Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto
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Faisal Hayat, lawyer, landowner, former member of the National As-sembly from Punjab:
’Search all you want,’ I said. ’This is a family home, not a headquarters. We don’t even have a basement.’ They arrested me anyway. I spent the first twenty-four hours in jail with no food or water. Then I was blindfolded and taken to Lahore Fort, the 450-year-old brick-walled fort from the time of the Moguls. Shah Jehan, the creator of the Taj Mahal, built the beautiful Palace of Mirrors in Lahore Fort. My family and I used to stroll in the shade of the Summer Pavilion where the Mogul emperors created pools of water lilies. But after the hijacking, the Lahore Fort was known only for its tortures. It became Pakistan’s answer to the Bastille in France. There were about twenty-five to thirty of us arrested at the same time: Jehangir Badar, additional Secretary-General of the PPP Punjab, Shaukat Mahmood, the General Secretary, Nazim Shah, our Finance Secretary, Mukh-tar Awan, a former Minister, all high government officials. It was a miser-able, very miserable state of affairs. Every two days I was taken to be interrogated. I never knew exactly when. They came for me at 6.00 in the morning, in the evening, in the dead of night. I never knew. Though we were already in prison, we were taken in handcuffs to be grilled by Brigadier Rahib Qureshi, Chief-of-Staff to the Martial Law Administrator of Punjab, and Abdul Qayyum, the Chief of Provincial Intelligence. The names and faces of these two men will be with me for the rest of my life.
THE YEARS OF DETENTION ’We are giving you the chance of your life,’ they said to me while I was forced to stand in front of them hour after hour after hour. ’You are a young man. You come from a good family. You have a future. All you have to do is agree to testify against Begum Nusrat Bhutto and Miss Benazir Bhutto in the hijacking case.’ I refused. And their temptations escalated. ’You are in politics,’ they said. ’We will make you a minister.’ ’You are in textiles,’ they said. ’Your permission to put up a new mill was cancelled because of your political activities. We will reinstate that permission now. You will be rich.’ When I continued to resist them, they changed their tactics. ’We can put you behind bars for twenty-five years,’ they threatened. ’We are a Martial Law government. We don’t need evidence. We can convict you here and now.’ I spent three months locked into a cell five feet by four feet. Being six feet tall, I could never stretch out day or night. There were four identical cells in my block with the open bars facing west. From noon on, the sun blazed in on us with no relief, the temperature often reaching 115 degrees. There was no way to get away from the heat. Fans were installed on pedestals outside our cells, positioned to blow through the corridor of heat until the air reaching us seemed to be on fire. My lips swelled and were so painful I couldn’t swallow any water. My skin blistered and round, dark circles spread all over my body from my face to my toes. I had sores all over. In desperation, I tied my shirt to the bars one afternoon to block the sun, and the guards snatched it away from me altogether. I didn’t get my shirt back for three days. One by one the others in my cellblock began to succumb to heatstroke. I could hear them fainting and calling out in their delirium. I was the youngest, twenty-seven then, and held out the longest. But after two months I collapsed. When I woke up two days later I was in an un-derground cellar the jail authorities had turned into a makeshift hospital. When the doctors were sure I had regained my senses, I was returned to my cell. The nights soon became a bigger torment than the days. Neither I, nor any of the others, had any bedding, not even a sheet. We had to curl up on the broken cement floor of the cell next to the open stinking hole which served as a toilet. Ants crawled over us, cockroaches, lizards, rats, every insect and rodent which lives in the earth. And there was no respite from the heat. The prison authorities installed 500 watt bulbs into the seven foot ceilings and left the lights on all night. They were careful to sink the sockets deep into the ceiling so none of us could commit suicide by plunging our hands into the wiring. I think I might have, had it been pos-sible. My health deteriorated rapidly. The conditions were so unsanitary it’s remarkable that anyone lived. The miserable food they brought us, which 160 SOLITARY CONFINEMENT IN SUKKUR JAIL we had ten seconds to grab from a tray outside the bars, consisted of bread with pebbles and sand in it, and thin curry encrusted with flies. I suffered from repeated bouts of dysentery, malaria, cholera. At one point my temperature went up to 105. My head was splitting with pain, the light at night slicing into my eyes so that I could not keep myself from screaming in agony. My body alternated between burning and freezing and I couldn’t stop being sick. For days I lay in my own vomit. ’Look who is here to see you,’ Brigadier Qureshi and Major General Qayyum said to me one day. I blinked at the familiar figure standing in front of me in the interrogation room. They had brought my mother. ’Twenty-five years he will be in prison,’ the Martial Law Administrators said to my mother. ’Twenty-five years unless he consents to testify against the Bhuttos.’ My mother’s face was streaming with tears. She was a broken woman, with her brother-in-law tortured and driven into exile, her son almost destroyed, and our ancestral agricultural lands brown and withered because the regime had cut off our water supply. But in spite of the fact that she was a lady of soft heart and very kind soul, she showed an inner strength that day I had never seen before. ’Don’t let them intimidate you, Faisal,’ she said to me right in front of them. ’Don’t let them force you into going against your will. You must do what your conscience tells you to.’ ’I have put my faith in God,’ I told her. ’These men are merely human beings. If it is God’s destiny for me to spend twenty-five years in prison, I can’t help it. But I will not betray the trust of the Bhutto family.’ I couldn’t betray them. None of the political prisoners in Lahore Fort could. We all came from good families with long histories of religious and government service. We were educated. We had names in society. We couldn’t have lied and then lived with the dishonour, in spite of all the regime’s temptations and threats. Not one of the former government officials agreed to give false evidence against the Bhuttos. After three months the authorities finally gave up and transferred us to local district jails. I was sent to Gujranwala Jail forty miles north of Lahore for another two months. The regime didn’t dare release us directly back into society from Lahore Fort. Even they would have been embarrassed by our condition.
THE YEARS OF DETENTION arrested again and taken first to Rawalpindi Jail, then Gujranwala Jail, and then to the Lahore Fort. It was a terrible place. ’Tell us the connection between Miss Bhutto and AI-Zulfikar,’ the jail authorities asked me over and over again. When I said she had never talked to me about it, that I knew nothing about the hijacking, they whip-ped me with leather straps and beat me on the head with bamboo rods. That was just the beginning. I am a very small man, three feet high and weighing forty-eight pounds. So it was easy for them to make great sport of me. When I refused to support their lies, they put heavy handcuffs on me and told me to raise my arms over my head. My arms are quite short and when I fell down with the effort, they stepped on me, laughing uproariously. Often, they picked me up by the flesh on my stomach and either hurled me to the ground, or tossed me back and forth between them like a ball. They blindfolded me and led me around, I don’t know where. ’You are going to die now unless you confirm the Bhutto ladies’ involvement with Al-Zulfikar,’ they told me during these sessions. When I refused, they held me by one foot and hung me over the high walls of the prison. ’Why do you want to die?’ they said. ’Just sign this confession.’ ’Go ahead and kill me,’ I told them. ’But I can’t tell you what I don’t know.’ For thirty-five days they tortured me like this constantly. One of their favourite cruelties was to make me stand naked in front of them, then to weave a pole between my legs and tell me to hang on to it. It was not possible for me to stay in this position for even two or three minutes and I would pitch forward on my face. Blood would spurt from my nose and my teeth, making them laugh. ’Oh, you are a very important leader,’ they taunted me. What was it about you that Mr Bhutto liked? Is there something special? You are the sort of man people should hate. You are not a beautiful chap. The some-thing special must be that you are doing something secret with Ad-Zulhkar.’ Then they would kick and beat me. The wounds on my back, on my legs, on my hands became infected, but they wouldn’t let me see a doctor. I spent another thirty-five days in solitary confinement, locked in total darkness. I was just left in the dirt, in a living grave. I was given very little food, one rusk of bread and perhaps a chapatti with thin lentil sauce. They dropped the food through the small hole in the cell door. I was not tall enough to reach the opening so I had to scrape the food out of the dirt. They dropped my one cup of tea a day as well. I tried to catch the cup, but it almost always spilled. If I was lucky, I got one or two sips. My head and feet were often scalded. When I was released after two months, I addressed a reception for other political prisoners in Rawalpindi. My speech dwelt on the horrible condi-tions and treatment of political prisoners under General Zia. The Guardian carried the story in England as did the Associated Press all over the world. I was arrested again and kept in solitary confinement in Kot Lakhpat Jail
My nephews have been supporting me ever since because I am still blacklisted by the government. But I continue to work for the PPP. I will never give in. I will not leave Benazir Bhutto while I am alive.
