Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto
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of my father and brother. Some said the Pakistani political arena was not for women. My answer to all of them was that my party workers will protect me from danger. I have willingly taken the path of thorns and stepped into the valley of death.’ The loudspeaker system wasn’t working well and certainly couldn’t reach ten times the number of people we’d anticipated. But as if by tele-pathy the people fell quiet with one motion of my hand. ’Here and now, I vow I will make every sacrifice to secure people’s rights,’ I called out. ’Do you want freedom? Do you want democracy? Do you want revolution?’ ’Yes,’ the roar came back every time, three million voices shouting as one. ’I have returned because I want to serve the people, not to seek revenge,’ I told them. ’I put an end to revenge. I don’t have any such feelings in my heart. I want to build up Pakistan. But first I must take a referendum from you. Do you want Zia to stay?’ ’No,’ the sound wave roared. ’Do you want Zia to go?’ ’Yes,’ the roar mounted. ’Then the decision is Zia jahve!’ I called out. ’Zia must go.’ Jahve! Jahve! Jahve!’ millions of voices cried into the darkening sky. There was not a single incident of violence during the entire day. Nor was there anything but a peaceful challenge to the regime. The crowd was so responsive that many felt the regime could have been brought down. With just a word, the crowd would have destroyed the Punjab Assembly, the Ministers’ houses, the Lahore High Court where Zia’s hand-picked bench had sentenced my father to death. But we didn’t want to come to power through bloodshed. We wanted to bring about democracy through peaceful and legitimate elections. It was the regime that used violence to gain their ends, not us. And, that night, they struck again. I was just sinking into the first sleep I’d had for forty-eight hours when someone knocked urgently on my bedroom door. For my own security, the local party officials had said I was staying at three different houses. 28I THE YEARS OF DETENTION ’I have finished a trolley cloth and four napkins,’ I noted in my diary in mid-May. ’When I’m free I can bore everyone with ”and this is what I did in jail”. On a less frivolous note, the concentration that needlework requires does not permit wandering thoughts. Moreover, in the vacuum of solitary confinement, it provides a point of focus, something to do, something to build the day about and so it has a salutary effect.’ I forced myself to write at least an hour a day in my journal. Tran~ois Mitterand has been elected by France to become the first socialist President of post-war France,’ I noted in my diary on May I I. ’The Anglo-American media had run quite a ferocious anti-Giscard campaign. This election will have far-reaching effects on the politics of Europe. France may become embroiled in internal controversies while adjusting to socialist policies. This will take the thrust out of aggressive French foreign policy. Who will step in to fill the French influence among the Arab and African nations? How will France’s relationship with the Federal Republic of Ger-many shape up now that the partnership of ’technocrats’ and ’friends’, Giscard and Schmidt, is broken. What of the spillover effect in Italy?’ On the same day I noted the death of Bobby Sands, an Irish political dissident. ’After sixty-six days of hunger strike, Bobby Sands finally fell victim to death in a British jail. To the British, Bobby Sands was a terrorist. But to his country, Bobby Sands fought for political liberty and rights. It is the story of the world.’ Too often, though, I would let days go by without writing at all. ’I have not written properly for some time,’ I chided myself in my diary on June 8. ’It is no use asking myself what there is to write about because the news from the papers can always be summarised. Without writing one loses the flow of expression and familiar-ity with words and sentences as well as the ability to express ideas.’ Slowly but surely, I settled into a pattern. ’Each hour has passed more slowly than a day or a week and yet I have come so far,’ I noted on June II. ”’Adjusted”is not the right word. I cannot adjust to a situation which is abhorrent. To adjust is to give in. I have coped. Each moment has dragged, but it has also passed. God alone has helped me in this ordeal. Without Him, I would have perished.’ My detention at Sukkur was to end at noon on June 12. I had no idea whether I’d be set free or detained longer, possibly to face trial and execution. ’Death comes in the end and I do not fear it,’ I wrote in my notes. ’The animals in the regime can only eliminate people. They cannot eliminate concepts. The concept of democracy will survive. And in the inevitable victory of democracy, we will live again. At least I will be free from the monotony of solitary confinement where one lives, but does not live.’ At 11.00 am on the day my detention ended, the order from the Deputy Martial Law Administrator arrived. He was ’pleased’, he wrote, to
