luxuries’ or who have been sentenced to rigorous Imprison-ment are put in Class C confinement - group cells where fifty sleep on lice-filled mats on the floor with a single hole in the comer for their lavatory, and subsist on a daily ration of two bowls of watery lentils and a piece of bread. There are no fans to stir the over 100 degree heat, no showers to cool the prisoners or allow them to wash. The police took me to meet my father in the jail superintendent’s office. ’With this recycled murder charge Zia is coming out more openly against us now. The other children must leave the country quickly, before Zia makes it impossible,’ my father tells me. ’Especially the boys. I want them out of the country in twenty-four hours.’ ’Yes, Papa,’ I say, knowing that Mir and Shah would hate leaving now. How could they concentrate on their studies with their father in prison? They were both working so hard in Larkana and Karachi preparing for the elections Zia was still promising to hold. . . ’You have completed your education. But, if you want to return to England and live a safer life, I will understand. You can go,’ my father . continues. ’If you choose to stay here, know that we are in for heavy weather.’ ’I will stay here, Papa, and help with your case,’ I tell him.
’I have permission to see my father,’ Shah told the guards inside the first gate. ’I have come to say good-bye to him.’ ’We don’t have permission to admit you,’ the guards said. ’We can’t let you in.’ My father, who happened to be passing by the inner steel wall on the way to a meeting with his lawyers, overheard Shah arguing with the jailers. ’You are my son. Don’t ask them for any favours,’ he called out loudly to my brother. ’Go for your studies and work hard. Make me proud of you.’ Shah Nawaz left two days later for the American College in Leysin. Sanam left shortly thereafter to return to Harvard. Ten days after that, September 29, 1977, I was arrested for the first time. People. Swarms of people. Young men in shalwar khameez clinging to tree branches and lamp-posts, balancing on the tops of buses and trucks. Fam-ilies craning to see from their windows, roofs and balconies. People wedged so tightly that anyone fainting will be held upright, women in burqas hovering on the edges of the crowd, daring for this cause to be seen in public. The daughter of their imprisoned Prime Minister had come to talk to them. A woman standing on a political podium was not as strange to the crowd as it felt to me. Other women on the sub-continent had picked up the political banners of their husbands, brothers and fathers before me. The legacies of political families passing down through the women had become a South Asian tradition. Indira Gandhi in India. Sirimavo Bandar-anaike in Sri Lanka. Fatima Jinnah and my own mother in Pakistan. I just never thought it would happen to me. Standing on the makeshift stage in the industrial city of Faisalabad, I was terrified. At twenty-four years old, I did not think of myself yet as a political leader or a public speaker. But I had no choice. ’Darling, you have to campaign. We have to divide up your father’s schedule,’ my mother had said to me the week before in Karachi. ’The other PPP leaders are either in detention or already committed to their schedules. We are the only ones left.’ ’But I won’t know what to say,’ I had told her.