I had been arrested three times before, the first time with my 62-year-old father on October I, 1977, the day Zia first cancelled the elections. Then cars and jeeps full of police had come to our home in Khairpur in interior Sindh, where I was running for the Provincial Assembly on a PPP ticket. ’Get moving,’ the police ordered us, handcuffing my father’s amt to mine and parading us through the streets while the cars and jeeps followed behind. People gathered on the footpaths in amazement to watch us walk by. Common criminals weren’t treated this way, much less members of respectable families. At first I felt so ashamed that I took my handkerchief and tried to cover up the cuffs. But when I saw that there were tears in the people’s eyes I took the kerchief off. After sleeping on the floor of the police station for twenty-five days, a major released me but sentenced my father to a year in Sukkur jail. A year later, when thousands in Khairpur began courting arrest by calling for Mr Bhutto’s release, they came again. This time I wasn’t at home, though the police looking for me even entered the women’s quarters which for generations no outsider had ever entered. They pulled the clothes out of the cupboards, and emptied drawers on the floor. They finally arrested me at a friend’s wedding I was attending, and put me in a cell measuring ten feet by seven feet with twenty-one others. I was charged with arson. When they could find no witnesses, they sentenced me to a year in jail for inciting crowds. But the arrest in 1981 was the worst. I was blindfolded and driven the six hours from Karachi to Khairpur Central Jail, where I was held for three days without food. Then I was moved again, first to Hyderabad, and then in the middle of the night back to Frere police station in Karachi. ’At least give me a cup of tea,’ I begged the police. ’You’ll get everything you need at 555,’ they told me. 555 was notorious, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Karachi. 163 THE YEARS OF DETENTION Once again I was loaded into a police van. This time I was released into a pitch-black cell whose ceiling just touched my head. ’Watch out,’ voices cried out as my foot trod on other prisoners. I don’t know how long we all huddled there in the darkness. I was taken to Colonel Salim, the head of Interservices intelligence. He handed me a piece of paper and a pencil. Write down that Miss Benazir is the leader of the bomb blast and that Begum Bhutto is involved in the hijacking,’ he told me. ’How can I write something I don’t know,’ I an-swered. He asked again. I refused. He called in Lala Khan, the famous torturer of 555, who strapped my legs to a wooden rack, and began to rap my kneecaps with along wooden stick. The pain built up and built up until tears ran down my cheeks. ’I don’t know anything about the bomb blast or the hijacking,’ I begged. Lala kept hitting. When he finished I could not move either leg. ’Stand up, or you will never be able to walk again,’ he told me coldly. I was moved to another cell. Often members of the four different bran-ches of intelligence came to ask me to implicate Benazir and Begum Sahiba. When I refused, they called Lala. Sometimes he made me watch while he hung others upside-down and beat them until they screamed. Sometimes I was tied to the ceiling so that just my toes touched the floor and left to hang there for hours. Often at night guards stationed around my cell kept me from sleeping, asking me silly questions like my name and jabbing me with sticks if I didn’t respond. When I was completely exhausted and starving from the two glasses of water and watery lentils I was given every day, I would be called in to have lunch with an interrogator. ’Look at yourself. You’re an educated man from a good family,’ they would say as I sat in my filthy jail clothes over a sumptuous lunch and glasses of hot tea. Why make things hard? Just say that Benazir and Begum Bhutto were involved in the hijacking and all this will be over.’ When I refused, I was taken away and tortured. After three months I was moved to Karachi Central jail, and later to Khairpur where my family was allowed a monthly visit. In the seven times I was hauled before a military court, the regime produced no witnesses and framed no charges. In February of 1985, the regime finally sentenced me to a year’s imprisonment for ’propagating political opinions prejudicial to the ideology, integrity and security of Pakistan. No allowance was made for the then almost four years I had already spent in prison. My wife had a nervous breakdown under the strain of trying to manage our small business in Karachi and bring up our three children. Pervez Ali Shah was adopted as a ’prisoner of conscience’ by Amnesty International. In the dreadful period following the formation of the MRD and the hijacking, so were many others. Throughout 1981, Amnesty re-ported, the number of political prisoners being tortured in Pakistan in-
