Daughter of the east by benazir bhutto



Yüklə 1,3 Mb.
səhifə3/38
tarix17.09.2018
ölçüsü1,3 Mb.
#69140
1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   ...   38

They hurried us back to the airport over a different and even more tortuous route. But the same crew again stood at attention. There was no difference either in our searches at the gates to Sihala, no difference in the grimy rooms we were being held in. But a sense of peace and a new certainty had

settled over me.

Stand up to challenge. Fight against overwhelming odds. Overcome the enemy. In the stories my father had told us over and over as children, good always triumphed over evil.

’Whether you grasp an opportunity or let it slip away, whether you are impetuous or thoughtful, whether you have unsinkable nerves or are timid, all of these choices are up to you,’ he had always impressed upon us. ’What you make of your destinies is up to you.’

Now, in the nightmare that had engulfed Pakistan, his cause had become my own. I had felt it as I stood by my father’s grave, felt the strength and conviction of his soul replenishing me. At that moment I pledged to myself that I would not rest until democracy returned to Pakistan. I prom-ised that the light of hope that he had kindled would be kept alive. He had been the first leader of Pakistan to speak for all the people, not just for the military and the elite. It was up to us to continue.


As my mother and I were being taken back to Sihala after my father’
THE ASSASSINATION OF MY FATHER
soyem, soldiers were lobbing tear gas shells among the hundreds packed into our garden at 70 Clifton to read and reread prayers for my father’s soul. The barrage of shells was so intense that the canopy over the patio was set on fire. Clutching their Holy Qurans, the grieving people dispersed, choking.

THE YEARS OF

DETENTION

IMPRISONED IN MY OWN HOME


My mother and I were released from Sihala at the end of May, 1979, seven weeks after my father’s death. We returned to 70 Clifton, our family home in Karachi.

Everything was the same. But nothing was the same. ’Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Bar-at-Law’ read the brass nameplate beside the gate to 70 Clifton. Above it was another brass plate, faded with time, inscribed with my grandfather’s name, Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto. My grandmother built this two-storey sprawling bungalow shortly after I was born in 1953 and my brothers, sister and I grew up here in the cooling breezes from the Arab-ian Sea just a quarter of a mile away. Who could have foreseen the tragedy and violence that would overtake this peaceful family com-pound?

Every day hundreds of wailing mourners mass in the garden of coconut palms, mangoes, and red and yellow flowering trees coaxed from the desert of Karachi. Hundreds more wait patiently outside the gates to pay condolence calls to their leader’s family. My mother is still in Iddat and can’t receive outsiders. She sends me to greet them instead.

The familiarity of being at home makes our nightmare seem even more unreal. Two nights before my father was hanged, the staff tell us, the army raided 70 Clifton for the

second time, searching the roof and the garden, opening my mother’s safe, rifling through the clothes in my father’s cupboards. ’Do you have a search warrant?’ one of the staff had asked, still clinging to the concept of civil law. ’I am with the search party, so there is no need for a warrant,’ claimed the army officer who had come with the police. For ten hours they had tom the house apart, taking many of my personal letters from my bedroom and two black briefcases containing bank orders and cancelled cheques, evidence I had collected to refute the regime’s trumped up charges of corruption against my father.

’There are secret cupboards and passages here. Show them to us!’ the army officers commanded the staff, then beat them when they said there were none. As the search wore on, the servants were taken to the reception room and locked in. When the milkman came early in the morning, he

THE YEARS OF DETENTION
was locked in with them. So was the man who came with the newspapers. The army was getting desperate. ’Sign this paper,’ an officer said to one of our staff. He refused. ’You’ve seen what happened to your Sahib,’ the officer threatened him. ’If you don’t sign, imagine what will happen to you.’ The man was so frightened that he signed.

When the search turned out to be fruitless, a truck rumbled through the gate. The soldiers unloaded a red carpet, covered it with documents that also came from the truck, and then brought in the press to photograph the new ’evidence’ against my father. Many assumed the regime was trying to build another case against my father in view of the Supreme Court’s unanimous recommendation to commute the death sentence against him to life imprisonment. When the raiding party left in the late afternoon, they took their ’evidence’ with them as well as many of our personal possessions, among them my father’s collection of antique maps.

