Songs of Blood and Sword Read online

  Songs

  of

  Blood

  and

  Sword

  Songs

  of

  Blood

  and

  Sword

  A DAUGHTER’S MEMOIR

  FATIMA BHUTTO

  VIKING CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Copyright © Fatima Bhutto, 2010

  Fatima Bhutto has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  ISBN: 978-0-670-06960-6

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  For my Joonam, Nusrat, who is always with me

  And my mother Ghinwa

  for giving me life

  THE BHUTTOS OF LARKANA

  Taken from a family tree commissioned by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and kept in 70 Clifton

  Poem of the Unknown

  On your breast lay

  the deep scar of your enemy

  but you standing cypress did not fall

  it is your way to die.

  In you nestles songs of blood and sword

  in you the migrating birds

  in you the anthem of victory

  Your eyes have never been so bright.

  KHOSROW GOLSURKHI (Executed 1972)

  Preface

  12 November 2008

  It is almost eleven at night in Karachi. From my bedroom in70 Clifton I can hear the constant hum of traffic. I’m used to the sound now; it has become the soundtrack to my writing and thinking here. But now there are sirens too. Ambulances, or maybe politicians, driving around the city blaring out announcements of their arrival. Heavily armed elite guards, mainly Rangers toting Kalashnikovs, accompany them. Sometimes, there’s gunfire. More often than not, it’s a staccato burst and it sounds far away. It’s not the wedding season in Karachi, when macho males take to the streets and spray the sky with bullets. It’s not New Year’s Eve, traditionally boisterous and often peppered with gunfire to mark the start of the New Year. This is the new Karachi. But we’ve seen it all before.

  Fourteen years ago I missed weeks of school because of the violence that had taken hold of our city. I remember going to sleep hearing the hum of bullets nearby. I remember picking up the newspapers the next morning and seeing the previous night’s body count. It was a dangerous city then, my Karachi. The Sindhi PPP government launched a genocidal strike, called Operation Clean-Up, against the ethnic Muhajirs who form the bulk of the MQM political party. The MQM began to hit back. They formed their own death squads and the sound of their revenge became aggressively familiar too.

  There were moments, when I was younger, when it scared me to be here in Karachi, in this house. I used to shiver in the dead of summer nights, begging myself to sleep and praying that I might push past the fear of the violence and the spectres of the dead that surrounded me and my city. But one night I heard the mynah birds outside my window crowing at five in the morning. After that I would wait to hear them, these dark, rough birds, and I would fall asleep as they reassured me with their raven song that we had defeated the night once more. I made my peace with 70 Clifton and with this city when I realized that the sounds of the mynah birds would not follow me elsewhere and that I would miss them should I pack my bags and head somewhere far away

  But that was a long time ago. We haven’t lived like this in over a decade. We haven’t been this afraid in a long time.

  After the PPP government fell in 1996, on the heel of more violence, we had a few years of calm in Karachi as Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the sometimes opposition sometimes ruling party, the Pakistan Muslim League, blundered through his own second term. It was quiet then. We went to school, took our tests, ate our watery lunch at the school cafeteria, and came home safely.

  After the Musharraf coup and the advent of the war on terror, we saw violence rear its head in our city again. The times and methods of terror had changed in the sleepy interim period; violence shifted its course and mutated, growing stronger until it became an unrecognizable strain of what we once knew intimately. This time they weren’t gunmen. Instead, they were suicide bombers and they tended to strike fast-food outlets and crowded malls designed like traditional bazaars. When they were feeling particularly aggrieved, they attacked embassies. But we Karachiites, so schooled in survival, knew which ones to avoid. We avoided driving past the American consulate. We didn’t drive very close to the British high commission either. And we ordered take-away when we were feeling peckish.

  The electricity just went off, blinking out in between the typing of these words. The lights go out all the time now; this is the fifth time the power has been cut today. It’s worse outside the city, though. A friend recently returned from the interior told me today that in central Sindh villagers are lucky to get two hours electricity a day, if any at all. Autumn in Sindh, oddly enough, is one of the hottest periods of the year. Rarely, on good days, my friend explained, four hours worth of electricity might reach the poorest houses across the province. There is, fortunately, a generator in my house so I sit in the darkness listening to the restless sound of Karachi’s errant traffic, chaotically composed of cars, trucks, amped-up motorcycles carrying families of four or more and auto rickshaws, as I wait by the glow of my laptop for the generator to whirr into life. Its frenzied sound overpowers everything. It’s like a mosquito buzzing in my ear as I write.

