[R-G] Benazir Bhutto - Daughter of the West (Tariq Ali)

[Tim Murphy]

Amidst all the attempts to canonise Benazir Bhutto as a martyr for
Democracy, I remembered this little dose of sanity, written a few weeks
before her death...

=======

December 13th 2007
London Review of Books
www.lrb.co.uk


Daughter of the West

by 

Tariq Ali 


Arranged marriages can be a messy business. Designed principally as a means
of accumulating wealth, circumventing undesirable flirtations or
transcending clandestine love affairs, they often don’t work. Where both
parties are known to loathe each other, only a rash parent, desensitised by
the thought of short-term gain, will continue with the process knowing full
well that it will end in misery and possibly violence. That this is equally
true in political life became clear in the recent attempt by Washington to
tie Benazir Bhutto to Pervez Musharraf.

The single, strong parent in this case was a desperate State Department –
with John Negroponte as the ghoulish go-between and Gordon Brown as the
blushing bridesmaid – fearful that if it did not push this through both
parties might soon be too old for recycling. The bride was certainly in a
hurry, the groom less so. Brokers from both sides engaged in lengthy
negotiations on the size of the dowry. Her broker was and remains Rehman
Malik, a former boss of Pakistan’s FIA, who has been investigated for
corruption by the National Accountability Bureau and who served nearly a
year in prison after Benazir’s fall, then became one of her business
partners and is currently under investigation (with her) by a Spanish court
looking into a company called Petroline FZC, which made questionable
payments to Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Documents, if genuine, show that she
chaired the company. She may have been in a hurry but she did not wish to be
seen taking the arm of a uniformed president. He was not prepared to forgive
her past. The couple’s distaste for each other yielded to a mutual
dependence on the United States. Neither party could say ‘no’, though
Musharraf hoped the union could be effected inconspicuously. Fat chance.

Both parties made concessions. She agreed that he could take off his uniform
after his ‘re-election’ by Parliament, but it had to be before the next
general election. (He has now done this, leaving himself dependent on the
goodwill of his successor as army chief of staff.) He pushed through a legal
ruling – yet another sordid first in the country’s history – known as the
National Reconciliation Ordinance, which withdrew all cases of corruption
pending against politicians accused of looting the national treasury. The
ruling was crucial for her since she hoped that the money-laundering and
corruption cases pending in three European courts – in Valencia, Geneva and
London – would now be dismissed. This doesn’t seem to have happened.

Many Pakistanis – not just the mutinous and mischievous types who have to be
locked up at regular intervals – were repelled, and coverage of ‘the deal’
in the Pakistan media was universally hostile, except on state television.
The ‘breakthrough’ was loudly trumpeted in the West, however, and a
whitewashed Benazir Bhutto was presented on US networks and BBC TV news as
the champion of Pakistani democracy – reporters loyally referred to her as
‘the former prime minister’ rather than the fugitive politician facing
corruption charges in several countries.

She had returned the favour in advance by expressing sympathy for the US
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, lunching with the Israeli ambassador to the UN
(a litmus test) and pledging to ‘wipe out terrorism’ in her own country. In
1979 a previous military dictator had bumped off her father with
Washington’s approval, and perhaps she thought it would be safer to seek
permanent shelter underneath the imperial umbrella. HarperCollins had paid
her half a million dollars to write a new book. The working title she chose
was ‘Reconciliation’.

As for the general, he had begun his period in office in 1999 by bowing to
the spirit of the age and titling himself ‘chief executive’ rather than
‘chief martial law administrator’, which had been the norm. Like his
predecessors, he promised he would stay in power only for a limited period,
pledging in 2003 to resign as army chief of staff in 2004. Like his
predecessors, he ignored his pledge. Martial law always begins with the
promise of a new order that will sweep away the filth and corruption that
marked the old one: in this case it toppled the civilian administrations of
Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. But ‘new orders’ are not forward movements,
more military detours that further weaken the shaky foundations of a country
and its institutions. Within a decade the uniformed ruler will be overtaken
by a new upheaval.

Dreaming of her glory days in the last century, Benazir wanted a large
reception on her return. The general was unhappy. The intelligence agencies
(as well as her own security advisers) warned her of the dangers. She had
declared war on the terrorists and they had threatened to kill her. But she
was adamant. She wanted to demonstrate her popularity to the world and to
her political rivals, including those inside her own fiefdom, the Pakistan
People’s Party (PPP). For a whole month before she boarded the Dubai-Karachi
flight, the PPP were busy recruiting volunteers from all over the country to
welcome her. Up to 200,000 people lined the streets, but it was a far cry
from the million who turned up in Lahore in 1986 when a very different
Benazir returned to challenge General Zia ul-Haq. The plan had been to move
slowly in the Bhuttomobile from Karachi airport to the tomb of the country’s
founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, where she would make a speech. It was not to
be. As darkness fell, the bombers struck. Who they were and who sent them
remains a mystery. She was unhurt, but 130 people died, including some of
the policemen guarding her. The wedding reception had led to mayhem.

