Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto
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I rushed to tell my father during the tea break, wasting no time. While the ’confessing accused’ were allowed to chat with their families in the court-room for as long as they liked, my father was often hustled off to a little room in the back under heavy police guard. ’Papa, we’ve won! We’ve won!’ I said to him, telling him about the ballistics report. I’ll never forget the look of kindness on his face while he listened to my excitement. ’You don’t understand, do you, Pinkie,’ he said gently. ’They are going to kill me. It doesn’t matter what evidence you or anyone comes up with. They are going to murder me for a murder I didn’t commit.’ I looked at him dumbstruck, not believing him, not wanting to believe him. None of us in the room, including his lawyers, wanted to believe him. But he knew. He had known since Zia’s soldiers came for him in the middle of the night in Karachi. ’Flee,’ his sister had begged him when she had first heard rumours of the impending murder charge. Others, too, had urged him to leave. His answer had always been the same as it was now. ’My life is in God’s hands, not anyone else’s,’ he said to me in the tea room. ’I’m prepared to meet God whenever He calls me. My conscience is clear. What is most important to me is my name, my honour, and my place in history. And I am going to fight for that.’ My father knew that you can imprison a man, but not an idea. You can exile a man, but not an idea. You can kill a man, but not an idea. But Zia was blind to that, and was trying to send another message to the people. Look at your Prime Minister. He is made of flesh and blood like any ordinary man. What good are his principles to him now? He can be killed
THE YEARS OF DETENTION just as you can be killed. See what we are doing to you Imagine what we can do to you. My father tried to tell me what lay ahead. But I heard his words as if from a great distance. And I kept them there. Otherwise, I could not have gone on to fight’the one new charge after another that was being brought against him. The fight to save his honour became my own.
If the military regime deemed that the properties and assets were ac-quired through political influence or that government property had been misused, the guilty party would be disqualified from any elected or ap-pointed political post. Arbitrarily choosing whom to disqualify, the Martial Law authorities used the new law to threaten members of parliament into acquiescence to the military regime. The only avenue of appeal open to victims of dis-qualification was a Tribunal set up by the same regime which had dis-qualified them in the first place. Of course those who co-operated with the regime were miraculously requalified. Heading the first list of disqualified politicians was my mother, although she had been a member of parliament for only three months. She had to make repeated appearances before the Tribunal, where the regime found it difficult to frame any charges against her. Her hearings had to be post-poned time and again. But the biggest target in the autumn and winter of 1977 was my father whose reputation Zia wanted desperately to dis-credit. Bhutto used government funds to buy motorcycles and bicycles for People’s Party Workers. Mr Bhutto had his houses at Larkana and Karachi air-condi-tioned at government expense. Mr Bhutto used our Embassies abroad to purchase dishes and clothing for his personal use with official funds. The regime heaped charge after charge of corruption, misappropriation of funds, even criminal charges against my father, knowing that he would find it hard to refute them from his prison cell. They had taken the extra precaution of jailing his personal secretary. But my father’s filing system proved to be a formidable opponent in the sixty-plus cases now facing us. I found everything we needed to refute the charges against my father 108 THE JUDICIAL MURDER OF MY FATHER in his papers in Karachi. Day after day I waded through the family ac-counts, rushing copies of what was needed to the lawyers, receiving new instructions on what was required next in return. My father had kept a record of every single expense, right down to the receipt for 24 dollars worth of cloth bought on a trip to Thailand in 1973, or 218 dollars worth of Italian wall-paper paste from 1975. I was astonished to discover that he had even paid for his own reading glasses, although health care was provided free to the Prime Minister. But our refutations of the charges never appeared in the newspapers, only the charges themselves. We mimeographed the refutations on our own machines and distributed them among the people. We also put together a pamphlet, later bound as a book, called Bhutto: Rumour and Reality, in which the rumours against my father were outlined and then contrasted with the reality. Producing the pamphlet was a risky business, since any literature that was positive about my father was re-garded as ’seditious’ by the regime, and those printing or distributing it were likely to be jailed and the material confiscated. The refutations were useful for both Pakistani and foreign journalists who were flooded with the regime’s propaganda against my father and the PPP. But there was always something more to do. ’We’ve got to send out a call to the people for a strike, for demonstra-tions, for something,’ I said in frustration to the Party leaders who came to our rented house for secret meetings at night. But timidly they demur-red. ’Don’t do anything until we have a party line,’ they kept repeating. I was impatient with their apathy, as were the other young members. ’Let’s