’I will tell you who I am,’ he said menacingly. ’I am a Major in the Pakistan army.’ He was pressing the gun into my forehead, hurting me. I pushed it away. He took the rifle butt and hit me with it, breaking the bones in my hand and finger while my twelve-year-old daughter screamed. ’Where is your husband?’ he demanded, while other army men ransacked the house. ’He is not here,’ I told him. He raised his rifle butt again. Where is the door to the secret passage?’ he said. ’There is no secret passage,’ I replied. He locked my daughter and me in a room and finally they went away. They came back fifteen days later. ’Come with us. You are under arrest,’ said the Additional Superintendent of Police and the local magistrate. ’Where are your warrants?’ I asked them. ’We are the warrants,’ they replied. They took me to jail where I was forced to stand the whole night. Every hour a new interrogator was brought in. ’Your husband is a member of AI-Zulfikar as are Benazir Bhutto and Begum Bhutto. We know this to be a fact. Confirm. Confirm.’ Hours passed. But I was adamant. Whatever they said, I would have will. I felt my knees begin to buckle. I reached for the chair right beside me. ’Get away!’ they shouted. Two days later, I was taken to Lahore Fort where I was locked in a tiny cell with another political prisoner, Begum Bhatti, whose husband had been a Provincial Minister as well as the Revenue Minister for the Punjab. Begum Bhatti: Eleven different government agencies interrogated us. ’Where are your husbands?’ they kept yelling. ’They are terrorists, working with the Bhutto 165 THE YEARS OF DETENTION ladies.’ The jail officials kept us awake all night, our third without rest. ’No sleep, Mrs Rana,’ they yelled into our cell, banging the bars with clubs. ’Wake up, Begum Bhatti.’ The next day they took us to Major-General Qayyum, the Chief of Intelligence. The same questions. The same answers. At one point Major-General Qayyum grabbed me by the hair and smashed my head against the wall. ’Where is your husband?’ he yelled at me. ’I don’t know.’ He held cigarettes to our arms until we could smell the burning of our own flesh. ’Where are your husbands?’ I began to faint. From a distance I heard Nasira scream. ’We’ll break you!’ Major-General Qayyum yelled, the last words I heard before blacking out.
Three times they took us to a special room. Wet sponges were tied around our wrists, and wires were run through them. Every few seconds, they sent electric shocks through the wires, one after another after another. Our bodies twitched, went rigid. My broken hand was in a cast and was particularly sensitive. I finally screamed. I couldn’t help it. ’We’ll bring your father to be tortured,’ they threatened. `We’ll bring your daughter.’ The shocks went on for two hours. Begum Bhatti: ’We had no bed in our cell and no bedding. They gave us a gunny-sack. When I went to lay it on the floor, a three-foot snake wiggled out. ’Don’t scream,’ I hissed at Nasira as much as to myself. Somehow, the snake made me the angriest. I grabbed it up in the sack, mashed it against the wall then twisted its neck. The policewoman screamed when she saw it. The authorities tried to make us sign a statement that they were not responsible for the snake, that the snake had got into the cell on its own. We refused to sign it. Implicate Benazir. Implicate Begum Sahiba. Implicate your husbands,
got word from one of the guards that my husband had been captured and brought to the Fort. I don’t know what they did to him. I don’t want to know. He had a heart attack after he was tortured. He turned blue and gasped for breath. They took him to the hospital because they didn’t want it said he died under torture. It was a miracle he survived. I didn’t know about any of these tortures in my isolation at Sukkur. I didn’t know that Dr Niazi, at the urging of his wife and family after the hijacking, had fled Pakistan minutes before the police came to arrest him for the third time. He suffered a near fatal heart attack in Kabul from the strain and barely survived by-pass surgery in London where he would remain until 1988. Yasmin, too, barely escaped arrest. ’Is Yasmin Niazi at home?’ the police had asked at the family’s gate. ’No,’ Yasmin had the presence to say. When the police decided to take her mother instead, Yasmin and Mrs Niazi had a brief and whispered fight. ’I’m going to tell them who I am,’ Yasmin said to her mother out of hearing of the police. ’Yasmin, if you do this I will die. So either you have me in prison or you have my dead body. You can choose which you want,’ she replied. Yasmin stayed quiet as the police took Mrs Niazi to Rawalpindi Central Jail where she was held with three other women in the cell directly across from my father’s former death cell. For the five days of Mrs Niazi s imprisonment, the cell was so crowded that the women had to take turns sleeping. Yasmin went into hiding for three months while the police continued to search for her. She was in great danger. In very poor health and worried about his daughter, Dr Niazi bought a PIA airline ticket for Yasmin to join him in London. But how was she to be got out of the country? After her release from prison, Mrs Niazi telephoned the British Embassy. Luckily, Yasmin had been born in England and the embassy said they could get her a British passport within forty-eight hours if Mrs Niazi could find the passport Yasmin had travelled on with her as an infant. Mrs Niazi found the eighteen-year-old passport in the bottom of a box in their basement. Yüklə 1,3 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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