The general, while promising to collaborate with Benazir, was coolly making
arrangements to prolong his own stay at President’s House. Even before her
arrival he had considered taking drastic action to dodge the obstacles that
stood in his way, but his generals (and the US Embassy) seemed unconvinced.
The bombing of Benazir’s cavalcade reopened the debate. Pakistan, if not
exactly the erupting volcano portrayed in the Western media, was being
shaken by all sorts of explosions. The legal profession, up in arms at
Musharraf’s recent dismissal of the chief justice, had won a temporary
victory, resulting in a fiercely independent Supreme Court. The independent
TV networks continued to broadcast reports that challenged official
propaganda. Investigative journalism is never popular with governments and
the general often contrasted the deference with which he was treated by the
US networks and BBC television with the ‘unruly’ questioning inflicted on
him by local journalists: it ‘misled the people’. He had become obsessed
with the media coverage of the lawyers’ revolt. A decline in his popularity
increased the paranoia. His advisers were people he had promoted. Generals
who had expressed divergent opinions in ‘frank and informal get-togethers’
had been retired. His political allies were worried that their opportunities
to enrich themselves even further would be curtailed if they had to share
power with Benazir.

What if the Supreme Court were now to declare his re-election by a dying and
unrepresentative assembly illegal? To ward off disaster, the ISI had been
preparing blackmail flicks: agents secretly filmed some of the Supreme Court
judges in flagrante. But so unpopular had Musharraf become that even the
sight of judicial venerables in bed might not have done the trick. It might
even have increased their support. (In 1968, when a right-wing, pro-military
rag in Lahore published an attack on me, it revealed that I ‘had attended
sex orgies in a French country house organised by [my] friend, the Jew
Cohn-Bendit. All the fifty women in the swimming-pool were Jewish.’ Alas,
this was totally false, but my parents were amazed at the number of people
who congratulated them on my virility.) Musharraf decided that blackmail
wasn’t worth the risk. Only firm action could ‘restore order’ – i.e. save
his skin. The usual treatment in these cases is a declaration of martial
law. But what if the country is already being governed by the army chief of
staff? The solution is simple. Treble the dose. Organise a coup within a
coup. That is what Musharraf decided to do. Washington was informed a few
weeks in advance, Downing Street somewhat later. Benazir’s patrons in the
West told her what was about to happen and she, foolishly for a political
leader who has just returned to her country, evacuated to Dubai.

On 3 November Musharraf, as chief of the army, suspended the 1973
constitution and imposed a state of emergency: all non-government TV
channels were taken off the air, the mobile phone networks were jammed,
paramilitary units surrounded the Supreme Court. The chief justice convened
an emergency bench of judges, who – heroically – declared the new
dispensation ‘illegal and unconstitutional’. They were unceremoniously
removed and put under house arrest. Pakistan’s judges have usually been
acquiescent. Those who in the past resisted military leaders were soon
bullied out of it, so the decision of this chief justice took the country by
surprise and won him great admiration. Global media coverage of Pakistan
suggests a country of generals, corrupt politicians and bearded lunatics:
the struggle to reinstate the chief justice had presented a different
picture.

Aitzaz Ahsan, a prominent member of the PPP, minister of the interior in
Benazir’s first government and currently president of the Bar Association,
was arrested and placed in solitary confinement. Several thousand political
and civil rights activists were picked up. Imran Khan, a fierce and
incorruptible opponent of the regime, was arrested, charged with ‘state
terrorism’ – for which the penalty is death or life imprisonment – and taken
in handcuffs to a remote high-security prison. Musharraf, Khan argued, had
begun yet another shabby chapter in Pakistan’s history.

Lawyers were arrested all over the country; many were physically attacked by
policemen. Humiliate them was the order, and the police obliged. A lawyer,
‘Omar’, circulated an account of what happened:

While I was standing talking to my colleagues, we saw the police go wild on
the orders of a superior officer. In riot gear . . . brandishing weapons and
sticks, about a hundred policemen attacked us . . . and seemed intensely
happy at doing so. We all ran.

Some of us who were not as nimble on their feet as others were caught by the
police and beaten mercilessly. We were then locked in police vans used to
transport convicted prisoners. Everyone was stunned at this show of brute
force but it did not end. The police went on mayhem inside the court
premises and court buildings . . . Those of us who were arrested were taken
to various police stations and put in lockups. At midnight, we were told
that we were being shifted to jail. We could not get bail as our fundamental
rights were suspended. Sixty lawyers were put into a police van ten feet by
four feet wide and five feet in height. We were squashed like sardines. When
the van reached the jail, we were told that we could not get [out] until
orders of our detention were received by the jail authorities. Our older
colleagues started to suffocate, some fainted, others started to panic
because of claustrophobia. The police ignored our screams and refused to
open the van doors. Finally, after three hours . . . we were let out and
taken to mosquito-infected barracks where the food given to us smelled like
sewage water.