At 70 Clifton now, I make preparations to go to Larkana to pay my respects at my father’s grave. The regime learns of my plan and cancels the scheduled flights, so I take the train. Massive crowds meet me at every station. Where there are no stations they lie across the track, forcing the train to halt. ’Revenge! Revenge!’ the crowds shout. ’We must turn our grief to strength to beat Zia at the polls,’ I tell them, encouraged by the huge turnout. The crowds are the best answer to our political op-ponents who had publicly declared that ’Bhutto’s strength has been buried in his grave, and along with it that of the PPP.’

Back in Karachi, I meet PPP leaders and supporters at ten-minute in-tervals from nine in the morning until nine at night. Every

few hours I take a break to greet my father’s mourners in the garden. Their eyes brighten when they see me - and my mother as well, after her period of seclusion is over. The people did not expect either of us to survive our periods of detention or my father’s death. We have lived a softer, more privileged life than their harsh ones. But seeing us with their own eyes seems to fill them with new hope. As one group leaves the garden, another enters.

At night I immerse myself in organisational matters, policy matters, complaints, and political arrests, having summaries prepared for my mother to read. I feel I’ll never catch up and probably wouldn’t have without the help of my schoolfriend Samiya and also of Amina and Yasmin, two young women who had become my friends and aides during the fight to appeal against my father’s death sentence. The Western press dubs Samiya, Amina and Yasmin ’Charlie’s Angels’, though I’m sure the real Charlie’s Angels would have given up under the workload. One night I fall asleep with a report in my lap. The next night I move my toothbrush and toothpaste into my study.


22
IMPRISONED IN MY OWN HOME
To calm the people before he ordered my father’s death, General Zia had again promised elections that would return the country from his military dictatorship to civilian rule. But was he going to let the PPP win? He had publicly declared that he would ’not hand power to those he had taken it from’, and that only elections with ’positive results’ would be acceptable to him.

Zia had been in this predicament before, when he scheduled elections shortly after he overthrew my father in 1977. Faced with the PPP’s certain victory at the polls, his answer then had been to cancel the elections and arrest all the party leaders instead. What would he do this time?

The local elections come first, in September. The PPP sweeps them. The national elections are to come next, the elections Zia desperately needs to win to gain legitimacy. Knowing that the rules are likely to be rigged against the PPP, our own party officials meet at 70 Clifton to debate whether or not to enter the national elections or boycott them instead. ’Electoral fields should never be left open,’ I argue, remembering what my father had told me. No matter how heavy the odds, no matter how crooked the rules, always mount an opposition. And the rules cer-tainly are crooked. Just as we expect, Zia changes them as soon as the PPP decision to participate is announced.

’Register as a political party or you can’t participate,’ the regime informs us.

We refuse. To register is to recognise Zia’s military regime.

’We’ll run as Independents,’ we counter,

though we realise the loss of our party emblem on the ballots is a great risk in a society with an official literacy rate of 27 per cent, and an actual rate closer to 8 per cent.

The regime raises the stakes. ’Independent candidates must secure S I per cent of the popular vote,’ the new rule says.

’Fine,’ we say. ’We’ll carry it.’

But on October 15, 1979, a month before the elections are scheduled to take place, the PPP reconvenes at the request of some high-ranking party officials. The question of fighting the elections is reopened, and the party splits down the middle. ’Boycott! Boycott!’ several of the party officials urge my mother in the dining room of 70 Clifton now serving as a conference room. Some of them, I know, have called me ’a silly little girl’ in private, but I speak up again. ’By continually changing the rules, Zia has lost his confidence,’ I argue. ’We must not lose ours. We swept the Local Bodies elections and we will sweep the general election too.’ It is late at night before the PPP decides by a narrow margin to uphold the decision to contest.

