Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto
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’I couldn’t go to the airport with Yasmin because I was afraid I’d be recognised. I put a burqa over her and sent her with her sister,’ Mrs Niazi told me years later in a voice that still trembled. ’Yasmin was wanted on 167 THE YEARS OF DETENTION Zia’s personal orders. There were arrest orders on her in Islamabad. She was wanted in every province. There wasn’t a list that didn’t have her name on it. She got out by an act of God.’ ’There’s no entry visa on your passport,’ the immigration officer said to Yasmin at the airport. ’That’s very odd,’ Yasmin bluffed. ’There must be a mistake.’ As he turned to look up her name on a list, the lights suddenly went out in the airport. For over a minute the airport was plunged into darkness, creating chaos among the passengers trying to reach their flights. When the lights came back on, the immigration officer was in such a hurry that he just stamped her passport quickly and sent her through. Yasmin arrived safely in London where she later married my cousin Tariq, himself a political refugee. They are still living there with their two small children. The heat reached Sukkur in May: a dry, searing heat which turned my cell into an oven. The winds blew constantly through the open sides of my cell, winds heated to I IO degrees, 120 degrees, by the surrounding desert of Interior Sindh. A constant dust storm swirled in my cell. Sticky with sweat, I was often coated with grit. My skin split and peeled, coming off my hands in sheets. More boils erupted on my face. The sweat dripped into them, burning like acid. My hair, which had always been thick, began to come out by the handful. I had no minor, but I could feel my scalp with my fingertips: damp, gritty, and naked. Every morning I would find new clumps of hair on my pillow. Insects crept into the cell like invading armies. Grasshoppers. Mos-quitoes. Stinging flies. Bees. They were forever buzzing in my face or crawling up my legs. I flailed my arms to keep them away, but there were so many it was often useless. Insects carne up through the cracks in the floor and through the open bars from the courtyard. Big black ants. Cock-roaches. Seething clumps of little red ants. Spiders. I tried pulling the sheet over my head at night to hide from their bites, pushing it back when it got too hot to breathe. Water. I dreamed of cool, clear water. The jail water I was given to drink was pale brown or yellow. It smelled like stale eggs, did not taste like water or quench my thirst. But the jail authorities cut off the fresh water Mujib, a lawyer who lived nearby, had tried to send to me. ’It is for your own good,’ the jail superintendent told me. ’These people are your enemies. Your own party leaders want you out of the way.’ On another day, he told me that instead of delivering the fresh oranges Mujib had sent me, he had eaten them himself. ’It was to save your life,’ he added. ’He could have injected them with poison.’ It was theatre of the absurd. 168 SOLITARY CONFINEMENT IN SUKKUR JAIL ’Can you please provide me with insect spray?’ I asked the prison auth-orities. ’Oh, no,’ they said. ’It is poisonous. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.’ What was all the talk about poison? I suddenly realised they were implanting the idea of suicide in my head. What tidier solution could there be for the regime than to announce that Benazir Bhutto had killed herself? Problem solved. The proof came in the shape of a bottle of Phenyle, a strong cleaning detergent left all the time in my cell. The label was covered with a picture of a skull and crossbones. ’Be sure not to leave it in her cell,’ the jail superintendent said loudly to the woman who cleaned the cell each time he came on his weekly visit. ’Don’t let the Phenyle out of your sight. She might want to end her misery.’ But the bottle of poison remained where it was. Were they playing with my mind? My ear began to trouble me again, my chronic condition being aggravated by the dust and sweat trickling constantly down my face. But the jail doctor kept telling me nothing was wrong. ’You are in solitary confinement and under a great deal of stress,’ he said to calm me. ’Many people in your situation imagine aches and pains where there are none.’ I began to half-believe him. Maybe I was just imagining the clicks which disturbed me night and day. If only it weren’t so hot. ’My dearest Pinkie,’ my mother wrote to me from Karachi Central Jail on May 23, telling me about her recipe for the heat. ’I pour water three to four times a day over myself to beat the heat. You should try it. I first bend my head and pour mugs of water on the back of my neck and on top of my head, then all over with my clothes on. Then I sit on my bed under the fan and it is so cooling until the clothes dry. As a matter of fact, even after the clothes dry, one is kept cool for quite sometime thereafter. With this method you don’t get prickly heat [rash]. It’s just marvellous. I strongly recommend it . . . With love, your Mummy.’ I followed her suggestion, dumping the entire bucket of water over my head every morning. It was much hotter in Sukkur than it was in Karachi, and I had no fan. But for the hour it took my clothes to dry in the hot wind, I was comfortable, little realising that as more water seeped into my ear, the infection was growing. ’You’re just imagining it,’ the jail doctor continued to say soothingly. He wasn’t a specialist. whether he did it deliberately or out of ignorance. 