Geo, the largest TV network, had long since located its broadcasting
facilities in Dubai. It was a strange sensation watching the network in
London when the screens were blank in Pakistan. On the very first day of the
emergency I saw Hamid Mir, a journalist loathed by the general, reporting
from Islamabad and asserting that the US Embassy had given the green light
to the coup because it regarded the chief justice as a nuisance and wrongly
believed him to be ‘a Taliban sympathiser’. Certainly no US spokesperson or
State Department adjunct in the Foreign Office criticised the dismissal of
the eight Supreme Court judges or their arrest: that was the quid pro quo
for Washington’s insistence that Musharraf take off his uniform. If he was
going to turn civilian he wanted all the other rules twisted in his favour.
A newly appointed stooge Supreme Court would soon help him with the
rule-bending. As would the authorities in Dubai, who suspended Geo’s
facilities.

In the evening of that first day, and after several delays, a flustered
General Musharraf, his hair badly dyed, appeared on TV, trying to look like
the sort of leader who wants it understood that the political crisis is to
be discussed with gravity and sangfroid. Instead, he came across as a dumbed
down dictator fearful for his own political future. His performance as he
broadcast to the nation, first in Urdu and then in English, was incoherent.
The gist was simple: he had to act because the Supreme Court had ‘so
demoralised our state agencies that we can’t fight the “war on terror”’ and
the TV networks had become ‘totally irresponsible’. ‘I have imposed
emergency,’ he said halfway through his diatribe, adding, with a
contemptuous gesture: ‘You must have seen it on TV.’ Was he being sarcastic,
given that most channels had been shut down? Who knows? Mohammed Hanif, the
sharp-witted head of the BBC’s Urdu Service, which monitored the broadcast,
confessed himself flummoxed when he wrote up what he heard. He had no doubt
that the Urdu version of the speech was the general’s own work. Hanif’s
deconstruction – he quoted the general in Urdu and in English – deserved a
broadcast all of its own:

"Here are some random things he said. And trust me, these things were said
quite randomly. Yes, he did say: ‘Extremism bahut extreme ho gaya hai
[extremism has become too extreme] . . . Nobody is scared of us anymore . .
. Islamabad is full of extremists . . . There is a government within
government . . . Officials are being asked to the courts . . . Officials are
being insulted by the judiciary.’

At one point he appeared wistful when reminiscing about his first three
years in power: ‘I had total control.’ You were almost tempted to ask: ‘What
happened then, uncle?’ But obviously, uncle didn’t need any prompting. He
launched into his routine about three stages of democracy. He claimed he was
about to launch the third and final phase of democracy (the way he said it,
he managed to make it sound like the Final Solution). And just when you
thought he was about to make his point, he took an abrupt turn and plunged
into a deep pool of self-pity. This involved a long-winded anecdote about
how the Supreme Court judges would rather attend a colleague’s daughter’s
wedding than just get it over with and decide that he is a constitutional
president . . . I have heard some dictators’ speeches in my life, but nobody
has gone so far as to mention someone’s daughter’s wedding as a reason for
imposing martial law on the country.

When for the last few minutes of his speech he addressed his audience in the
West in English, I suddenly felt a deep sense of humiliation. This part of
his speech was scripted. Sentences began and ended. I felt humiliated that
my president not only thinks that we are not evolved enough for things like
democracy and human rights, but that we can’t even handle proper syntax and
grammar."

The English-language version put the emphasis on the ‘war on terror’:
Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln, he said, would have done what he did to
preserve the ‘integrity of their country’ – the mention of Lincoln was
obviously intended for the US market. In Pakistan’s military academies the
usual soldier-heroes are Napoleon, De Gaulle and Atatürk.

What did Benazir, now outmanoeuvred, make of the speech as she watched it on
TV in her Dubai sanctuary? Her first response was to say she was shocked,
which was slightly disingenuous. Even if she had not been told in advance
that an emergency would be declared, it was hardly a secret – for one thing,
Condoleezza Rice had made a token public appeal to Musharraf not to take
this course. Yet for more than 24 hours she was unable to give a clear
response. At one point she even criticised the chief justice for being too
provocative.

Agitated phone calls from Pakistan persuaded her to return to Karachi. To
put her in her place, the authorities kept her plane waiting on the tarmac.
When she finally reached the VIP lounge, her PPP colleagues told her that
unless she denounced the emergency there would be a split in the party.
Outsmarted and abandoned by Musharraf, she couldn’t take the risk of losing
key figures in her party. She denounced the emergency and its perpetrator,
established contact with the beleaguered opposition, and, as if putting on a
new lipstick, declared that she would lead the struggle to get rid of the
dictator. She now tried to call on the chief justice to express her sympathy
but wasn’t allowed near his residence.