  Electricity prices under this new PPP government have soared. The Karachi Electrical Supply Company, one of the most corrupt organizations in this country, has always been appalling – no matter whether you’re at home or not your electricity bill is always the same. You pay phenomenal changes
and then sit in darkness for most of the year. The poor, who don’t have generators, subsist in darkness. Pakistan recently missed its millennium goal of eradicating polio, still rife in our country, because the state could not guarantee the proper refriger-ation of the vaccines. Corruption is as simple as that. This winter, Karachi traders have decided not to pay their KESC bills in protest over the latest blackouts. They’ve been on the streets every day this week, burning their electricity bills in Saddar, the city’s commercial centre; burning tyres in Malir, a poor Baloch neighbourhood near the airport; and protesting outside local press clubs and business centres. India has just launched a moon mission and we can’t even light up the streets. We are a nuclear-armed state that cannot run refrigerators.

  But back to the violence. We’ve had a record number of suicide bombings in the past year, topping Iraq and Afghanistan at various points. Suicide bombers have grown plucky now; they are no longer targeting infidel Western food outlets or foreign embassies. Now they strike on main roads, outside office buildings, police stations and army barracks; they direct their vengeance against the government and those politicians, back in office, who have promised us to a foreign power.

  For several months, unmanned American Predator drones have been flying over Northern Pakistan in what feels like daily missions. Local newspapers report the strikes that kill scores of people with disheartening ease. They say the ‘operations’ were ‘successful’. Our newspapers, which are now so heavily censored that my column, which I wrote for two years, has been halted because the democratic government of Pakistan does not tolerate criticism – especially not internally – are shallow empty shells of what newspapers ought to be. They never say exactly what they mean – that a ‘successful’ drone mission means people were killed, often as they slept. Sometimes, they tell us that the dead were militants. Sometimes they tell us they were Al Qaeda operatives. Other times, they say they were part of the burgeoning Pakistani Taliban. They’re never civilians. There are never mistakes; the drones remove the possibility of human error. This is terrorist hunting, American-style. Dead women and children killed in their schools and fields are ‘human shields’, young boys armed with only blackboard slates in their local madrassahs, since they have no government schools to attend, are future jihadis, it is inconceivable that anything less than the hysterical is possible.

  We are a country that has enthusiastically fought the war on terror against our own people for the last seven years. But never before have we allowed a foreign country, American or otherwise, to carry out strikes on our own soil. It’s unheard of. Never before have we allowed machines to fly through our skies and kill our citizens for free, as if life here costs nothing and can be swiftly cancelled out if the political will is strong enough.

  Pakistan is being spoken of now, as if the transition happened quietly, almost secretly, as the third front in this war: Afghanistan, Iraq and now Pakistan. Robert Fisk was on Al Jazeera – a channel still officially banned in Pakistan, the ban circumvented by wily cable operators – saying the excitement over the recent global financial meltdown has been used to cover the fact that Pakistan is the world’s new battleground. The American vice-presidential candidates, in their debate, both said Pakistan represents more danger than Iran. Barack Obama has said, if need be, America will bomb us. But they already have.

  Tonight, as I write this, the BBC is reporting that a US missile strike in North Waziristan has killed eight schoolchildren. Two missiles, fired from yet another drone, hit the school this morning. The school was near a supposed Taliban commander’s house. The Pakistani Army issued a classic we’re investigating this response. The United States has said nothing. This is how wars are fought now. The new President of Pakistan has hungrily asked for drone technology for himself; he needs it, he says, to fight Pakistan. The new parliament has vowed vigorously to continue to help America, and its allies, the Pakistani Army, to launch successful operations against the terrorists. Or militants. Or Al Qaeda. Or schoolchildren, if they happen to get in the way.

  Bodies, mutilated corpses bearing the signs of torture, have started turning up again in Karachi, on the outskirts of the city, in jute sacks. The newspapers, sedated, merely note this. Man found on a highway, cause of death body riddled with bullets, killer unknown – the victim had been shot to death. End of story. There is nothing new about this. Recently, I met the German consul general; he had come to say goodbye – he was retiring from his post and leaving Pakistan. I mentioned the resurgence of tortured bodies and roadside burials, mentioned that there was a time when this happened before. He told me his office had reports of sixty such deaths. Sixty such sacks since the new government took over in February, not even a year ago. I asked him what the timing meant to him. He shrugged and nibbled on some more goodbye cake. ‘I’m retiring,’ he laughed.