When Zia hears of our intention the next day, his nerves crack. The Chief Martial Law Administrator repeats the pattern of 1977, cancelling the elections altogether and once again sending his soldiers to 70 Clifton.
23

THE YEARS OF DETENTION


’The house is surrounded,’ one of the staff tells me in the middle of the night. Quickly I gather all the political papers I had laboriously collected - party papers, membership lists, letters, lists of those in jail - throw them in the bath, and bum them. I don’t want to make the regime’s persecution easier. Minutes later the soldiers enter the house to take my mother and me at gunpoint to Al-Murtaza, our country home in Larkana. We will be imprisoned there for six months.
I pace the corridors of Al-Murtaza. Though this is my mother’s ninth political detention and my seventh since the coup two years ago, I still can’t adjust to the forced isolation. Each incarceration is just adding an-other layer of anger. Perhaps at twenty-six, it is my age. But I don’t think I would feel differently at any age, especially being detained at AI-Murtaza.

Al-Murtaza was the heart of our family, the house to which we always returned from the four corners of the earth to pass our winter vacations, to celebrate Eid at the end of the holy month of Ramazan as well as my father’s birthday, to attend family weddings or pay condolences to our many relatives living on the lands that had been in the family for hundreds of years. Now the regime has declared Al-Murtaza a sub-jail for my mother and me.

The Western press is being told

by the regime that we are under ’house arrest’. But that is inaccurate. ’House arrest’ in Pakistan is quite informal, the detained person being allowed visits from friends and family, press interviews, local and long distance telephone calls, books, and some-times even a quick drive or outside meetings. Under sub-jail rules, AI-Murtaza has been deemed a prison where the Jail Manual Regulations prevail. Our telephone is disconnected. My mother and I are confined to the compound and allowed no visitors except for an occasional visit from Sanam.

The house both inside and outside the walls is surrounded by soldiers from the Frontier Force, a paramilitary group of Pathan tribesmen from the Northwest Frontier Province. In my father’s time, special commandos were posted at Al-Murtaza to keep intruders out. The Frontier Force is here now for the sole purpose of keeping his widow and his daughter in. Zia wants the country, even the world, to forget that there was ever a family named Bhutto.

In Pakistan, the papers hardly even mention our names. From October 16, 1979, the day Zia cancelled the second elections and arrested my mother and me, he added to his burgeoning list of Martial Law regulations by imposing total censorship on the press. Under Martial Law Order No. 49, the editor of any publication deemed dangerous to the ’sovereignty, integrity and security of Pakistan, or morality and maintenance of public


24
IMPRISONED IN MY OWN HOME
order’, is now subject to ten lashes and twenty-five years of rigorous im-prisonment.

Our party newspaper, Musawaaf, with a circulation of over 100,000 in the city of Lahore alone, has been closed down, and its presses seized. Other newspapers are being threatened with closure or the cut-off of govern-ment controlled newsprint and advertising if they do not comply. For the next six years, pictures of my father, mother or me will rarely appear in any newspaper. Nor will there be any favourable mention of our names. If the military censors find any story even slightly sympathetic, they will cut it out of the galleys each newspaper is required to submit for approval. At times, whole newspaper columns will run blank, the journalists’ method of letting the reading public know that news worthy of being printed has been removed by the censors.

The strength of the PPP has also forced Zia to tighten his already oppressive political restrictions. Since the imposition of Martial Law in 1977, anyone participating in political activity had been subject to im-prisonment and whipping. But from October 16, 1979, the military regime decreed that political parties themselves were illegal, a clear attempt

to kill popular support for my father’s policies once and for all. ’All political parties in Pakistan with all their groups, branches and factions . . . shall cease to exist,’ General Zia’s Martial Law Order No. 48 stated bluntly. Any member of a political party, or anyone who even calls himself one in private conversation, is now subject to fourteen years rigorous imprison-ment, the loss of his property, and twenty-five lashes. From that moment on, any mention of the PPP in the press will be preceded by the word ’defunct’. My mother and I are thus reduced to the ’defunct’ leaders of a ’defunct’ party in a defunct democracy.


Photographs of my grandfather at the 1931 Indian Round Table Confer-ence in London. Photographs of my father’s annual birthday celebrations. So much of our family history is rooted in Al-Murtaza. My father and his three sisters were born here, the midwife from the nearby village of Lar-kana coming to the women’s quarters built by my grandfather to deliver them. Though the old house has been replaced by a more modem one, the sense of AI-Murtaza as the true home of the Bhuttos remains.