THE YEARS OF DETENTION ’Bhutto ko reha kayo - Free Bhutto!’ the masses are chanting, the same cry a million had raised the day before in Rawalpindi for my mother. I had stood behind her on the stage, watching, learning. ’Do not worry if the father is in jail. You have the mother who is still free,’ she had called out to the crowds. ’I do not have either tanks or guns, but I certainly have the unconquerable power of the downtrodden to face any power in the world.’ Her voice was firm but her hands shook slightly as she rallied the people and my heart went out to her. My mother hadn’t wanted this public life, hadn’t wanted to assume the leadership of the PPP while my father was in prison. She was still ill from her low blood pressure and feeling very weak. When the party leaders squabbling over the chair-manship had proposed her as a compromise candidate, she had refused. But after my father had written from prison to ask her to accept the party decision she had had to accept. The first promised elections were only two weeks away. And the people were more than ready to welcome back the PPP. Zia’s ’Operation Fairplay’ was turning out to be anything but fair for the vast majority of the population. Less than two months after the coup, Zia’s regime returned the flour and rice mills my father had nationalised to their original owners, and promised further denationalisation. In-dustrialists throughout the country were celebrating by firing union or-ganisers. Fifty thousand workers in Lahore alone were laid off. Where’s your Father Bhutto now?’ the industrialists taunted the workers who had lost the only job security they had ever had. Other workers were threatened with massive dismissals and wage cuts. Peasants expecting to sell their crops for guaranteed prices were offered ’take it or leave it’ prices instead. Once again the feudal landowners and the factory owners were pocketing the profits, onions now selling for five times the 1975 price, potatoes for twice as much, eggs and flour up by 30 per cent. The outrage at the reversal of my father’s policies was being shouted at PPP rallies all over Pakistan. Bhutto ko reha kayo! Bhutto ko reha kayo! Free Bhutto! In Faisalabad, I clutched the speech which I had practised over and over again in my room in Islamabad. Look up. Don’t look down. Speak to the back of the room. What a tidy technique that had been at the Oxford Union. Stretching in front of me now in a sports field was a seemingly infinite mass of humanity. ’Don’t antagonise the junta and give Zia any pretext for cancelling the elections,’ my mother had cautioned me. But the crowds were irrepressible. ’I can’t believe it,’ a local party worker said, mopping her brow. ’I’ve never seen such a big public meeting in my life.’ Somebody handed me the microphones which were connected to the loudspeakers with unearthed wires. Sparks were crackling and flying off
’When I was in India with my father during the negotiations with Indira Gandhi, my father refused to sleep in his bed but slept on the floor,’ I called out in my own contribution to my prepared speech. ”’Why are you sleeping on the floor?” I asked him. ”I cannot sleep in a bed in India,” he answered, ”when our prisoners-of-war have nothing to sleep on in the camps but the ground.”’ And the roar rose. Kasur one day. Okara the next. Past the rolling green fields where farmers bent to weed and water. The PPP was cutting a swathe through the agricultural heartland of the Punjab, our progress on the roads slowed by cheering crowds. The Punjab was the home of the army jawans, the rank and file who were devoted constituents of my father’s. He had treated the jawans with simple decency: issuing warm clothing for the soldiers lying in the winter trenches of West Pakistan, raising their pay, and offering them greater opportunities for promotion to officer rank. Now the families of the soldiers were turning out in force to support us. We were getting too close to Zia’s quick. ’The magistrate is here to see you,’ said my hostess nervously when I arrived in Sahiwal on September 29, the third stop on my tour. ’This house has been declared a sub-jail. You are detained for fifteen days,’ the magistrate told me. I couldn’t believe it. The house was surrounded by the police. The telephone was cut off as periodically were the water and electricity. The roads to the whole neighbourhood were cordoned off, keeping the resi-dents from their homes. My host and hostess, who subsequently left the party, were detained with me. I spent three days pacing up and down my bedroom in a fury, a policewoman posted in the hallway outside. What were the charges? I hadn’t broken any law, even a Martial Law. I was merely standing in for my father during the month of campaigning sanctioned by Zia himself. How little I understood then about the high-stakes game I had been drawn into. ’My daughter is used to wearing jewellery. Now she will be proud to wear the chains of imprisonment,’ my mother said at a campaign rally in Karachi where the size of