She could have followed the example of her imprisoned colleague Aitzaz
Ahsan, but she was envious of him: he had become far too popular in
Pakistan. He’d even had the nerve to go to Washington, where he was politely
received by society and inspected as a possible substitute should things go
badly wrong. Not a single message had flowed from her Blackberry to
congratulate him on his victories in the struggle to reinstate the chief
justice. Ahsan had advised her against any deal with Musharraf. When
generals are against the wall, he is reported to have told her, they resort
to desperate and irrational measures. Others who offered similar advice in
gentler language were also batted away. She was the PPP’s
‘chairperson-for-life’ and brooked no dissent. The fact that Ahsan was
proved right irritated her even more. Any notion of political morality had
long ago been dumped. The very idea of a party with a consistent set of
beliefs was regarded as ridiculous and outdated. Ahsan was now safe in
prison, far from the madding hordes of Western journalists whom she received
in style during the few days she spent under house arrest and afterwards.
She made a few polite noises about his imprisonment, but nothing more.

The go-between from Washington arrived at very short notice. Negroponte
spent some time with Musharraf and spoke to Benazir, still insisting that
they make up and go through with the deal. She immediately toned down her
criticisms, but the general was scathing and said in public that there was
no way she could win the elections scheduled for January. No doubt the ISI
are going to rig them in style. Had she remained loyal to him she might have
lost public support, but he would have made sure she had a substantial
presence in the new parliament. Now everything is up for grabs again. The
opinion polls show that her old rival, Nawaz Sharif, is well ahead of her.
Musharraf’s hasty pilgrimage to Mecca was probably an attempt to secure
Saudi mediation in case he has to cut a deal with the Sharif brothers – who
have been living in exile in Saudi Arabia – and sideline her completely.
Both sides deny that a deal was done, but Sharif returned to Pakistan with
Saudi blessings and an armour-plated Cadillac as a special gift from the
king. Little doubt that Riyadh would rather him than Benazir.

With the country still under a state of emergency and the largest media
network refusing to sign the oath of allegiance that would allow them back
on air, the polls scheduled for January can only be a general’s election.
It’s hardly a secret that the ISI and the civilian bureaucracy will decide
who wins and where, and some of the opposition parties are, wisely,
considering a boycott. Nawaz Sharif told the press that in the course of a
long telephone call he had failed to persuade Benazir to join it and thereby
render the process null and void from the start. But now that he is back in
the country it’s unclear whether he will still go ahead with the boycott or
try and negotiate a certain number of seats with the Chaudhrys of Gujrat,
who had betrayed him by setting up a faction of the Pakistan Muslim League,
the PML-Q, to support Musharraf. Perhaps a shared bout of amnesia will bring
them together again.

What will Benazir do now? Washington’s leverage in Islamabad is limited,
which is why they wanted her to be involved in the first place. ‘It’s always
better,’ the US ambassador half-joked at a reception, ‘to have two phone
numbers in a capital.’ That may be so, but they cannot guarantee her the
prime ministership or even a fair election. In his death-cell, her father
mulled over similar problems and came to slightly different conclusions. If
I Am Assassinated, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s last will and testament, was
written in semi-Gramsci mode, but the meaning wasn’t lost on his colleagues:

"I entirely agree that the people of Pakistan will not tolerate foreign
hegemony. On the basis of the self-same logic, the people of Pakistan would
never agree to an internal hegemony. The two hegemonies complement each
other. If our people meekly submit to internal hegemony, a priori, they will
have to submit to external hegemony. This is so because the strength and
power of external hegemony is far greater than that of internal hegemony. If
the people are too terrified to resist the weaker force, it is not possible
for them to resist the stronger force. The acceptance of or acquiescence in
internal hegemony means submission to external hegemony."

After he was hanged in April 1979, the text acquired a semi-sacred status
among his supporters. But, when in power, Bhutto père had failed to develop
any counter-hegemonic strategy or institutions, other than the 1973
constitution drafted by the veteran civil rights lawyer Mahmud Ali Kasuri
(whose son Khurshid was until recently the foreign minister). A
personality-driven, autocratic style of governance had neutered the spirit
of the party, encouraged careerists and finally paved the way for his
enemies. He was the victim of a grave injustice; his death removed all the
warts and transformed him into a martyr. More than half the country, mainly
the poor, mourned his passing.

The tragedy led to the PPP being treated as a family heirloom, which was
unhealthy for both party and country. It provided the Bhuttos with a
vote-bank and large reserves. But the experience of her father’s trial and
death radicalised and politicised his daughter. She would have preferred,
she told me at the time, to be a diplomat. Her two brothers, Murtaza and
Shahnawaz, were in London, having been forbidden to return home by their
imprisoned father. The burden of trying to save her father’s life fell on
Benazir and her mother, Nusrat, and the courage they exhibited won them the
silent respect of a frightened majority. They refused to cave in to General
Zia’s military dictatorship, which apart from anything else was invoking
Islam to claw back rights won by women in previous decades. Benazir and
Nusrat Bhutto were arrested and released several times. Their health began
to suffer. Nusrat was allowed to leave the country to seek medical advice in
1982. Benazir was released a little more than a year later thanks, in part,
to US pressure orchestrated by her old Harvard friend Peter Galbraith. She
later described the period in her memoir, Daughter of the East (1988); it
included photo-captions such as: ‘Shortly after President Reagan praised the
regime for making “great strides towards democracy”, Zia’s henchmen gunned
down peaceful demonstrators marking Pakistan Independence Day. The police
were just as brutal to those protesting at the attack on my jeep in January
1987.’

