Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto

When Shah’s body was finally released, we went to say prayers over
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his body. I thought I’d see my little brother as I remembered him, bronzed from the sun, slim and handsome in the white suit we had taken to the undertakers because he was so fond of white. But the body lying in the coffin was almost that of a stranger. Shah’s face was powder-white and puffy. The morticians had had to chalk his face to cover the many incisions of the autopsies. The sight was heart-breaking.

Oh, my poor Gogi. What have they done to you? The room filled with wailing. Without knowing it, I started hitting myself in the face, sobbing in huge silent gasps where the breath was caught in my chest. We had to be taken out of the room. We forced some control over ourselves and walked to the car where press photographers were waiting.

I took Shah home to Pakistan on August 21, 1985. The regime had reluctantly agreed to allow his burial in Larkana, swayed perhaps by the people’s outrage that, contrary to Muslim ritual, neither my mother and I nor they had been permitted to witness my father’s burial. Yet the regime was once again making every effort to keep the burial of another Bhutto quiet.

Fearing an emotional mass turn-out, the Martial Law authorities made arrangements for us to fly Shah’s body straight on from Karachi to Moenjodaro, then on to our family graveyard by helicopter where they had already built a helipad. The regime wanted Shah to be buried quickly and secretly, out of the sight and minds of the people.

I refused. Shah had longed to return to the home of his birth for eight years. I was determined to make his final journey as meaningful to him as it would be to us, to pass him by the doorways that had sheltered him: 70 Clifton in

Karachi, Al-Murtaza in Larkana. I wanted to take him past the lands where he had hunted with Papa and Mir, past our fields and ponds, past the people he had tried to defend in his own way. The people, too, deserved the chance to honour this brave son of Pakistan before he was laid to rest near his father in Garhi Khuda Bakhsh.

’Tell the Martial Law authorities that they can do whatever they want to me, but I will not allow my brother to be denied the Muslim right of return to his own home for his final bath by his own family and members of his household,’ I told Dr Ashraf Abbasi who was coordinating the arrangements with the local administration in Larkana. A compromise had been reached with the regime. We were not to be permitted to take Shah home to 70 Clifton, but we could take him to Al-Murtaza. Our home in Larkana was so remote and difficult to get to, the local authorities noted in their reports, that the crowds would be sparse, especially in the inferno of August.

To make sure, the Army set up roadblocks on all the roads leading into the province of Sindh. Buses, trucks, trains and cars were stopped and

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searched. The Army was put on alert in Sindh and PPP leaders were detained under house arrest. Karachi airport was cordoned off and trucks filled with soldiers and automatic weapons pulled across the main thoroughfares of the city. As further insurance against any outburst, the regime tried to placate the people by finally setting a date for the lifting of Martial Law. On the eve of my departure from Zurich to Pakistan with my brother’s body, Zia’s appointed Prime Minister Mohammed Khan Junejo announced that Martial Law would be lifted in December.
Black. Black armbands. Black shalwar khameez and dupattas. We stopped briefly at Karachi and transferred from Singapore Airlines to a smaller chartered Fokker for the final journey to Moenjodaro. As Shah’s coffin, draped with an outlawed PPP flag, was unloaded onto a trolley, several of our servants who had come from 70 Clifton threw themselves on it, weeping. There was much weeping too, among the relatives who joined us in Karachi, as well as Paree, Samiya and her sister. And we flew on towards the most tumultuous funeral Pakistan had ever witnessed.

’Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go to Larkana. Don’t you know they are bringing Shah Nawaz today? Shah Nawaz, who is the son of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Shah Nawaz who is a warrior, Shah Nawaz, who has given his life for you and for me. Come on, come on. Let us go. Let us go and receive a hero today.’ The beautiful song written for my brother was being sung all over Pakistan. In

spite of the regime’s threats, the people had been flooding towards Larkana for weeks, camping in the fields, sleeping on footpaths.

Black. More black. As the Fokker came in to land soon after 10.00 am at Moenjodaro, there was a mass of black ringing the airport, lining the roads for miles. The regime’s roadblocks could not stop the mourners who had travelled through the searing heat to express their grief for this fallen son of the land. Even where there is enmity, it is incumbent on Muslims to express sorrow at death and to take part in the grief. But no one had anticipated these multitudes. The press reported the crowds at well over a million.