her crowds swamped previous records. The tremendous turnouts we were receiving dashed Zia’s hopes of politically defeating the PPP. Bhutto in jail was even more powerful than Bhutto on the campaign trail. The next day, Zia announced on television that the elections were can-celled. From that moment, I knew there were no more laws. I03 THE YEARS OF DETENTION October 24, 1977. The day my father’s trial for conspiracy to murder began. Unlike ordinary murder cases which started in the lower courts, this one started in the Lahore High Court, depriving my father of one level of appeal. The Justice who had released my father on bail six weeks earlier had been removed from active duty in the High Court, and a bench of five specially selected judges had been set up. One of the first acts of this new bench was to cancel my father’s bail. Now he was being held under criminal charges and under orders of the Chief Martial Law Administrator, Zia ul-Haq. At least I was free to continue working with my mother on my father’s behalf: I had been released from my detention shortly after the elections were cancelled. A party supporter lent us an unfurnished house in Lahore, the capital of the Punjab, to use as an office and meeting place for the PPP during my father’s trial. Every day one of us attended the court hearings in the handsome building built by the British in 1866. The trap-pings of justice were everywhere in the carved wooden-ceilinged court-room with its rich, red carpet. Everyone stood as the judges entered, preceded by a bearer wearing a long green coat and a white turban and carrying a wooden sceptre topped with a silver knob. The judges, wearing black robes and white wigs, took their places in five high-backed chairs under a red satin tasselled canopy. My father’s lawyers were already in court, dressed in black silk gowns over their black jackets, starched white shirts with winged collars, morning suit trousers. Sitting with the other onlookers filling the rows of wooden benches in the court-room, I should have felt comforted. It looked like a trial being held in the finest traditions of British law. It wasn’t. The case against my father rested primarily on the confession of Masood Mahmood, the Director General of the Federal Security Force. Masood Mahmood was one of the public servants who was arrested soon after the coup and who we had been told was tortured to give false evidence against my father. After almost two months of detention by the military, Masood Mahmood had decided to become an ’approver’, a wit-ness who claims to be an accomplice in a crime and is pardoned on the promise that he will tell the ’truth’ about the other participants. Now Masood Mahmood was claiming that my father ordered him to murder the politician Kasuri. Masood Mahmood’s statement was the only testimony directly linking my father to the alleged conspiracy. The other four ’co-accused’ were also members of the Federal Security Force who allegedly took part in the attack and who took their orders from the Director General. Like Masood Mahmood, they had all been under arrest since shortly after the coup. There were no eyewitnesses to the attack. While the four accused members of the FSF sat next to their lawyers, 104 THE JUDICIAL MURDER OF MY FATHER my father was surrounded by intelligence agents and kept within a wooden dock constructed just for this trial. ’I know you are used to a very comfortable life, so I am providing you with a chair instead of a bench,’ Acting Chief Justice Maulvi Mushtaq Hussein said sarcastically to my father on the first day of what was to be a five-month trial. One of Zia’s top judicial appointees, Maulvi Mushtaq was from Zia’s home area of Jullandar in India, and was an old enemy of my father’s. He was the judge who had tried my father during his challenge to Ayub Khan. Under the PPP government he had been passed over for the post of Chief justice and denied promotion to the Supreme Court after the Law Minister, the Attorney General and my father had all deemed him unfit. And shortly after the coup he had accepted Zia’s appointment as Chief Election Com-missioner, making a mockery of the separation between the executive and judicial branches of government. He could hardly be impartial. The court’s bias was clear. On the first day of the trial, Mian Abbas, one of the FSF accused and a good and brave man, stood up and denied his own testimony. ’My confession was extracted from me under torture,’ he announced. The next day he did not appear in court. He was ill, the prosecution explained. The defence requested copies of the witnesses’ statements against my father. The request was deferred by the Chief Justice ’until some ap-propriate time’. As the trial progressed Mr D. M. Awan, the chief defence counsel, was called into the Chief Justice’s chambers where he was advised to ’think about his future’. When Mr Awan persisted in mounting a proper legal defence of my father, the Chief Justice retaliated by giving unfavour-able rulings in Mr Awan’s other cases being heard by the court. Finally, Mr Awan advised his clients to find another lawyer. I was present when Maulvi Mushtaq misrepresented the testimony of Masood Mahmood’s driver, trying to establish a link between my father and the Director General of the FSF. ’Is it true that you took Masood Mahmood to see the Prime Minister?’ the Chief Justice asked. ’No,’ the frightened driver replied. ’Write: ”I drove Masood Mahmood to see the Prime Minister”,’ Maulvi Mushtaq directed the court stenographer. ’Objection, my Lord!’ the defence lawyer said, rising. ’Overruled!’ Maulvi Mushtaq snapped, his heavy white brows gathering in anger. Then he turned to the witness. ’What you meant to say is that you don’t remember, but you may have driven Mahmood to see the Prime Minister,’ he said. ’No, Sir. I didn’t drive him,’ the driver responded. ’Write: ”Masood Mahmood drove himself to see the Prime Minister”,’ the Chief Justice instructed the stenographer. ’Objection!’ the defence lawyer said again, rising. 105 THE YEARS OF DETENTION ’Sit down!’ roared Maulvi Mushtaq. He turned back to the driver. ’Masood Mahmood could have driven himself to see the Prime Minister, couldn’t he?’ he asked. ’No, sir,’ the driver said, shaking. ’Why not?’ shouted Mushtaq. ’Because I had the keys, sir,’ quivered the driver. John Matthews, QC, a lawyer from England who came to attend the trial in November, was shocked by the proceedings. ’Particularly I was concerned at the way a witness’s favourable answer would be the subject of immediate interruptions from the Bench, who would take over the case and cause him to whittle down or change his answer,’ he told an English journalist later. The defence lawyers were even more concerned. At the end of the trial, not one of the objections they raised or the contradictions in the evidence they pointed out appeared in the record 706 pages of tes-timony. There wasn’t even a pretence of impartiality. When I arrived at court one morning, I overheard the deputy director of the Federal Investigative Agency, Abdul Khaliq, briefing a group of witnesses on what they were to say during their testimony. ’What sort of justice is this?’ I protested loudly. People began to gather. ’Take her away,’ Khaliq ordered the police. ’I will not go,’ I shouted, quite willing to create a scene to embarrass the prosecution. ’Take her!’ Khaliq yelled again. As the police moved towards me, the murmur began to run down the corridor that my father was arriving from prison. I didn’t want my father to be upset at the sight of his daughter being bullied and pulled from the court, so I withdrew from the confrontation. Later I heard that the prosecution had rented a house near the court, complete with good food and drink, to polish the testimony of the witnesses. Ramsey Clark, the former Attorney General of the United States, came to observe my father’s court proceedings. Later he wrote an article about it in The Nation. ’The prosecution case was based entirely on several witnesses who were detained until they confessed, who changed and ex-panded their confessions and testimony with each reiteration, who con-tradicted themselves and each other, who, except for Masood Mahmood (the Director General of the FSF) were relating what others said, whose testimony led to four different theories of what happened, who were absolutely uncorroborated by an eyewitness, direct evidence, or physical evidence,’ he wrote. I believed in justice. I believed in laws and codes of ethics, sworn testimonies and the judicial process. But there was not to be any during the farce of my father’s trial. The defence got hold of an army log-book showing that the jeep allegedly used during the attack on Kasuri was not even in Lahore on the day in question. ’The travel log has not been
The defence produced FSF travel vouchers showing that Ghulam Hus-sein, the officer who had supposedly organised and supervised the murder attempt, was in Karachi on another assignment on the day it took place. In fact, the vouchers revealed, he’d been in Karachi for the ten days prior to and the ten days following the attack as well. ’Those documents were intentionally falsified,’ the prosecution back-pedalled, though no mention of this had been made before by them or by any of the ’confessing ac-cused’. Irrefutable evidence that the whole murder case had been fabricated came when my father’s lawyers obtained a copy of the ballistics report on the actual shooting. The positions the ’assailants’ claimed to have fired from did not match the bullet holes in the car. There had been four assassins, not two as the prosecution had claimed. Moreover, the FSF guns which the ’confessing accused’ claimed to have used in the murder attempt did not match the empty cartridges found at the scene. ’We have won the case!’ Rehana Sarwar, the sister of one of my father’s lawyers and a lawyer herself, said to me jubilantly in the court-room. Yüklə 1,3 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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