Her tiny Barbican flat in London became the centre of opposition to the
dictatorship, and it was here that we often discussed a campaign to take on
the generals. Benazir had built up her position by steadfastly and
peacefully resisting the military and replying to every slander with a
cutting retort. Her brothers had been operating on a different level. They
set up an armed group, al-Zulfiqar, whose declared aim was to harass and
weaken the regime by targeting ‘traitors who had collaborated with Zia’. The
principal volunteers were recruited inside Pakistan and in 1980 they were
provided with a base in Afghanistan, where the pro-Moscow Communists had
taken power three years before. It is a sad story with a fair share of
factionalism, show-trials, petty rivalries, fantasies of every sort and
death for the group’s less fortunate members.

In March 1981 Murtaza and Shahnawaz Bhutto were placed on the FIA’s most
wanted list. They had hijacked a Pakistan International airliner soon after
it left Karachi (a power cut had paralysed the X-ray machines, enabling the
hijackers to take their weapons on board); it was diverted to Kabul. Here
Murtaza took over and demanded the release of political prisoners. A young
military officer on board the flight was murdered. The plane refuelled and
went on to Damascus, where the Syrian spymaster General Kholi took charge
and ensured there were no more deaths. The fact that there were American
passengers on the plane was a major consideration for the generals and, for
that reason alone, the prisoners in Pakistan were released and flown to
Tripoli.

This was seen as a victory and welcomed as such by the PPP in Pakistan. For
the first time the group began to be taken seriously. A key target inside
the country was Maulvi Mushtaq Hussain, the chief justice of the High Court
in Lahore, who, in 1978, had sentenced Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to death, and
whose behaviour in court had shocked even those who were hostile to the PPP.
(Among other charges, he had accused Bhutto of ‘pretending to be a Muslim’ –
his mother was a Hindu convert.) Mushtaq was in a friend’s car being driven
to his home in Lahore’s Model Town area when al-Zulfiqar gunmen opened fire.
The judge survived, but his friend and the driver died. The friend was one
of the Chaudhrys of Gujrat: Chaudhry Zahoor Elahi, a dodgy businessman who
had ostentatiously asked General Zia to make him a present of the ‘sacred
pen’ with which he had signed Bhutto’s death warrant. The pen became a
family heirloom. Zahoor Elahi may not have been the target but al-Zulfiqar,
embarrassed at missing the judge, claimed he was also on their list, which
may have been true.

It is the next generation of Chaudhrys that currently provides Musharraf
with civilian ballast: Zahoor Elahi’s son Shujaat organised the split with
Nawaz Sharif and created the splinter PML-Q to ease the growing pains of the
new regime. He still fixes deals and wanted an emergency imposed much
earlier to circumvent the deal with Benazir. He will now mastermind the
general’s election campaign. His cousin Pervez Elahi is chief minister of
the Punjab; his son, in turn, is busy continuing the family tradition by
evicting tenants and buying up all the available land on the edge of Lahore.
It has not been divulged which member of the family guards the sacred pen.

The hijacking meanwhile had annoyed Moscow, and the regime in Afghanistan
asked the Bhutto brothers to find another refuge. While in Kabul, they had
married two Afghan sisters, Fauzia and Rehana Fasihudin, daughters of a
senior official at the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Together with
their wives they now left the country and after a sojourn in Syria and
possibly Libya ended up in Europe. The reunion with their sister took place
on the French Riviera in 1985, a setting better suited to the lifestyles of
all three siblings.

The young men feared General Zia’s agents. Each had a young daughter.
Shahnawaz lived in an apartment in Cannes. He had been in charge of the
‘military apparatus’ and life in Kabul had exacted a heavier toll on him. He
was edgy and nervous. Relations with his wife were stormy and he told his
sister that he was preparing to divorce her. ‘There’s never been a divorce
in the family. Your marriage wasn’t even an arranged one . . . You chose to
marry Rehana. You must live with it,’ was Benazir’s revealing reply,
according to her memoir. And then Shahnawaz was found dead in his apartment.
His wife claimed he had taken poison, but according to Benazir nobody in the
family believed her story; there had been violence in the room and his
papers had been searched. Rehana looked immaculate, which disturbed the
family. She was imprisoned for three months under the ‘Good Samaritan’ law
for not having gone to the assistance of a dying person. After her release
she settled in the United States. ‘Had the CIA killed him as a friendly
gesture towards their favourite dictator?’ Benazir speculated. She raised
other questions too: had the sisters become ISI agents? The truth remains
hidden. Not long afterwards Murtaza divorced Fauzia, but kept custody of
their three-year-old daughter, Fatima, and moved to Damascus. Here he had
plenty of time for reflection and told friends that too many mistakes had
been made. In 1986 he met Ghinwa Itaoui, a young teacher who had fled
Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of 1982. She calmed him down and took
charge of Fatima’s education. They were married in 1989 and a son, Zulfiqar,
was born the following year.