’Allahu Akbar! God is Great!’ the people shouted as Shah’s coffin was placed in a waiting ambulance and packed with the ice I’d asked for. After all the postmortems and autopsies he’d been through, I didn’t want anything else to happen to him. ’Inna li Allah, wa inna ilayhi raji’un - To God we belong and to Him we must return,’ the people chanted as the ambulance passed, holding their arms out and their palms up in their recitation of the Muslim prayer for the dead.

I don’t think many state presidents have been given as honourable and magnificent farewell as Shah was receiving at the age of twenty-seven. Two thousand vehicles of every sort, cars, motorcycles, trucks and animal-

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drawn carts draped in black, followed his coffin, a motorcade stretching ten miles. The people showered the ambulance bearing his body with rose petals in the loving gesture of farewell all along the twenty-eight kilometres from the airport to Larkana. As his coffin passed, many men in the crowd saluted, their heads topped with embroidered caps or wrapped in the turbans of their tribes.

Pictures of Shah rimmed in black. Shah Nawaz Shaheed. Shah Nawaz the Martyr. There were pictures of me, of my mother, one unforgettable one of Shah silhouetted against Papa. Shaheed ka beta Shaheed, the legend read - the Martyr’s son has been martyred. The pent-up grief the people had not been allowed to express for my father, for their own suffering and for ours welled over. Wailing and striking their breasts, the grieving masses threw themselves at our motorcade, rocking the cars in their frenzy to touch the vehicle bearing Shah in the gesture of farewell.

The sun was high in the sky and there was still much to be done before the afternoon prayers: the ritual washing of the body, the viewing of the face by the family, the prayers for the dead read at home by women who do not accompany the body to the graveyard, the prayer service for men which had been organised on

a nearby football field. Shah had to be buried before sundown. And Sanam and I still had to pick out the site for his grave. We hadn’t been able to do that for my father. This time I wanted to be able to plan the space, to place Shah far enough away from my father so there would be room later to build mausoleums for both of them. As we neared Al-Murtaza, however, the crowds became a solid wall.

’Go straight on to Garhi,’ I told the driver of our car. Somehow he got us out of the crush as the ambulance bearing Shah’s body pulled into the courtyard of Al-Murtaza. The crowds were only slightly less dense at our family graveyard fifteen miles away, but they stayed outside the walls. Together Sanam and I chose a site in the far left-hand comer of the graveyard, quite a distance away from my father, who is buried behind my grandfather. After saying a brief prayer at my father’s grave, we hurried back to AI-Murtaza.

Crying. Wailing. In the fever of their grief, the people had broken down the walls of Al-Murtaza and flooded not only into the courtyard but into the house. The house was packed not only with them, but with all our female relatives, with women party workers, and the household staff. Shah’s coffin was in the drawing room still unopened because of the pandemonium. ’Please give us room,’ I beseeched the people with folded hands as they pushed over each other. All discipline had simply been overwhelmed.

I had wanted to show Shah’s face to the relatives but, when the staff started to move the coffin towards my grandfather’s room where the maulvi was waiting to bathe the body, emotions reached fever pitch. The women, even the household staff became overpowered with grief and
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started hitting their heads on the coffin. Blood started to flow from men’s heads, women’s heads. ’For God’s sake, move them all away before they harm themselves any more,’ I cried. ’Move Shah quickly into my grand-father’s room.’

Finally, quietly and tenderly, Shah was bathed by our maulai and the household staff, and placed in a ICaffan, the unstitched Muslim burial shroud. The heat was suffocating, well over I IO degrees, and I was increas-ingly anxious to get on with the burial. ’Oh Baba, he had cuts all over his body,’ one of the shocked staff said, returning from the washing. ’Don’t tell me,’ I said to him. But he couldn’t stop. ’His nose was cut, his chin, his . . .’ ’Stop!’ I shouted. ’Enough. He is now home, back where he be-longs.’ My brother-in-law, Nasser Hussein came up to me. ’It’s getting late,’ he said. ’We must hurry.’ Given the crowd, we decided it was best to take Shah to

the graveyard in the strong wooden coffin rather than carrying him in the Kaffan.