My sister, Sanam: I was given permission to visit my sister on her birthday, her third in detention. My flight from Karachi was delayed, leaving me only an hour to see her. I was crying when I finally reached her cell, I was so frustrated. I had been searched and searched and searched. The prison matrons had gone through my hair which was very short at the time, emptied my bag, turned every page of the Cosmopolitan magazine I was bringing her. They even made me taste the food I had brought my sister to make sure it wasn’t poisoned. ’I won’t have any time with her at all,’ I protested as the jailors slowly unlocked and relocked the four gates between her and the jail walls. They just wanted to hurt her, even on her birthday. She received me as if she were a gracious hostess and I an honoured guest. On that day she had been sent some oranges by a friend in Sukkur and she offered me one, apologising that she had no plate to put it on, or a knife to peel it with. ’They’re afraid I’ll slit my wrists,’ she smiled. I felt so guilty. There I was, crying and complaining about my frustrating jour-ney. And there she was in the furnace of Sukkur, not complaining at all. She looked so ill, so skinny. I saw to my horror that her hair had got thin. I could see her scalp. ’Tell me the gossip,’ she said, as if we were back in our bedrooms at home. I did have something very important to tell her, but there was a big burly policeman sitting right outside the open bars and a policewoman in the cell with us, listening to every word we said. There was no place to sit but her bed. I leaned close to her. ’Nasser wants to marry me,’ I whispered. ’Don’t let them whisper!’ the policeman said, gripping the bars of the cell. The policewoman moved towards us. ’Oh, Sunny, that’s wonderful news. I’m so happy for you,’ my sister said. The policewoman moved closer, putting her face practically between my sister and me. ’I don’t want to get married with both you and Mummy in jail,’ I told my sister quietly. ’I told Nasser we should wait until I have my family around me again.’ ’But that’s just why you shouldn’t wait,’ Pinkie told me. Who knows when we’ll get out? We’ve both been worried about you living alone. You’ll be much happier with the protection of a husband. And we’ll feel more secure about you.’ ’Oh Pinkie, why does it have to be this way?’ I said, putting my arms around her. THE YEARS OF DETENTION
’For goodness sake,’ Pinkie said. We are not talking politics, but personal family news. I haven’t seen my sister for months. It’s my birthday. Can’t you give us some privacy?’ The policeman ignored her, busy scribbling notes about our conversation in his notebook. For the rest of the hour, the policewoman stood between us. I could barely keep from crying again when I had to leave her alone in that barren, empty cell with those horrible people. ’I wish you and Nasser much happiness,’ she called after me. ’Happy birthday, Pinkie,’ I managed to call back while the policeman hurried me away. To Miss Benazir Bhutto Sukkur Central Jail My darling Baby, From Begum Nusrat Bhutto Karachi Central Jail June 9, 1981 By the time this second letter of mine reaches you, it will be near your Birthday. My memory has taken me back to the day when I was happily informed by the doctor in England where your father was studying that I was pregnant. Oh! How excited and happy we were. You were our first born, our love. How we celebrated at the good news. Then at Pinto’s hospital in Karachi I couldn’t sleep the night after you were born because I just wanted you to be in my arms and to stare at your beautiful golden curls, your rosy face, your beautiful long-fingered hands. My heart fluttered at the sight of you. When Papa arrived from England, you were three months old. He was shy in front of his parents but when we were alone, he stared and stared at you, then touched your face and hands, looking with wonder at the miracle of having such a lovely baby. He wanted to know how to hold you and I lifted you and gave you to him, telling him ’one hand under her head and another around her body’. He said you looked just like him. How thrilled he was. He went round and round in a circle in the room with you in his arms - I can’t go on into more details because my eyes are filled with tears for the beautiful days gone by. I remember the day you took your first step when you were only ten months old. I remember the day you talked intelligently a week before your first birthday in Quetta; the day I took you to nursery school at the age of only three and a half; the pretty little dresses I used to sew and embroider with love and affection, praying after each of my five daily prayers for your future happiness, health and long life. Now June 21 is here and I wish you a very happy birthday, with many, many, many more to come. I cannot give you a little gift, not even a little 172 SOLITARY CONFINEMENT IN SUKKUR JAIL kiss being locked up so far away from each other for