Blue and white tiles flank the front door depicting the men and women of Moenjodaro, a nearby ruin of a highly advanced Indus civilisation dating from 2500 sc. As a small child I thought the ancient city was called ’Munj Jo Dero’, which in Sindhi means ’my place’. My brothers, sister and I took great pride that we had been raised in the shadow of Moenjodaro, that we lived on the bank of the Indus which had been bringing life to the land since the beginnings of time. In no other place


25

THE YEARS OF DETENTION


did we feel such continuity with the past, for our ancestors were directly traceable to the Muslim invasion of India in 712 AD. The diaries of one of our ancestors giving details about the family were washed away in a great flood in my great-grandfather’s time. But as children we were told that we were either descended from the Rajputs, the Hindu warrior class in India which converted to Islam at the time of the Muslim invasion, or from the conquering Arabs who entered India through our home province of Sindh, giving it the name ’The Gateway to Islam’.

Hundreds of thousands throughout India and Pakistan belonged to the Bhutto tribe, one of the largest in Sindh, whose members ranged from farmers to landowners. Our branch of the family was directly descended from the famous tribal chief of the Bhuttos, Sardar Dodo Khan. Several villages in Upper Sindh - Mirpur Bhutto where uncle Mumtaz’s family live, Garhi Khuda Bakhsh Bhutto where my own family graveyard is located - are named after our ancestors, who had

owned much of the land in the province and dominated its politics for hundreds of years. My immediate family retained a house near Garhi Khuda Bakhsh Bhutto in Naudero, where my father and brothers used to go on Eid days to offer guests the traditional holiday fare of rice cooked with sugar cane and water flavoured with flower petals. But since my grandfather’s time the true centre of the family had been in Larkana, at AI-Murtaza.
Before the first land reforms in 1958, the Bhuttos were among the largest employers of agricultural workers in the province. Our lands like those of other landowners in Sindh were measured in square miles, not acres. As children we loved to hear the story of the amazement of Charles Napier, the British conqueror of Sindh in 1843. ’Whose lands are these?’ he re-peatedly asked his driver as he toured the province. ’Bhutto’s lands,’ came the inevitable response. ’Wake me up when we are off Bhutto’s lands,’ he ordered. He was surprised when some time later he woke up on his own. ’Who owns this land?’ he asked. ’Bhutto,’ the driver repeated. Napier became famous for his dispatch in Latin to the British military command after he conquered the province: ’Peccaai - I have sinned.’ As children we thought it a confession, not a pun.

My father loved to recount other family stories. ’Your great-grand-father, Mir Ghulam Murtaza Bhutto, was a handsome and dashing man of around twenty-one,’ my father would begin one of our favourite stories. ’All the women in Sindh were in love with him, including a young British woman. In those days, it was haram - forbidden - to marry a foreigner but he couldn’t prevent her feelings for him. A certain British army officer Colonel Mayhew heard about this forbidden relationship and sent for your great-grandfather.


26
IMPRISONED IN MY OWN HOME
’It did not matter to the British officer that he was in Larkana, the hometown of the Bhuttos. It did not matter to him that the Bhutto land stretched farther than the eye could see. The British had little respect for our family heritage. All they saw was our brown skin.

”’How dare you encourage the affections of a British woman!” the Colonel warned Ghulam Murtaza when your great-grandfather stood before him. ”I am going to have to teach you a lesson.” And the Colonel picked up a whip. But, as the Colonel raised his hand to lash Ghulam Murtaza, your great-grandfather seized the whip and lashed the officer instead. Screaming for help, the Colonel sought refuge under a table until Ghulam Murtaza strode out of the office. ”You must escape,” Ghulam Murtaza’s family and friends urged him. ”The British will kill you.” So your great-grandfather left Larkana,

accompanied by some companions and the British woman who insisted on leaving with him.

’The British were soon in hot pursuit. ”Split up,” Ghulam Murtaza ordered his companions. ”One group come with me. The rest of you go with the English woman. But on no account let her be taken by the British. It is a matter of honour.” And off they galloped in different direc-tions, crisscrossing the river Indus to deceive the pursuing British. The British moved perilously close to the party with the British woman, for she could not travel with the speed of your great-grandfather. To fool them the men dug a tunnel to hide in and covered the entrance with leaves. When the British found the tunnel, your great-grandfather’s friends became desperate. They had promised Ghulam Murtaza they would not hand the girl over to the British. They could not face the dishonour of surrendering her to the enemy. Just before the British reached the woman, your great-grandfather’s retinue killed her.’