Benazir returned to Pakistan in 1986 and was greeted by large crowds who
came out to show their affection for her and to demonstrate their anger with
the regime. She campaigned all over the country, but felt increasingly that
for some of the more religious-minded a young unmarried woman was not
acceptable as a leader. How could she visit Saudi Arabia without a husband?
An offer of marriage from the Zardari family was accepted and she married
Asif in 1987. She had worried that any husband would find it difficult to
deal with the periods of separation her nomadic political life would entail,
but Zardari was perfectly capable of occupying himself.

A year later General Zia’s plane blew up in midair. In the elections that
followed the PPP won the largest number of seats. Benazir became prime
minister, but was hemmed in by the army on one side and the president, the
army’s favourite bureaucrat, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, on the other. She told me at
the time that she felt powerless. They wouldn’t let her do anything. ‘Tell
the people,’ was my advice. Tell them why you can’t deliver on your promises
to provide free education, proper sanitation, clean water and health
services to improve the high infant mortality rate. She didn’t tell them; in
fact she did nothing at all apart from provide employment to some of her
supporters. Being in power, it seemed, was satisfaction enough. She went on
state visits: met and liked Mrs Thatcher and later, with her new husband in
tow, was received politely by the Saudi king. In the meantime there were
other plots afoot – the opposition was literally buying off some of her MPs
– and in August 1990 her government was removed by presidential decree and
Zia’s protégés, the Sharif brothers, were back in power.

By the time she was re-elected in 1993, she had abandoned all idea of
reform, but that she was in a hurry to do something became clear when she
appointed her husband minister for investment, making him responsible for
all investment offers from home and abroad. It is widely alleged that the
couple accumulated $1.5 billion. The high command of the Pakistan People’s
Party now became a machine for making money, but without any trickle-down
mechanism. This period marked the complete degeneration of the party. All
that shame-faced party members could say, when I asked, was that ‘everybody
does it all over the world,’ thus accepting that the cash nexus was now all
that mattered. In foreign policy her legacy was mixed. She refused to
sanction an anti-Indian military adventure in Kargil on the Himalayan
slopes, but to make up for it, as I wrote in the LRB (15 April 1999), her
government backed the Taliban takeover in Kabul – which makes it doubly
ironic that Washington and London should be promoting her as a champion of
democracy.

Murtaza Bhutto had contested the elections from abroad and won a seat in the
Sind provincial legislature. He returned home and expressed his unhappiness
with his sister’s agenda. Family gatherings became tense. Murtaza had his
weaknesses, but he wasn’t corrupt and he argued in favour of the old party’s
radical manifesto. He made no secret of the fact that he regarded Zardari as
an interloper whose only interest was money. Nusrat Bhutto suggested that
Murtaza be made the chief minister of Sind: Benazir’s response was to remove
her mother as chairperson of the PPP. Any sympathy Murtaza may have felt for
his sister turned to loathing. He no longer felt obliged to control his
tongue and at every possible opportunity lambasted Zardari and the corrupt
regime over which his sister presided. It was difficult to fault him on the
facts. The incumbent chief minister of Sind was Abdullah Shah, one of
Zardari’s creatures. He began to harass Murtaza’s supporters. Murtaza
decided to confront the organ-grinder himself. He rang Zardari and invited
him round for an informal chat sans bodyguards to try and settle the
problems within the family. Zardari agreed. As the two men were pacing the
garden, Murtaza’s retainers appeared and grabbed Zardari. Someone brought
out a cut-throat razor and some warm water and Murtaza shaved off half of
Zardari’s moustache to the delight of the retainers, then told him to get
lost. A fuming Zardari, who had probably feared much worse, was compelled to
shave off the other half at home. The media, bemused, were informed that the
new clean-shaven consort had accepted intelligence advice that the moustache
made him too recognisable a target. In which case why did he allow it to
sprout again immediately afterwards?

Some months later, in September 1996, as Murtaza and his entourage were
returning home from a political meeting, they were ambushed, just outside
their house, by some seventy armed policemen accompanied by four senior
officers. A number of snipers were positioned in surrounding trees. The
street lights had been switched off. Murtaza clearly understood what was
happening and got out of his car with his hands raised; his bodyguards were
instructed not to open fire. The police opened fire instead and seven men
were killed, Murtaza among them. The fatal bullet had been fired at close
range. The trap had been carefully laid, but as is the way in Pakistan, the
crudeness of the operation – false entries in police logbooks, lost
evidence, witnesses arrested and intimidated, the provincial PPP governor
(regarded as untrustworthy) dispatched to a non-event in Egypt, a policeman
killed who they feared might talk – made it obvious that the decision to
execute the prime minister’s brother had been taken at a very high level.