I asked the servants to bring Shah’s body back into the drawing room so the relatives could pray. Then, suddenly, Shah’s coffin was being carried through the heaving crowd to the ambulance. Nasser Hussein hurried behind. In the chaos, I almost missed the departure myself. Hearing the chant of the prayers, I ran to follow the coffin to the door.

Good-bye, Shah Nawaz. Good-bye. The parting was so quick, so pain-ful. As the ambulance started, I wanted to run out, to stop it, to bring Shah back somehow. I didn’t want to let my little brother go. Oh, Gogi. Stay with me. A single moan rose from the five hundred women praying in the garden as the ambulance moved through the gates and out of sight. My brother was gone for ever.

In every generation, Shiite Muslims believe, there is a Karbala, a re-enactment of the tragedy that befell the family of the Prophet Mohammed, PBUH, after his death in 640 AD.

Many in Pakistan have come to believe that the victimisation of the Bhutto family and our supporters was the Karbala of our generation. The father was not spared. The mother was not spared. The brothers were not spared. The daughter was not spared. The band of followers were not spared. Yet, like the followers of the Prophet’s grandson, our resolve never faltered.

As I stood now in the doorway of Al-Murtaza, a woman’s voice rose above the moans in the courtyard, re-enacting the tragedy at Karbala. ’See, see Benazir,’ the woman keened in the cadence of the sub-continent. ’She has come with the body of her brother. How young he is, how handsome, how innocent. He has been slain by the tyrant’s hand. Feel the grief of the sister. Remember Zeinab, going to the court of Yazid. Remember Zeinab as she sees Yazid playing with her brother’s head.

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’Think of the heart of Begum Bhutto, how it bursts as she sees the child she gave birth to, who she played with as a baby. He grew before her eyes. Nusrat sees his first steps. The mother that made him grow with such love. Think of her.

’Think of Murtaza. He has lost his right hand. He has lost half of himself. He will never be the same.. .’

Cries echoed off the walls of Al-Murtaza as the women wailed and beat their chests. ’A-i-i-e-e-e!’ It was a massive, heaving cry of farewell. I slowly backed into the house. My brother was being buried in the grave-yard of our ancestors. I could do no more.
Nasser Hussein, Garhi Khuda Bakhsh:
When we arrived at the Bhutto family graveyard from the prayer service, the crowd was impenetrable. As the coffin came out of

the ambulance, I shouldered the front comer. I have no idea who was behind me or what happened to them. I just clung to my position as the crowd pushed forward to try to carry the coffin even for a moment, to relieve our burden and share in the task.

There was no one to guide us toward the gravesite and we couldn’t see where we were going. The coffin seemed twice as heavy because we couldn’t coordinate our actions. It rocked like a rudderless ship on our shoulders as the sea of bodies pushed and shoved. Where our feet ended, somebody else’s began. Our progress was so circuitous, it took us forty-Eive minutes, maybe longer, to blindly move the ten yards from the ambu-lance to the entrance of the graveyard.

Suddenly, an upturned, beckoning hand came out of the crowd in front of me. I caught a glimpse of the son of one of the staff at AI-Murtaza, and I followed his hand while he backed towards the gravesite. The crowd helped by pushing the coffin in his direction. I willed myself not to faint in the heat and hysteria. Yet, miraculously in all the crush, no one trod on the other Bhutto graves.

When we reached Shah’s grave, I collapsed, my legs in the excavation. A villager brought me water in a rusty cup and I gulped it down. There was no room to take Shah’s body out of the coffin. We had to tilt the coffin and slide it into the grave. The people were calling out to be shown Shah’s face in the last viewing, but Benazir had asked me not to. The last quick prayer was said, and the mourners joined in the Fateha, the hand-raising act of prayer and submission. The elders were coming forward for the long recital of 24 prayers when I left. My sad duty was over. We had brought Shah Nawaz to his final resting place.
I was arrested by the Martial Law regime five days later in Karachi. I was not surprised. Though Zia had given assurances to the press that I would
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not be arrested on my return with Shah’s body, and the Chief Minister of Sindh had also issued a statement saying that I would be free to come and go, the masses of mourners who had swept by the Army’s barricades in Larkana to express solidarity with the family had badly shaken the regime. As the mourners continued to mass in the fields across from Al-Murtaza and in the street outside the house for the other religious rites surrounding death, the regime, I’m sure, feared an uprising.