Our eyes were wide by this point, but the story had just begun. Our great-grandfather had escaped into the independent state of Bahwalpur. But after the British threatened to seize the state my great-grandfather thanked the Nawab for his hospitality and crossed the Indus again to gain sanc-tuary in the kingdom of Afghanistan where he was a guest of the Royal family. In fury, the British had seized all his lands. Our family home was auctioned. Our silk carpets were auctioned. Our sofas made of the im-ported silks, satins and velvets of the old days, our plates made of pure gold and silver, the huge cooking pots used to cook for the thousands of family followers on religious holidays, the embroidered tents set up for celebrations were all sold. Ghulam Murtaza had to be punished and pun-ished severely, for it was unthinkable for anyone to defy the British. They were like gods. In parts of India natives were not allowed to walk the same streets; they could not answer back to a British person, let alone strike one.

Finally a compromise was worked out with the British and Ghulam


27

THE YEARS OF DETENTION


Murtaza returned to Larkana. But his days were numbered. He became ill and began to lose weight. The hakims, or village doctors, suspected poison though no one could find the source. Your great-grandfather had tasters to test his food and drinking water, but the poisoning continued until it killed him at ’the early age of twenty-seven. Afterwards, the source was found to be his hookah, the water pipe he used to smoke tobacco after dinner.

I loved hearing these family stories, as did my brothers Mir Murtaza and Shah Nawaz, who naturally identified

with their namesakes. The advers-ities faced by our ancestors formed our own moral code, just as my father had intended. Loyalty. Honour. Principle.
Ghulam Murtaza Bhutto’s son, my grandfather, Sir Shah Nawaz, was the first to start breaking the Bhuttos away from the feudal ethos that was stifling a whole segment of society. Until his time, the Bhuttos had only married other Bhuttos, first cousins or possibly, second. Islam entitled women to inherit property and the only way to keep the land within the family was through marriage. Such a ’business’ marriage had been arranged between my father and his cousin Amir when he was only twelve and she eight or nine years older. He had resisted until my grandfather tempted him with a cricket set from England. After their marriage, Amir had re-turned to live with her family and my father had returned to school, leaving him with a lasting impression of the inequity, especially as far as women were concerned, of forced, family marriages.

At least Amir had married. When there was no suitable cousin in the family, the Bhutto women did not marry at all. For this reason my aunts, my grandfather’s daughters from his first marriage, had remained single all their lives. Despite great opposition from the family, my grandfather had allowed his daughters from his second marriage to marry outside the Bhutto circle, though they were not love matches, but strictly arranged affairs. A generation later, my sister Sanam would become the first Bhutto woman to make her own decision. Contrary to my expectations, I would follow the traditional path and have an arranged marriage myself.

Still, my grandfather was considered very progressive. He educated his children, even sending his daughters to school, an act that was considered scandalous by the other landowners. Many feudal landowners did not even bother to educate their sons. ’My sons have land. They have a guaranteed income, and will never become employees or work for anyone else. My daughters will inherit land, and be looked after by their husbands or their brothers. So why bother with educationT ran the feudal ethos.

My grandfather, however, had seen at first hand the advances being made by the educated Hindus and urban Muslims in Bombay where he


28
IMPRISONED IN MY OWN HOME
served in the government during the rule of the British Raj. By educating his own children, Sir Shah Nawaz tried to set an example for the other Sindhi landowners so that after the partition of India in 1947 and the establishment of independent Pakistan, our society would not stagnate. Despite the raised eyebrows of his peers, he sent my father abroad to study.

My father had not disappointed him, graduating with honours from the University of California at Berkeley and then going on to read law at Christ Church, Oxford, and being called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn before returning to Pakistan to practise law.


Yüklə 1,3 Mb.

Dostları ilə paylaş:
1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   ...   38




Verilənlər bazası müəlliflik hüququ ilə müdafiə olunur ©genderi.org 2024
rəhbərliyinə müraciət

    Ana səhifə