go to the mazaars to pray,’ I suggested, believing that the regime which was pounding Islam - Islam - Islam - into everyone’s heads wouldn’t dare arrest us while we prayed at the tombs of our saints. The idea took hold. PPP workers began to gather in mosques and mazaars all over the country to read the Holy Quran and pray for my father’s release. But I was wrong. The regime came down with a heavy hand even at the mazaars. And the arrests and floggings continued, totalling 700 by December, 1977. The case of Khalid Ahmed, the Deputy Commissioner of Larkana, indicates what the regime must have done to Masood Mahmood and the other civil servants arrested after the coup to make them give false evi-dence against my father. Two army men came to Khalid Ahmed’s house in Lahore with a written order from Zia, his wife Azra told me. ’If I don’t call you tomorrow, you’ll know something is wrong,’ he told her as he was taken away. There was no call. When she finally located him in a prison in Islamabad a month later, she almost wished she hadn’t. ’I cannot forget that day,’ she told me. ’His face was ashen, his lips dry and cracked. There was white spittle caked around his mouth. He had been given
THE YEARS OF DETENTION
Khalid was held for five months in solitary confinement. Every evening Azra went to a public garden with a view of the prison terrace. ’He was allowed to exercise for half an hour a day,’ she said. ’I sat on a bench for hours just to catch a glimpse of him, to make sure he was still alive.’ Khalid Ahmed’s life, and probably many others, was saved by a petition my mother filed in the Supreme Court shortly after my father’s first arrest, challenging the legal authority of Martial Law to detain him. In November 1977, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of Martial Law, declaring it to be a ’law of necessity’ in keeping with a Quranic law which permitted a Muslim to eat pork in order to survive if no other food was available. But the Court also made it clear that Martial Law was only valid for a limited period, the nine months quoted by the regime as the time needed to organise free and fair elections. The justices also ruled that superior civil courts would continue to have the power of judicial review over the actions taken by the military courts. Without this provision of civil review, thousands of people, including political activists and public servants arrested after the coup, would not have been able to appeal for review of their detention. Though the appeals - including my own appeals when I was in detention - took many months to reach the bench, at least there was some hope of relief through the civil courts at that time. The High Court released Khalid Ahmed in December 1977 because there wasn’t a shred of evidence against him, not even an arrest order. We had orders from higher up,’ the army officers said. But just as the regime had gone around every court decision to rearrest my father, now they did the same to Khalid. A week after his release, the former com-missioner was warned by a friend that he was about to be rearrested under Martial Law Order No. 21 for the misuse of a government car and an air-conditioner. An air-conditioner! ’I begged him to leave,’ Azra said, her eyes filling with tears. Her husband left that night for London. The cases are still pending against him, forcing him to remain abroad. Azra has brought up their two children alone. The persecution of this family, and many others, was just beginning in December of 1977. Two weeks later, it escalated sharply.
December 16, 1977. The anniversary of the Army’s surrender to India. Qaddafi Stadium, Lahore. My mother and I decide to go to a cricket match to take our minds off the trial. We have tickets to the women’s
Whoosh. Something heavy hurtles past my face. ’Tear gas! Tear gas!’ I hear the screams beginning. The people panic, rushing towards the locked exits. I can’t breathe, can’t see. I begin to suffocate in the poisonous clouds billowing towards us. Can lungs catch fire? My shoulder! I almost fall from the blow. All around me in the murk are police clubbing people to the ground. ’Mummy!’ l call out. ’Mummy!’ I find her bent over the iron railing of the stands. She lifts up her head at my voice. Blood is streaming from a gash in her scalp. ’The hospital. We’ve got to get my mother to the hospital,’ I scream. ’No,’ my mother says quietly. ’First we are going to see the Martial Law Administrator.’ The blood is streaking down her face, dropping in red rivulets to her dress. We move through the crowd and find a car. ’Take us to the Martial Law Administrator’s house,’ she says. The security at the gate is shocked to see us and lets us in. As my mother gets out of the car, the General’s jeep pulls in behind us. ’Do you remember this day, General?’ she says, confronting Iqbal, Zia’s appointed Martial Law Administrator of the Punjab. ’On this day you surrendered to the Indian army at Dacca and today you have shamed yourself again by shedding my blood. You do not know the word honour, General, only dishonour.’ He looks at her, stunned. With great dignity my mother then turns and gets back into the car. We drive straight to the hospital, where it takes twelve stitches to close her wound. That afternoon I am arrested at home. My mother is arrested in the hos-pital. The next day Zia appears on television to congratulate the Punjab administration for its handling of the incident. And my father is removed from the court for saying ’damn it’ when he tries to find out what hap-pened to us. ’Take him away until he regains his senses,’ the Chief Justice says. The next day my father files a petition for a mistrial. The petition is denied.