Though my brother’s death had forced them to announce the date for the ending of Martial Law, neither his death nor the suffering of thousands of others had been avenged. ’We should take the initiative now when emotions

are running so high to oust Zia,’ several PPP leaders suggested at an evening meeting after Shah’s burial. Others argued that we should not give the regime the pretext for not lifting Martial Law. Even in grief, it seemed, politics could not be forgotten. ’Martial Law is the curse of the country and we must ensure that it is lifted,’ I argued wearily in favour of restraint. ’Shah has given his life for it. If we mount an agitation now, then they can say that they wanted to lift Martial Law, but were forced not to. We must consider this aspect.’

Nonetheless, I took precautions against repercussions from the regime. The soyem ceremony for the dead is held on the third day following burial, the chehlum forty days afterwards. I was not at all sure I’d be free in forty days, so after great debate with religious leaders, we decided to count the forty days from the time of Shah’s death in France in July rather than from his August burial. That way the soyem and the chehlum almost coincided.

Another Bhutto grave. Another mound of fresh mud. I took flowers with me to add to the masses already on Shah’s grave. ’In the name of God, most gracious, most merciful,’ I prayed along with hundreds of others crowded into the sweltering graveyard. It was heart-rending to see all that fresh mud. Shah Nawaz.

Sanam had to go back to Karachi the night after the soyem. So did Fakhri. I didn’t want to be alone in my grief at Al-Murtaza and decided to go with them. It was some sort of consolation that at least Sanam and I were together, a little something of the family. But once more politics overrode our personal mourning.

Thousands greeted us at Karachi airport. We couldn’t get through the crowds to reach the car. Members of the party finally forced a passageway of sorts, linking their arms around us to make a flying wedge. It took several hours for the car to make its way through the people to 70 Clifton. Some people in the jeeps arid motorcycles accompanying us made the victory sign but there was no shouting of political slogans. Slogans are a sign of happiness and everyone was in mourning for Shah.

The garden at 70 Clifton was just as packed. I walked out to thank the

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people for taking part in our grief and for showing their solidarity. Many faces were familiar: men and women who had been to jail several times for their political beliefs. ’Whether we agreed with my brother’s methods or not, he was a man who opposed tyranny,’ I said to them. ’His conscience did not allow him to keep silent at a time when Pakistan was suffering.’

Nasser Baloach. Ayaz Samoo. Two other young men who had given their lives for the cause of democracy and were victims

of military terror. They, too, had been my brothers, rallying round me, protecting me, think-ing of me as their sister. The next day I contacted their families. Just as mourners were pouring in to 70 Clifton to condole with us, I wanted to pay condolence calls to their families, to share the grief of other mothers and sisters who had lost their brothers. I never got there.

The police surrounded 70 Clifton in the early hours of August 27. Once more 70 Clifton was declared a sub-jail and guarded by police and army units armed with tear gas. I was served a ninety-day detention order, the regime later claiming that I had ignored their warnings not to visit ’ter-rorists’ in ’sensitive areas’. I had received no such warnings. The areas deemed ’sensitive’ by the regime were Malir and Lyari, impoverished areas of Karachi, whose inhabitants including the families of Nasser Baloach and Ayaz Samoo had suffered the most under Zia. No wonder he considered the areas ’sensitive’. And Zia was no one to use the excuse of terrorism. If terrorism is defined as the use of force by a minority to impose its views on the majority, then Zia and his army had defined themselves.

In Washington, the Reagan administration expressed ’dismay’ over my detention. ’Pakistan has taken encouraging steps towards the restoration of constitutional government . . . putting Ms Bhutto under house arrest would appear to be inconsistent with this process,’ a State Department spokesman was quoted as saying. The reaction from British parlia-mentarians was stronger, both MP Max Madden and Lord Avebury contacting Zia on my behalf. But I remained locked up, once more without a telephone or any contact with the outside world. Sanam and Nasser were with me for the first few days, as was my cousin Laleh who had been staying for the night and was inadvertently caught in the regime’s net. But on September 2, the regime forced my family to leave and I was left at 70 Clifton, utterly alone in my grief.