another ninety days . . . . I hope, my love, you eat a proper diet and drink lots of water. Don’t forget to eat fruit and vegetables also. I end with my wishes for a good future for you. Your ever loving MUMMY . Fruit and vegetables. Water. What nice thoughts from a mother. I felt terribly for her. A new detention order. How long were they going to make her suffer? My own new detention order had elevated me to ’A’ class, entitling me to a radio, television set, a refrigerator which I imagined filled with chilled, pure water, and an air conditioner. I was briefly thrilled, though I couldn’t figure out how a totally open cell could be air conditioned. I needn’t have bothered. The only privilege my much touted elevation to ’A’ class brought me was the freedom to wander around the compound courtyard at night. No longer, the jail superintendent told me as if it were a great gift, would I be locked in my cell at night. ’I decline your ”A” class status,’ I wrote to the jail superintendent. ’I will not be party to your lies.’ I dreamed of being free. I dreamed of eating steak and mushrooms at the Sorbonne restaurant in Oxford. I dreamed of fresh apple cider in New England and peppermint stick ice cream from Brigham’s. My father had passed the time in his death cell by conjuring up someone he knew, then remembering every single detail about him. I thought of Yolanda Kodrzycki, my roommate at Radcliffe, who, the last time I’d heard, was working as an economist in Massachusetts. I thought of Peter Galbraith who was now working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington and had married his long time girlfriend and another of my contemporaries Anne O’Leary. I had introduced them to each other at Harvard. The time droned on. ’These days will pass,’ my father had told me in prison. ’What is important is that we pass them with honour.’ I didn’t have his patience. I had to get out of there. I just had to. General Abbassi, the Martial Law Administrator of Sindh, Sunny told me, had said that the regime was out to crush us physically, morally, and financially. They had moved on the latter, filing a civil suit in May to sell 70 Clifton, AI-Murtaza, our agricultural lands and other properties at public auction. I had no idea what had happened. If I lived, would I still have a home to return to, would I ever sleep in my own bed again? As the summer heat baked on, I became obsessed with getting myself transfer-red to 70 Clifton or AI-Murtaza. Somehow I felt that my physical presence in either of our homes would prevent the regime from seizing them. My repeated requests, not surprisingly, were turned down. ’We can’t spare
THE YEARS OF DETENTION that many guards,’ they told me, as if it required an entire regiment to detain one young woman in her home. The jail superintendent started a new tactic to demoralise me. ’Your party officials are deserting you,’ he told me, telling me stories about members of the PPP having meetings with members of the opposition parties, or even with the regime itself. ’They are all leaving you. Why are you wasting your life here? If you give up politics, your troubles will be over.’ I prayed to God to give me strength. ’If I am the only person left resisting the tyranny of the regime, then so be it,’ I told them. ’I don’t believe your lies. Even if everybody else capitulates, I will not.’ I didn’t believe the PPP leaders, some of whom had been released by July, would desert the party. I did not allow myself to believe it. I started to pray a special prayer for my release that one of the jail matrons told me about. ’Qul Huwwa Allahu Ahad, Say He is One God,’ I started the 112th surah of the Quran, reciting the verse forty-one times, then breathing over a mug of water and sprinkling a little of the water in each of the four comers of the cell. I prayed for every prisoner. I prayed for my mother. I prayed for myself. By the fourth Wednesday, the jail matron told me, the prison door was supposed to open. And it did. On the fourth Wednesday of the fourth month of my detention in Sukkur, my cell door opened and the jail authorities took me to see my mother in Karachi briefly. Four Wednesdays of rituals after that it was my mother’s cell door which opened. She was released from detention in July after vomiting blood. The jail doctors diagnosed her as having an ulcer. She had a bad cough as well, which they thought might be TB. I knew nothing about my mother’s health, and only found out about her release from a jail matron. I was thrilled that my prayer had worked and redoubled my efforts at Sukkur, adding additional prayers and sprink-ling more and more water for other prisoners, including me. Allahu Samad’, the Eternal God. On the fourth Wednesday in August, the cell door opened again. ’You’re leaving,’ the matron told me. I threw my things together. Please God, I prayed, let them take me home to 70 Clifton. The convoy of army and police didn’t go near 70 Clifton. Instead they took me to Karachi Central Jail, and locked me up in my mother’s old cell.