While the ambush was being prepared, the police had sealed off Murtaza’s
house (from which his father had been lifted by Zia’s commandos in 1978).
The family inside felt something was wrong. At this point, a remarkably
composed Fatima Bhutto, aged 14, decided to ring her aunt at Prime
Minister’s House. The conversation that followed remains imprinted on her
memory and a few years ago she gave me an account of it. It was Zardari who
took her call:

Fatima: I wish to speak to my aunt, please.

Zardari: It’s not possible.

Fatima: Why? [At this point, Fatima says she heard loud wails and what
sounded like fake crying.]

Zardari: She’s hysterical, can’t you hear?

Fatima: Why?

Zardari: Don’t you know? Your father’s been shot.

Fatima and Ghinwa found out where Murtaza had been taken and rushed out of
the house. There was no sign on the street outside that anything had
happened: the scene of the killing had been wiped clean of all evidence.
There were no traces of blood and no signs of any disturbance. They drove
straight to the hospital but it was too late; Murtaza was already dead.
Later they learned that he had been left bleeding on the ground for almost
an hour before being taken to a hospital where there were no emergency
facilities of any kind.

When Benazir arrived to attend her brother’s funeral in Larkana, angry
crowds stoned her limo. She had to retreat. In another unusual display of
emotion, local people encouraged Murtaza’s widow to attend the actual burial
ceremony in defiance of Islamic tradition. According to Fatima, one of
Benazir’s hangers-on instigated legal proceedings against Ghinwa in a
religious court for breaching Islamic law. Nothing was sacred.

Anyone who witnessed Murtaza’s murder was arrested; one witness died in
prison. When Fatima rang Benazir to ask why witnesses were being arrested
and not the killers she was told: ‘Look, you’re very young. You don’t
understand things.’ Perhaps it was for this reason that the kind aunt
decided to encourage Fatima’s blood-mother, Fauzia, whom she had previously
denounced as a murderer in the pay of General Zia, to come to Pakistan and
claim custody of Fatima. No mystery as to who paid her fare from California.
Fatima and Ghinwa Bhutto resisted and the attempt failed. Benazir then tried
a softer approach and insisted that Fatima accompany her to New York, where
she was going to address the UN Assembly. Ghinwa Bhutto approached friends
in Damascus and had her two children flown out of the country. Fatima later
discovered that Fauzia had been seen hobnobbing with Benazir in New York.

In November 1996 Benazir was once again removed from power, this time by her
own president, Farooq Leghari, a PPP stalwart. He cited corruption, but what
had also angered him was the ISI’s crude attempt at blackmail – the
intelligence agencies had photographed Leghari’s daughter meeting a
boyfriend and threatened to go public. The week Benazir fell, the chief
minister of Sind, Abdullah Shah, hopped on a motorboat and fled Karachi for
the Gulf and thence the US.

A judicial tribunal had been appointed by Benazir’s government to inquire
into the circumstances leading to Murtaza’s death. Headed by a Supreme Court
judge, it took detailed evidence from all parties. Murtaza’s lawyers accused
Zardari, Abdullah Shah and two senior police officials of conspiracy to
murder. Benazir (now out of power) accepted that there had been a
conspiracy, but suggested that ‘the hidden hand responsible for this was
President Farooq Ahmad Leghari’: the intention, she said, was to ‘kill a
Bhutto to get rid of a Bhutto’. Nobody took this seriously. Given all that
had happened, it was an incredible suggestion.

The tribunal said there was no legally acceptable evidence to link Zardari
to the incident, but accepted that ‘this was a case of extra-judicial
killings by the police’ and concluded that such an incident could not have
taken place without approval from the highest quarters. Nothing happened.
Eleven years later, Fatima Bhutto publicly accused Zardari; she also claimed
that many of those involved that day appear to have been rewarded for their
actions. In an interview on an independent TV station just before the
emergency was imposed, Benazir was asked to explain how it happened that her
brother had bled to death outside his home while she was prime minister. She
walked out of the studio. A sharp op-ed piece by Fatima in the LA Times on
14 November elicited the following response: ‘My niece is angry with me.’
Well, yes.

Musharraf may have withdrawn the corruption charges, but three other cases
are proceeding in Switzerland, Spain and Britain. In July 2003, after an
investigation lasting several years, Daniel Devaud, a Geneva magistrate,
convicted Mr and Mrs Asif Ali Zardari, in absentia, of money laundering.
They had accepted $15 million in bribes from two Swiss companies, SGS and
Cotecna. The couple were sentenced to six months in prison and ordered to
return $11.9 million to the government of Pakistan. ‘I certainly don’t have
any doubts about the judgments I handed down,’ Devaud told the BBC. Benazir
appealed, thus forcing a new investigation. On 19 September 2005 she
appeared in a Geneva court and tried to detach herself from the rest of the
family: she hadn’t been involved, she said: it was a matter for her husband
and her mother (afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease). She knew nothing of the
accounts. And what of the agreement her agent Jens Schlegelmilch had signed
according to which, in case of her and Zardari’s death, the assets of Bomer
Finance Company would be divvied out equally between the Zardari and Bhutto
families? She knew nothing of that either. And the £120,000 diamond necklace
in the bank vault paid for by Zardari? It was intended for her, but she had
rejected the gift as ‘inappropriate’. The case continues. Last month
Musharraf told Owen Bennett-Jones of the BBC World Service that his
government would not interfere with the proceedings: ‘That’s up to the Swiss
government. Depends on them. It’s a case in their courts.’