The days dragged into weeks while I tried to reconcile myself to Shah’s death. I read and re-read every old magazine in the house, wrote in my journals and tuned in to every BBC news report. It was frustrating being immobilised again. As much as I was burdened by my sorrow, I wanted to take advantage of the time I had in Pakistan. With Martial Law due to be lifted in less than three months, political opposition to Zia had to be organised and in place. Before my arrest I had scheduled meetings with the party leaders from the four provinces. Now they had been cancelled.

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Though there was much trumpeting in the regime-controlled press about the lifting of Martial

Law now announced for December 31, Zia’s hand remained as cold and repressive as ever. Meetings scheduled in Lahore to propose my release were banned. MRD leaders heading towards a meeting in Karachi on October 21 were either externed or barred from entering the city. On the eve of the meeting, several MRD leaders were jailed. Still Zia claimed to represent the people of Pakistan.

Politics. Politics. Politics. The mantle of leadership felt heavy in my detention at 70 Clifton. How often politics had kept me from my family, especially Shah Nawaz, now lying under the dust of Larkana. ’Make time to see me. Why can’t you make time?’ he had phoned me in London time and again, only to mimic my inevitable reply. ’Oh Gogi, I have to go to America, to Denmark. I have important meetings in Bradford, Birmingham, Glasgow ....’ If I had just paused, thought, given him more time. But then, no one can change destiny. His fate had been written. Still, it was very hard for me to accept that he was gone.

His room in the annexe across the courtyard was just the way he’d left it eight years ago, his yearbook from his high school in Islamabad still on the bookshelf next to the adventure novels he had loved and the Holy Quran my father had given him. Mir’s room was the same as well, his poster of Che Guevara on the wall and his Harvard yearbook in the desk drawer. My brothers’ rooms were locked now, as were the rooms of my sister and mother and father. The only light in the house in the few hours the electricity was uninterrupted by the regime, was in my room, one room in a whole, huge house.

I yearned to see Sassi, to bring Shah’s daughter to see her family home and learn her heritage. She should never forget her father, but be taught what he stood for and what he had given for his country. Her heritage was a proud one, interrupted by tragedy. Perhaps it was all pre-ordained. Why does Shah want to call her Sassi?’ Dr Abbasi had asked me one day as we drove together to Hyderabad. ’It’s such a sad name. You remember the legend of Sassi who fell in love with Pannu, but they were separated. Sassi walked across deserts and mountains in search of him. ”Sassi, Sassi,” she heard Pannu call to her from one spot in the desert. But when she reached it, the earth opened, swallowing her up.’ But Shah loved the name Sassi as much as he loved his daughter and the name stuck.

Would we ever know who was behind Shah’s murder? Locked up at 70 Clifton, I kept coming back to the story Samiya told me on the plane flight with Shah’s body to Moenjodaro. A man had visited several news-paper offices in Karachi the month before the murder, she told

me, asking for current pictures of Shah. Had someone been looking for a picture to identify Shah as he looked at twenty-seven?

I was listening to the early morning BBC report on October 22 when

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my body went rigid. The police had arrested Rehana in Cannes, the broad-caster said, and charged her under French law for ’failing to assist a person in danger’. There were no details.

A few days after I heard the announcement about Rehana on the BBC, I read in the local newspapers that I had received a summons to attend the inquiry into Shah’s death, but had responded that I did not want to go. What summons? I had never received a summons. ’It’s not true that I do not want to attend the inquiry,’ I wrote in a letter to the Home Department. ’I do want to attend, but it is in your hands, not mine. Please advise the French court that I wish to attend, but that you are preventing me.’

I was released on November 3. ’Today I begin a difficult journey, a sad journey which will take me into the court-rooms of a foreign land to inquire into the death of my beloved brother, Shah Nawaz,’ I began a statement to our supporters. I had to type it on a manual typewriter. This time the regime had turned off all the electricity to 70 Clifton, as well as the separate electrical system in the annexe. ’I am determined to return as soon as possible,’ I concluded the statement. ’God willing, I hope to be back in three months . . . no matter what the consequences.’