  Political opponents of the PPP, not necessarily very active or interesting ones, have left the country. They’re waiting out their time in Dubai or London. Those who stayed have missed the opportunity to lounge in exile and have been dealt a different sort of banishment. The former provincial representative of Larkana, a rotund, thuggish fellow, who belonged to an anti-PPP pro-Musharraf party, has been in jail since he lost the February elections. The charge levelled against him is that he plotted to kill the President’s sister, a housewife turned politician. His lawyers have quit. No one will defend him. Another opposition member, a currently elected member of parliament and former Chief Minister of Sindh who belongs to the same passé pro-Musharraf party, was physically beaten in the middle of the assembly. The Home Minister, a wealthy business associate of the new President turned politician, came on television after the public beating his party associates had carried out and said, ghoulishly, ‘I’m a doctor, we’ve just treated a sick man.* If he is not careful, he will receive more of our medicine.’ The Information Minister of the PPP – who also happens to be a former Karachi socialite and journalist as well as being the Minister of Health and an advisor to the President – said in August, ahead of the new President’s debut, that her party ‘never indulges in the politics of revenge’. It was telling that such a statement had to be made; they’re prostesting too much, thought those of us who have suffered under these political demagogues. But that’s how the business of politics is done now.

  How have we come to this state of affairs? The journey goes back a long way, before my father was murdered.

  Four years ago I set out to trace my father’s life. I opened dusty boxes filled with newspaper clippings, letters, diaries and official documents kept and collected by various members of the family over a fortyyear period. I unearthed my father’s old school bag, kept in its own dusty box, and racked my memory for names of college friends and classmates, cold-calling people whose names sounded familiar and writing long letters to addresses that I hoped were still valid. The search for my father’s past took me across Pakistan, from our Karachi home to the peaks of the Frontier province and the lush plains of Punjab.

  I travelled across Europe and America, searching out lost loves and old acquaintances, all connected in the web of my father’s youth. Interviews were conducted in person, by email, and on the telephone. Photographs were scanned and sent across or delivered by mail when we felt that the internet might be too open a space on which to exchange information about sensitive topics. I spoke not only to childhood friends and family members who remembered the Bhutto children at their youngest and most uncomplicated, spread out across continents, but also to police officers, members of my grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s cabinet, founding members and foot soldiers of the original Pakistan People’s Party, judges, lawyers, and South Asia experts and professors. There were many who asked that I protect their identity; it is not an easy task to speak out against the status quo, to criticize the legacies of serving parliamentarians and presidents, but they spoke to me still and interviews were conducted in crowded meeting places to circumvent our voices being picked up by the recording devices that logged c
onversations at home. Other times, when it might have been too dangerous to be seen speaking to me, interviews were done in confined private spaces, without notebooks or pens, memory serving as my only transcriber until I was safely at home and able to put pen to paper and record what I had learned. 70 Clifton, our family home, is an archive in itself. It is a living testament to the Bhuttos. There are still wardrobes filled with my great-grandfather’s suits and shelves that hold my grandfather’s cologne, Shalimar, his glasses and his cufflinks. Bookcases rise towards the ceiling cluttered with velvet-lined state albums and official government memoranda in musty green leather folders bearing the insignia of the Prime Minister’s office. Documents, both written by hand and officially typed, served to build a political as well as a personal chronology.

  It has been difficult to surround myself with the lives and scandals of the dead, to immerse myself among their personal effects and to speak to them through interlocutors acting as mediums. I have struggled to imagine people I have loved and known as human beings independent of my recollections. My detective work has been shocking and painful at times, but it was, for me, an uncomfortable and necessary pursuit. Milan Kundera once said that the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting; this is my journey of remembering.

  * The Home Minister is a doctor, businessman, politician, was once in the supposed running for the chairmanship of the Pakistan Cricket Board and is an old chum of the President. He has been charged, at various points in time, with the crimes of fraud and murder. His wife, a doctor, businesswoman, politician and old chum of the President, is the speaker of the assembly.

  { I }

  I9 September 1996. It was close to three in the morning and we were sitting in the drawing room downstairs, a room typical of the house’s abstract art deco style, boxed in with no windows, with maroon velvet walls and decorated with modern Pakistani art. We had just come back from dinner at the Avari Hotel. Papa’s birthday had been the night before and some friends had invited us for a belated celebration. He was forty-two.