us THE YEARS OF DETENTION at the cricket match had been premeditated. The police had locked the gates themselves to force us to walk into their barrage of tear gas and bamboo rods. The implications were enormous. Women had never been singled out for punishment or harassment. We were entering a period the likes of which had never been experienced in Pakistan before. Those days locked up alone in Lahore among mimeograph machines and typewriters were dark ones indeed. Within a week my mother joined me in detention, her scalp held to-gether by stitches. What is happening, we kept asking each other in disbelief. Are we really witnessing what we are witnessing? Our minds just weren’t prepared to absorb it. But that, I’m sure, is what sustained us throughout. Every new atrocity brought another shock - and a new burst of determination. From anger I moved on into a state of defiance and resolve. They think they can humiliate me? Try it, I remember thinking. I spent my first New Year back in Pakistan in detention. Just a year before I’d been home from Oxford at Al-Murtaza and had actually met Zia on my father’s birthday. Now my father was spending his birthday in prison. My mother and I checked off each day of our fifteen-day detention order. Mummy passed the time playing Patience and occasionally watch-ing the television set we left on just to hear voices. My scheduled visit to my father came and went, making me very sad. It always cheered me to see him, and to take away the instructions he wrote out for me on the yellow legal pads he had stacked in his cell. I thought his cell was bad then, with its dirt floor and poor running water. Little did I know that there were far worse cells awaiting him. The authorities had lodged him next to a group of mentally disturbed prisoners who hooted and howled all night. They also made sure he heard the other political prisoners being lashed in the courtyard, sometimes inserting microphones into their mouths. But the regime couldn’t break him. ’My morale is high,’ my father assured me during one of my visits to his prison. ’I am not made of the wood which bums easily.’
Three
days before the Day of Democracy, the Army locked the gates to the mill, got up on the roof, and fired into the workers trapped below. It was among the worst massacres the sub-continent had ever seen. We THE JUDICIAL MURDER OF MY FATHER were told hundreds died. Nobody knew how many. Some said two hun-dred, others three hundred. Bodies kept popping up for days, in fields, in gutters. Zia had put the members of the working class who formed the backbone of PPP support on warning: cower down or be massacred. The Day of Democracy turned out to be one of the worst days of oppression. Thousands of PPP supporters were arrested all over the country. And the brutalisation of the country deepened. Lashes were administered to anyone saying ’Long live Bhutto’, or ’Long live democracy’. Lashes were administered to anyone displaying a PPP flag. They were administered quickly, often within an hour of the sentence, because appeals were still being heard then by the civil courts. In Kot Lakhpat Jail, the prisoners were spreadeagled and tied with thongs to the whipping rack. Doctors were called in to check the pulses of the victims so that the whippings would stop short of death. Often the victims were revived by smelling salts so that the prescribed number of lashes, usually numbering ten to fifteen, could be completed. Outside prison, public lashings were also becoming more frequent. In-stant judgments and punishments from mobile military courts were meted out by a single Martial Law officer who toured the bazaars deciding whether the merchants were cheating on weights, over-charging or selling inferior goods. In Sukkur, one officer demanded that a man, any man, be handed over. We need someone to lash,’ he said. The stall keepers didn’t know what to do and finally led the officer to a man suspected of selling sugar on the black market. Though the ’crime’ was being committed by almost everyone in the bazaar, the man was promptly - and very publicly - lashed. Nothing in my life had prepared me for such barbarity. The whole framework of society as I had known it in America and England, and as experienced by those living in Pakistan under the Constitution of 1973, was vanishing. On the day our detention ended, the gates opened to let the magistrate in -but not to let us out. Instead he handed us a new detention order for another fifteen days. Another legal precedent shattered. Under my father’s civilian government, orders for preventive detention had been extremely restricted. No one could be detained for a cumulative, not consecutive, period of three months within a year, and the courts heard petitions within twenty-four hours. Now a new and terrible history of Pakistan was being written. Released. Detained. Extemed. Detained. Throughout my father’s trial the regime used its arbitrary powers to keep my mother and me off-balance, releasing and rearresting us so constantly that any kind of planning was impossible. During those first few months of 1978, I was detained and restricted repeatedly. Even the regime didn’t seem to know if I was coming or going. THE YEARS OF DETENTION