In Britain the legal shenanigans concern the $3.4 million Rockwood estate in
Surrey, bought by offshore companies on behalf of Zardari in 1995 and
refurbished to his exacting tastes. Zardari denied owning the estate. Then
when the court was about to instruct the liquidators to sell it and return
the proceeds to the Pakistan government, Zardari came forward and accepted
ownership. Last year, Lord Justice Collins ruled that, while he was not
making any ‘findings of fact’, there was a ‘reasonable prospect’ that the
Pakistan government might be able to establish that Rockwood had been bought
and furnished with ‘the fruits of corruption’. A close friend of Benazir
told me that she was genuinely not involved in this one, since Zardari
wasn’t thinking of spending much time there with her.

Daniel Markey, formerly of the State Department and currently senior fellow
for India, Pakistan and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations,
explained why Washington had pushed the marriage of convenience: ‘A
progressive, reform-minded, more cosmopolitan party in government would help
the US.’ As their finances reveal, the Zardaris are certainly cosmopolitan.

What then is at stake in Pakistan as far as Washington is concerned? ‘The
concern I have,’ Robert Gates, the US secretary for defense, recently said,
‘is that the longer the internal problems continue, the more distracted the
Pakistani army and security services will be in terms of the internal
situation rather than focusing on the terrorist threat in the frontier
area.’ But one reason for the internal crisis is Washington’s over-reliance
on Musharraf and the Pakistani military. It is Washington’s support and
funding that have given him the confidence to operate as he pleases. But the
thoughtless Western military occupation of Afghanistan is obviously crucial,
since the instability in Kabul seeps into Peshawar and the tribal areas
between the two countries. The state of emergency targeted the judiciary,
opposition politicians and the independent media. All three groups were, in
different ways, challenging the official line on Afghanistan and the ‘war on
terror’, the disappearance of political prisoners and the widespread use of
torture in Pakistani prisons. The issues were being debated on television in
a much more open fashion than happens anywhere in the West, where a blanket
consensus on Afghanistan drowns all dissent. Musharraf argued that civil
society was hampering the ‘war on terror’. Hence the emergency. It’s
nonsense, of course. It’s the war in the frontier regions that is creating
dissent inside the army. Many do not want to fight. Hence the surrender of
dozens of soldiers to Taliban guerrillas. This is the reason many junior
officers are taking early retirement.

Western pundits blather on about the jihadi finger on the nuclear trigger.
This is pure fantasy, reminiscent of a similar campaign almost three decades
ago, when the threat wasn’t the jihadis who were fighting alongside the West
in Afghanistan, but nationalist military radicals. The cover story of Time
magazine for 15 June 1979 dealt with Pakistan; a senior Western diplomat was
quoted as saying that the big danger was ‘that there is another Gaddafi down
there, some radical major or colonel in the Pakistani army. We could wake up
and find him in Zia’s place one morning and, believe me, Pakistan wouldn’t
be the only place that would be destabilised.’

The Pakistan army is half a million strong. Its tentacles are everywhere:
land, industry, public utilities and so on. It would require a cataclysmic
upheaval (a US invasion and occupation, for example) for this army to feel
threatened by a jihadi uprising. Two considerations unite senior officers:
the unity of the organisation and keeping politicians at bay. One reason is
the fear that they might lose the comforts and privileges they have acquired
after decades of rule; but they also have the deep aversion to democracy
that is the hallmark of most armies. Unused to accountability within their
own ranks, it’s difficult for them to accept it in society at large.

As southern Afghanistan collapses into chaos, and as corruption and massive
inflation takes hold, the Taliban is gaining more and more recruits. The
generals who convinced Benazir that control of Kabul via the Taliban would
give them ‘strategic depth’ may have retired, but their successors know that
the Afghans will not tolerate a long-term Western occupation. They hope for
the return of a whitewashed Taliban. Instead of encouraging a regional
solution that includes India, Iran and Russia, the US would prefer to see
the Pakistan army as its permanent cop in Kabul. It won’t work. In Pakistan
itself the long night continues as the cycle restarts: military leadership
promising reforms degenerates into tyranny, politicians promising social
support to the people degenerate into oligarchs. Given that a better
functioning neighbour is unlikely to intervene, Pakistan will oscillate
between these two forms of rule for the foreseeable future. The people who
feel they have tried everything and failed will return to a state of
semi-sleep, unless something unpredictable rouses them again. This is always
possible.

30 November

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n24/ali_01_.html

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