AT KARACHI CENTRAL JAIL Karachi Central Jail, August 15, 1981. Flaking cement. Iron bars. And silence. Utter silence. I am back in total isolation, the cells around me in the locked ward all emptied. I strain for the sound of a human voice. There is only silence. The cell is hot in the damp, humid weather of Karachi, and the ceiling fan provides no relief. The electricity is off again. Every day the power fails, sometimes for three hours, sometimes for longer. The jail authorities tell me it is because of a problem at the main power station. But I know that’s not true. At night I can see the sky lit up by lights in other parts of the jail. Only my cell-block is in darkness. The authorities have put me in an A-class cell reserved for high-ranking political prisoners, but once again I am not allowed A-class privileges. The cells to the right and left of mine, ordinarily used as a sitting room and kitchen, are now empty and locked. The cell in which I am held is small and dirty. The ’toilet’ has no flush, and swarms with roaches and flies. Its stench mingles with that of the open sewer which runs through the jail yard outside. The only water bucket is coated with dead insects. In the mornings I hear the jangling of keys and clicking of locks which signals the arrival of my food. Without saying a word, the grey-uniformed prison matron who sleeps in the courtyard at the far end of the cells brings me the tiffin boxes of food which the authorities allow to be sent from 70 Clifton. My throat tightens the first few times I open them to find carefully prepared creamed chicken with mushrooms, kebabs and chick-en sheeks. Though I have little appetite, and can only take a few mouthfuls, I keep thinking of the care my mother has taken to have the food made in our kitchen at home. I am worried about Mummy. She was allowed to visit me my second week in Karachi Central jail and, though I was relieved to see her alive, I was shocked by her appearance. The pale, haggard woman with her ner-vous movements and grey hair parted in the middle and tied in a plait looked so different from the elegant and self-confident woman I knew as my mother.
THE YEARS OF DETENTION Her eyes had filled with tears when she saw me, still a captive in her old cell. But we both tried to smile bravely, ignoring the jailers who crowded around us to listen to the news she hesitantly delivered. She’d caught a cough in jail, she told me quietly. She thought it was the dust, but then she started coughing blood. After several visits, the jail doctor and the authorities told her they suspected tuberculosis, a diagnosis which came as no surprise. Many people in Pakistan have tuberculosis, their lungs irritated from the constant dust, their systems depleted from malnutri-tion. The insanitary conditions in jail make the inmates especially suscep-tible to TB as well as to every other sort of disease. The prisoners often spit on the ground, releasing the viruses into the air. Her own doctor’s suspicions were even worse, my mother told me. Though she was still too weak for the bronchoscopy necessary for a diagnosis, he was not ruling out lung cancer. Lung cancer. I embraced her, trying not to register my shock, trying to be strong both for my mother and for the intelligence agents among the jailers who I knew would report back to General Zia. ’Perhaps it is not lung cancer. Wait for the bronchoscopy,’ I consoled her in the firmest voice I could muster. ’He thinks it can be cured if treated in time,’ she continued. ’If necessary, I can get treatment abroad.’ ’You must go as soon as you can,’ I heard myself saying, though inside my heart was breaking at the thought of her leaving Pakistan. ’But what about you, my darling? How can I leave you here alone?’ I assured her that I was fine. But I wasn’t. For three days after her visit I lay on my bed staring up at the ceiling, immobilised by a sense of overwhelming, irrational depression. I had no will to exercise, wash myself, or change my clothes. I couldn’t eat or drink. My God, I thought, I’ve lost my father: now I’m losing my mother. I knew I was being self-pitying, but I couldn’t shake off my sense of abandonment. Even my mother’s good news, that Sanam and Shah would be marrying their fiances in September, deepened my despair. During my father’s imprisonment he had cautioned us never to give the appearance that we were enjoying ourselves. ’If you go to the cinema, wear a burqa,’ he had instructed me. Now my family seemed to have reconciled themselves to my being perma-nently in jail. They were carrying on with their lives and having wedding celebrations as if I didn’t exist. After three days without water I felt weak and disoriented. Don’t play into Zia’s hands and fall apart, a voice in my head warned me. I felt better after I forced myself to take a mugful of water from the water bucket, and to begin a puzzle in one of the Pakistani newspapers which my mother sent to the cell every day and which for days I’d ignored. But the news-print looked fuzzy. I felt the beginnings of one of the migraine headaches I
My health problems, I learned later from a doctor, were due partly to a breakdown in the harmony of the body’s systems. Normally, he told me, the cardiovascular, muscular, digestive, respiratory and nervous systems each take their due share of energy and food intake. In times of stress, however, the nervous system goes on full alert, diverting more than its share from the other systems and weakening them. The heart was par-ticularly vulnerable, which explained why so many political prisoners suf-fered heart attacks. Our wills may have remained strong, but our bodies were paying the price. There was so much uncertainty. September 13, the day my detention order was due to end, was not far away. Several times the jail matron had whispered to me that she had heard of political prisoners being released. If the regime had begun freeing the people arrested after the hijacking, why shouldn’t I be freed too? There was no longer any mention in the press of my mother’s and my alleged connection with Al-Zulfikar. Despite all its tortures and planted ’evidence’, the regime had not been able to concoct a case against us that would hold up in the court of world opinion. And Zia could not risk losing the potential largesse of the West, especially the United States. Pakistan had not received aid from the United States since 1979 when, suspicious that Pakistan was developing or already possessed nuclear capa-bility, the Carter administration enforced its nuclear non-proliferation poli-cies and cut Pakistan off. But that was before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Now Zia was successfully banking on the presence of the Russians right on Pakistan’s border to overshadow America’s concern about Pakistan’s nuclear programme. The Reagan administration had offered Pakistan a six-year, 3.2 billion dollar economic and military aid package - more than twice as much as the offer that Zia had summarily dismissed from the Carter administration. The US had also added what Zia wanted most of all: 40 F-I6 planes. The package, due to come before Congress in the autumn of 1981, was more than acceptable to Zia, though a great disappointment to those of us who believed that America’s eagerness to bolster Pakistan against the Com-munist threat should have been balanced by a concern for human rights and the restoration of democracy. Zia’s position was being further strengthened by the hundreds of mil-lions in refugee relief Pakistan was receiving from the US, Saudi Arabia, and China, as well as from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the World Food Programme, and other international relief organisations. The numbers of Afghan refugees trekking through the ancient traders’ and smugglers’ passes of the Hindu Kush to wait out the 177 THE YEARS OF DETENTION war in Pakistan or to join the rebel forces of the mujahideen had swelled into millions. Refugee camps, hospitals, schools and service centres had been set up all along the border, giving members of the regime the opportunity to skim the international aid flooding into Pakistan. One UN official estimated that only one third of the aid actually reached the re-fugees, I would read later in Richard Reeves’ book Passage to Peshawar. Weapons sent to the mujahideen also went through Pakistan, giving Zia, and his men a chance to siphon them off into the arsenals of the Pakistani army and take fat commissions on arms sales. Another American journalist later told me that Washington officials only expected about a third of them, too, to reach their intended destination. Yüklə 1,3 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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