In September 1996 a fourteen-year-old Fatima Bhutto hid in a windowless dressing room shielding her baby brother while shots rang out in the streets outside the family home in Karachi. This was the evening that her father, Murtaza, was murdered along with six of his associates.
The Forsyte Saga, this is not. It might best have been written by a Jacobean dramatist — Webster, perhaps. Fatima Bhutto’s grandfather was hanged. One uncle was poisoned, possibly at his sister Benazir’s behest. Her father Murtaza, a former terrorist previously accused of a plane hijacking, was murdered by Karachi police. Aunt Benazir herself was shot in December 2007. Benazir’s husband Asif Zardari, considered by some to be the most notoriously corrupt figure in the subcontinent, climbed over her corpse to become Pakistan’s president, a post that he occupies to this day. He is one of the few characters in this catalogue of hate and blood who has not so far become dead.
Fatima, now 27, seeks in this book to raise a monument to the father she idolised. Her work is emotional, partial, naive and wholly unreliable about who really did what to whom. But it possesses readability for those with a taste for family horror stories.
The Bhuttos are Pakistani aristocracy, feudal landlords for centuries. The author tells proudly of a British officer conducting a census in Sind during the Raj, who told a subordinate: “Call me when you’ve finished detailing the Bhutto land.” Several days later he asked why he had heard nothing, and was told: “I’m still working on the Bhutto lands.”
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Fatima’s grandfather, was as equivocal a figure as any of Pakistan’s other modern leaders. He served as foreign minister under an army dictatorship, then at the 1970 election became leader of the largest political group, the Pakistan People’s party, which he had created. When East Pakistan’s electorate voted overwhelmingly for separation, he endorsed the army’s determination to preserve national unity by force. An appallingly bloody campaign of repression followed, halted only by Indian intervention and victory in the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war. General Yahya Khan fell from power in Islamabad, and Bhutto became national leader.
An ardent socialist and promoter of Muslim solidarity, Bhutto forged close links with China, whose aid he enlisted to build a Pakistani nuclear bomb. Even his worshipping granddaughter criticises the brutality with which he suppressed dissent in Balochistan, where thousands died.
In 1977, he was deposed and jailed by army chief General Zia al-Haq. Charged with the murder of a political opponent, he was later executed. To some Pakistanis, he was and remains a martyr. There is little doubt that the murder charge was a frame-up, but Bhutto’s acquiescence, if nothing worse, in the 1971 massacres in today’s Bangladesh makes it hard for most outsiders to cast him as an innocent.
His sons fled into exile. Fatima’s Harvard-educated father Murtaza, born in 1954, embarked on a life that fills his daughter with compassion, but may evoke mixed sentiments among others. He began an affair with Della Roufogalis, a glamorous Greek allegedly engaged in a civil-liberties campaign to persuade the Athens dictatorship to free her husband, a right-wing general, from imprisonment. Then in 1979, Murtaza pitched camp in Kabul and set about fomenting armed resistance to the Zia regime. He dumped Della to marry an Afghan, Fowzia, who was already pregnant with Fatima. Domestic bliss was interrupted when a Pakistan Airlines plane was hijacked to Kabul. One passenger was murdered during the protracted stand-off.
Fatima suggests that Zia’s agents staged the hijack to discredit her father, but Murtaza was widely held responsible. His sister Benazir, under house arrest in Karachi, narrowly escaped indictment for gloating about the episode.
In 1982, Afghan hospitality towards Murtaza became exhausted. With Fowzia and little Fatima, he moved on to Damascus, where he spent most of the next 12 years hanging around the Sheraton Hotel. If this sounds an unsympathetic way of putting it, he was a guest of President Assad. Fatima found the Syrian monster wonderfully kind and cuddly, but everybody else assumed he sponsored Murtaza as an aspiring terrorist. She defies belief by asserting: “It was a strange, beautiful childhood.”
In 1985, the family was visiting Murtaza’s brother Shahnawaz in the south of France when its next little drama took place. One morning, Shahnawaz’s wife Raehana reported finding him dead, apparently poisoned. She herself was held for some time on suspicion. Fatima scouts the possibility that Benazir might have promoted the murder, being, she claims, thick with the CIA and the Pakistan intelligence service. At the time, says the author with notable bathos: “I felt nauseous. Why was everything in this family so complicated?” Then her parents started quarrelling, and finally divorced, leaving Fatima with her father. The daughter now hates Fowzia, saying: “I am scared of my biological mother.”
President Zia’s probable assassination in 1988 and Benazir’s subsequent ascent to power made Murtaza no more welcome in Pakistan, where he was branded a terrorist. Fatima, in turn, denounces Benazir and her husband as founts of corruption. Only in 1994 did Murtaza return to his own country, having won a provincial assembly seat in absentia as an independent candidate.
He was promptly jailed. After his release, he barnstormed the country, promoting fiery socialism, in opposition to his sister’s governance. On September 20, 1996 he and his guards were mown down by police on a Karachi street, probably on Islamabad’s orders. In December 2007, Benazir in turn was shot, after returning from exile to contest an election she would have won.
The West mourned Benazir as a prospective saviour of her country. In reality, she was as corrupt, ruthless and incompetent a ruler as any in Pakistan’s modern history. Her only claim to respect derived from a democratic legitimacy that her country’s dictators have lacked.
This book’s virtues derive from the author’s passion and some vivid pen portraits. Its crippling weakness is blind rejection of any pretension to insight or judgment. But she conveys a terrifying sense of the ungovernability of Pakistan and its 180m people, exposed to the competing violence of rulers and rebels. Another army coup must be due some day soon.
Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir by Fatima Bhutto
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