250 times running-on-the-spot. Forty bending exercises. Swing the arms. Twenty deep breaths. Read the papers. Ignore the continuing stories attempting to implicate my mother and me in the hijacking. Concentrate instead on the embroidery kit Mujib and his wife Almas had sent in to me: cloth, thread and a pattern book. I’ll never know I69 TAKING ON THE DICTATOR the prosecutors”.’ By February, 1984, his trial had still not been concluded. I was concerned too, about another labour leader, Ayaz Samoo, who had been arrested in December, 1983, and falsely implicated in the murder of a political supporter of General Zia’s. His trial before a military court was about to get underway. Like Baloach, Samoo had been arrested in what the PPP saw as an attempt by the Zia regime to crush the labour movement in the industrial city of Karachi. As was the case in Baloach’s trial, the charge against Samoo was punishable by death. We had to act, and act quickly. When I could sit up in bed, I started to compile a list of other political persecutions with information from my own prison notes and reports coming from sympathisers in Pakistan. I learnt the value of providing Amnesty International with information when I saw how the human rights organisation could mobilise world opinion as they did in the case of Raza Kazim, a Pakistani international lawyer arrested at his home in Lahore in January and not heard from again. Amnesty’s ’Urgent Call for Action on Raza Kazim’s behalf was taken up in the Western press. ’The recent disappearance of Raza Kazim of Lahore, Pakistan, is an alarming case in point,’ ran a March article in The Nation about the numb-ing numbers of human rights offences worldwide. ’. . . The United States, which supports Pakistan with $525 million annually in military and econ-omic aid, has shown callous indifference to the case . . . . Apparently the Secretary of State has forgotten the letter of US law governing the dis-position of foreign aid, which reads in part: ”No assistance may be pro-vided . . . to the government of any country which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including torture, ... prolonged detention without charges, or other flagrant denial of the right to life, liberty and the security of person.”’ The timing of the article was perfect. I had been invited to speak to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington in March. Armed with reams of material about the political prisoners and my old address book, Yasmin and I flew off to America.
in political activity. Now I felt I couldn’t talk enough. For a week I talked incessantly abut the need to end human rights
Pakistan was already very much on the minds of legislators in Wash-ington. The 3.2 billion dollar US aid package voted to Pakistan in 1981 was in peril of being cut off because of Pakistan’s unverifiable nuclear programme. The Senate had got around this point in the past by basing aid not on whether or not Pakistan had ’the bomb’, but whether it had been tested. During my visit in 1984, this loophole was being plugged by Senators John Glenn and Alan Cranston in an amendment which precluded aid to Pakistan unless the President of the United States verified in writing that Pakistan neither had a ’nuclear explosive device’ nor was acquiring material to manufacture or detonate one. On March 28, the Foreign Rela-tions Committee unanimously adopted the amendment. I hadn’t come to Washington to debate the nuclear issue. I was therefore caught off guard during a meeting with the head of the Foreign Relations Committee Senator Charles Percy when he asked me if I favoured the cut-off of aid over the nuclear question. ’Senator, cutting off aid will only create misunderstandings between our two countries,’ I said after a moment’s hesitation. ’Both our countries would be better served if aid were linked to the restoration of human rights and democracy in Pakistan.’ Senator Percy, who had known my father, smiled and thanked me for my views. And I went on to my next meeting. In between appointments I walked the long corridors to Peter Gal-braith’s office at the Foreign Relations Committee. ’You speak too fast,’ Peter coached me, helping me make the most of the short meetings common on Capitol Hill. ’Speak slowly, and stress one point.’ I tried to follow his advice, though after years of isolation the words that had been suppressed during all the years in silence just kept spilling out. ’Benazir Bhutto talks as if making up for lost time,’ Carla Hall wrote in a profile in the Washington Post in early April. ’. . . Sentences shoot out in her vaguely British accent, well-ordered but racing off her tongue, accompanied by a flutter of hands, which are swathing her forehead, raking her hair.’ Carla Hall was right. I was making up for lost time. And I was very nervous. My memory, which had been excellent before the years of deten- 223 ”” TAKING ON THE DICTATOR Lion, was now failing me. Often I searched for dates and names, sometimes remembering them and sometimes not. And I was still uncomfortable around people. Though I pushed myself to meet as many government officials and members of the press as possible, I found I dreaded the interviews. While talking to Senator Cranston one day, I suddenly felt my cheeks go scarlet. The heat spread over my face until beads of perspiration broke out on my forehead. ’Are you all right?’ he asked in concern. ’Yes, yes, I’m fine,’ I told him with more composure than I felt. The night of my speech to the Carnegie Endowment I felt especially nervous. The audience was filled with State and Defense Department officials, members of Congress, former Ambassadors and members of the press. The Western press was now consistently portraying Zia as a ’benign dictator’ and the man who had brought ’stability’ to Pakistan. It fell to me to expose his human rights violations and point to the long-term dangers to Pakistan’s stability from centralised military rule. The influential mem-bers of the audience could help bring pressure to bear on Zia to free our political prisoners, to hold free elections, and to restore democracy to Pakistan. Their support was important. ’Calm down,’ I admonished myself when I moved to the podium. ’Just pretend that you’re at the Oxford Union.’ But I couldn’t. The debates at the Union had been intellectual games. Now I felt the weight of the lives of thousands of political prisoners and the political future of my country. ’We in Pakistan are confused and disappointed by the backing given to Zia’s illegitimate regime,’ I said to the distinguished audience. ’. . . We do appreciate your strategic concerns, but ask you not to turn your back on the people of Pakistan.’ In the middle of the speech, I looked up at the audience - and lost my place. There was silence in the hall while I desperately scanned my papers. How could I have? I wanted the earth to open and swallow me up. With as much aplomb as I could muster, I Mound my place and continued, asking the members of the government present to link US aid to human rights. I felt better during the question and answer period, and sat down at the end of my talk to applause. I just wasn’t my old self. But I had to press on. From Washington Yasmin and I went to New York. To the consterna-tion of the Pakistani Embassy, I had been granted a meeting with the top editors of Time magazine at the Time-Life building in New York, perhaps the first opposition leader in Pakistan to receive such an invitation. But I had an advantage. I had gone to Harvard with Walter Isaacson, now an editor at Time, and I had called him from Washington to see if he could fix up a meeting. My arrival at the Time-Life building with Yasmin caused quite a stir. When we took the lift to the 47th floor and walked into the private
’Didn’t Walter meet you in the lobby?’ someone finally said into the silence. ’He is downstairs waiting for you.’ ’I didn’t see him,’ I replied. ’But how did you get past the security guards?’ ’In Zia’s Pakistan you learn how to dodge security,’ I smiled. Over lunch the editors asked me so many questions that I didn’t even have time to eat the delicious fruit salad and cottage cheese lunch they served, a favourite meal from my years at Harvard. ’US aid to Pakistan is seen by many Pakistanis as US aid to Zia,’ I told them. ’You could all help clear up this misunderstanding by focusing media attention on human rights. For the political prisoners in Pakistan, publicity literally means the difference between life and death.’ I got publicity I didn’t expect as Yasmin and I came to the end of our two weeks in America and prepared to return to London. On April 3, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reversed its unanimous position on the tough anti-nuclear requirements for American aid. Instead they passed a new amendment allowing the continuation of aid to Pakistan with certifi-cation from the President that Pakistan did not have a nuclear bomb, and that American aid would ’reduce significantly the risk that Pakistan will possess a nuclear explosive device.’ Though I suspected the real cause for the change was intense pressure from the Reagan administration, Senator Percy kindly gave me public credit for the reversal of his vote.
wire for sound. The building was home in exile, too, to Dr Niazi and Yasmin, and we were in and out of each other’s flats all day. Quickly, the Barbican became the de facto command centre of the PPP both for England and for the units abroad. The flat was soon overflowing with files on the branches of the PPP in the United States, France, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and Austria as well as those in Australia, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi. A dedicated staff of Pakistani volunteers was soon in place. Sumblina, a young girl living in England, did the typing. Nahid, a student activist in exile, answered the telephone and helped Safdar Abbasi, a law student and the son of PPP Central Executive Committee member Dr Ashraf Abbasi, answer letters
TAKING ON THE DICTATOR from Pakistan. Bashir Riaz, a journalist who had helped my brothers organ-ise the campaign for my father’s life, acted as, our press spokesman and arranged press interviews. Dr Niazi joined forces with another exile, Safdar Hamdani, and with former Minister of Information Mr Naseem Ahmad to ensure that our ’information reached British Members of Parliament. As always, Yasmin did anything and everything to help. Together we turned out letters and reports on the human rights abuses in Pakistan from the spare bedroom we had converted into an office. We sent photographs of political prisoners, their case histories and letter campaigns to the UN Secretary General, to Assistant US Secretary of State for Human Rights, Elliott Abrams, to foreign ministers, lawyers’ syndicates and international trade organisations. We had meetings with British Members of Parliament, Amnesty International, and representatives of world leaders through their embassies. Nasser Baloach’s life hung in the balance. So did the lives of many others. But we were losing the race. In spite of protests by the bar associations all over Pakistan, three, young men falsely accused of murdering a policeman were hanged in August, following a secret trial by a special military court. ’The recent murder of the three young men, who had been detained for three years in chains, might have been prevented if the political circles and media in Europe and North America had shown interest in their fate or that of the thousands of other prisoners being held,’ I wrote to our growing mailing-list of members of governments and the press. ’The Western nations should assert their influence and raise their voices to save the lives of the political prisoners facing the gallows .... Please be so kind as to take urgent and effective action in response to this earnest appeal.’ Tony Benn, a Labour Member of Parliament, wrote a letter of protest to the Pakistan Embassy in London. He sent me a copy of his letter as well as the reply from the regime’s spokesman, Information Minister Qutu-buddin Aziz. ’Miss Bhutto’s allegation that there are more than 40,000 prisoners in Pakistan jails and that they are held in miserable conditions, bears no relevance to facts,’ wrote Qutubuddin Aziz. ’There are, no doubt, prisoners in Pakistani jails as in jails in any other country, but these prisoners are either convicted or suspected criminals. The conditions pre-vailing in our jails are certainly not worse than in most other developing countries . . . . While the government of Pakistan deals severely with those who commit acts of terrorism and murder, it adheres to the due process of law in every case.’ The regime’s spokesman made no mention of the continuing protests by the Pakistani bar associations over the lack of due legal process. When we anticipated, or faced, another series of death sentences from one of Zia’s military courts, all of us worked overtime. Envelopes, stamps and letters spilled out of the office into the living room as we spent day 226 THE YEARS OF EXILE and night labelling, sealing and posting. The regular volunteers would be joined by others, including a former Major in the Pakistan Army and a Superintendent of Police now living in exile. We drank endless cups of tea and coffee to keep ourselves going. Zia wanted to hide his atrocities from the world simply by continuing to forbid any observers from the outside. We did our best to expose him and to appeal to the world’s conscience on behalf of the prisoners. It was essential to have specific information and documentation about the circumstances of a political prisoner’s arrest and the conditions under which he had been held and tried. In Pakistan, where literacy rates were low and censorship extremely tight, such information was often hard to come by. Often the only people who had accurate and up-to-date details were the prisoners themselves. With great difficulty, we set up a secret network of people who sent regular reports from inside the prisons, questionnaires filled out by the prisoners and smuggled back to us in London. We used sympathetic jail guards, mailings to safe houses, relatives of exiles flying in and out of Pakistan, sympathetic airline personnel and mail drops in Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia where our letters were posted with a different post-mark to get past the regime’s censors. And the information began to flow in. The handwritten reply from Saifullah Khalid in Karachi Central Jail, a 23-year-old student from Larkana and one of Nasser Baloach’s co-defendants, docu-mented that he had been arrested in 1981 Eor his ’political views’ and was ’brutally’ interrogated to implicate the ’head of the Pakistan People’s Party’ in the hijacking. Like all political prisoners, he had been moved around from prison to prison and held incommunicado for months. °I was held at Arazwali Fort for two days, three unknown places for a week, Fort Balahisar for four days, Warsak Cantonment for ten days, one day at Peshawar Central Prison, then FIA [Federal Investigation Agency] Centre at Karachi for six days, one month at CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] Centre Karachi, one month at Baldia torture cell in Karachi,’ replied the student of political science, who three years after his arrest was still in prison and fearing the death sentence. Now imprisoned in Karachi Central jail, he wrote that he ’was kept in the punishment ward for ten days, and beaten thrice a day. During interrogation bulbs of high voltage have weakened my eye sight, causing constant headache and pain in my eyes. I was kept in iron leg fetters which resulted in severe pain in my testicles. The prison doctor suggested I be shifted to Civil Hospital for treatment. Three months later I am now here for hernia operation.’ Like so many other political prisoners, Saifullah Khalid was at the mercy of the regime. ’My life and those of my co-accused are in danger as the prosecution demanded capital punishment,’ the student added in a post- 227 TAKING ON THE DICTATOR script. ’I appeal to Amnesty to intervene in the matter and save our lives.’ Nottingham. Glasgow. Manchester. Bradford. I travelled around Eng-land to speak to Pakistani communities, adding more supporters to pro-mote our campaign. Germany. Denmark. Switzerland once a month to see my mother. I took the list of the prisoners with me everywhere; I had meetings with the former Prime Minister Ankur Jorgensen in Denmark who had known my father; with the Gaullists in France; with the Green Party in Germany. With a heavy heart I wrote ’martyred’ by the names of the three young men hanged in August. I was apprehensive every time I landed back in England, fearing that I would be turned away by the immigration authorities. At that time visas for Pakistanis were issued by British Immigration at the airport, and were valid for a single entry only. When I first arrived in England the im-migration officials had questioned me for forty-five minutes on where I would be staying and what I would be doing. ’I’m just a tourist,’ I assured them then and on every re-entry, feeling a flood of relief when the visa was finally stamped into my passport. But soon I had so many visas Yüklə 1,3 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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