Bang! Bang! I shot out of bed at 2.00 am. ’What is it?’ I called out in the panic that had never really left me since the commandos had burst into my room four months before. ’The police have surrounded the house,’ Dost Mohammed called to me. I dressed and went downstairs. ’We have booked you on the 7.00 am flight to Lahore,’ the officer said. ’You are externed from the province of Sindh.’ ’Why?’ I asked. ’I’ve just arrived to answer the charges your regime brought against us.’ ’General Zia is planning to take Prime Minister Callaghan of Great Britain to a cricket match,’ the officer told me. For once, I was speechless. ’What does that have to do with me?’ I asked. ’I didn’t even know there was a cricket match.’ ’The Chief Martial Law Administrator doesn’t want any trouble. You may decide to go to the match, so he has ordered your externment,’ the officer said. At 6.00 am I was driven to the airport under police guard and put on a plane to Lahore. Why couldn’t I just be restricted in Karachi for the day? Two days later I was having lunch with friends in Lahore when the police surrounded that house. ’You are being detained for five days,’ the arresting officer told me. ’Why?’ I asked again. ’It is the anniversary of Data Sahib’s death,’ the officer said - a fact I well knew, Data Sahib being one of our most revered saints. ’You may decide to go to his tomb.’ Back I went into detention with my mother. She played Patience while I paced the floors. Our mail was stopped. Our telephone was cut off. When I got out in early February I went immediately to see my father. Because of all our detentions, I had missed three precious meetings with him. But I wasn’t missing any court sessions. Though the Chief Justice had assured the world press that the trial would take place ’in the full light of day’, the court-room was closed to all observers on January 25, the day after my father had begun his testimony. The world had been invited to hear the prosecution. But no one was to hear the defence. Disgusted with the court’s bias, my father had already withdrawn his lawyers. Now he declined to testify at all, sitting silently THE JUDICIAL MURDER OF MY FATHER through most of the rest of the proceedings. The Chief justice from the Punjab took advantage of the in camera proceedings to reveal his racial prejudice against Sindhis, the race from the southernmost province of Pakistan to which my father belonged. Both my father and the PPP high command called for retrial on the basis of his bias - to no avail. While I helped with the case, my mother had been visiting different cities in the Punjab, including Kasur where she had prayed at the shrine of the Muslim Saint Buba Bullah Shah. ’I want you go to Sindh,’ my father told me in Kot Lakhpat Jail. ’You and Mummy have both been spending all your time in the Punjab. Get the PPP activists to arrange a tour.’ I was apprehensive as I prepared to go from Karachi to Larkana on the pretence that I was going to pray at the graves of my ancestors. Mummy sent me a cautioning note in Karachi. ’DON’T abuse or criticise Zia, but concentrate on issues like high prices. You must be there to hold the flag and run the party,’ she wrote from Lahore, after returning herself from a secret trip to Multan to comfort the families of the workers massacred at the textile factory. She sent me the names of families to visit, who had had members arrested, and the amounts of money to give them, depending on the number of children they had. ’If the worker is the only earning member, take his address so that we can send money to the family every month until the release,’ she wrote, then concluded: ’You should go in the Mercedes. It is strong and reliable with good acceleration. All my love, Your Mummy.’ Musawaat announced my departure and the cities en route. And on February 14, off I went on my first Sindh tour, taking with me a speech-writer, a reporter, and a photographer from Musawaat. Begum Soomro, the head of the Women’s Wing of PPP Sindh, came as my chaperone. Thatta, where Alexander the Great rested his troops. Hyderabad, where ancient roof windcatchers funnelled cooling breezes into the houses below. Huge crowds thronged our car along the way. Public political gatherings had been banned by Zia, so we held ours within the four walls of the biggest family compounds we could find. Standing on the roofs of one compound after another, I looked down at people packed into the court-yards like sardines. ’My Brothers and respected Elders,’ I yelled down to them at the top of my lungs, since microphones and loudspeakers had been forbidden by the regime. ’I bring you salaams - greetings - from Chairman Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The crime against him is a crime against the people.’ Therparkar. Sanghar. Whenever possible I also addressed Bar Associations and Press clubs, always speaking of the illegality of the regime and the injustice meted out to my father and the PPP. Yüklə 1,3 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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