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Songs of Blood and Sword
A Daughter's Memoir
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Songs of Blood and Sword tells the story of a family of feudal landlords who became powerbrokers. It is an epic tale of intrigue, the making of modern Pakistan, and ultimately, tragedy. A searing testament to a troubled land, Songs of Blood and Sword reveals a daughter’s love for her father and her search to uncover the truth of his life and death.
Excerpt
For my Joonam, Nusrat, who is always with me
And my mother Ghinwa
for giving me life
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.
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.
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 in 70 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 refrigeration 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.a 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 forty-year 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 conversations 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.
{ 1 }
19 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.
The Avari is one of Karachi's grander hotels, founded by an old Parsi family patriarch, Dinshaw Avari, who eventually passed it, as is the custom in Pakistan, to his son, Byram. It's rather a plain hotel, painted blue and white on the outside, not too ostentatious, unlike the spate of foreign chain hotels that are the Avari's neighbours. In the days before skyscrapers captured the imagination of the city's architects, the Avari was advertised as the country's tallest building. Now banks compete with each other over whose building is the highest as they struggle upwards to escape from the smog and poverty of the city. In the mid-nineties, the Avari Hotel was known for being home to Karachi's only Japanese restaurant, Fujiyama. We had eaten there that night.
That Friday evening Papa was wearing a navy blue suit, one of the few he had that still fitted him. Like his father, my grandfather Zulfikar Ali, Papa was a dandy when it came to clothes and grooming. He was an elegant man, nearly six foot three with salt and pepper hair and a neatly trimmed moustache. Papa had put on weight over the past two years, the busy and tense months that marked our return to Pakistan and the start of a newly public life, and we teased him about it. He took it good-naturedly, insisting that he was going on a diet soon, while my younger brother Zulfi and I patted his belly.
Papa signed the Avari guestbook that night. The staff at the restaurant presented the book to him with a great flourish and opened it, ironically, on the very page where General Zia ul Haq had signed an effusive note. It was the absolute worst page they could have turned to. General Zia presided over the military coup that deposed my grandfather's government. Two years later, after arresting and torturing him, General Zia put my grandfather to death. They say he was hanged, but my family never saw the body. The army had buried my grandfather's body quietly, not even notifying our family, before they released the news of his execution to the public. Papa looked at the General's handwriting. He calmly read the General's thoughts on Fujiyama's fine cuisine before making a face at me, sticking his tongue out and frowning comically, one of the few light moments we had that night at dinner, and then turned several pages on and began to write.
At dinner Papa was quiet. He sat across the table from me with his arms crossed in front of him, his chin resting in the bridge made of his intertwined fingers. It made me nervous to see Papa, usually animated and boisterous, so subdued.
Two days earlier, Papa had returned to Karachi from a trip to Peshawar feeling calm and rested. He had arrived late and was eating dinner and telling Mummy and me about his trip when, shortly after midnight, the intercom phone in the drawing room rang. It could only be someone in the kitchen or in the office next door at 71 Clifton: no one else was awake. The kitchen was close by and Asghar, our bearer, could have walked over if he needed to tell us anything. It had to be the office. Papa picked up the phone on the first ring. 'Gi?' he said, yes? He listened quietly for a few minutes. 'Gari tayar karo, jaldi,' he said, get the car ready, quickly. His relaxed mood was gone. Papa put down the phone, stood up and walked towards the door that connected to my parents' bedroom. 'What's happened?' I asked. 'They've taken Ali Sonara,' Papa replied. 'They just raided his house and took him.' 'Where are you going?' I asked slowly as Mummy's hands went softly to steady my back, patting me and reminding me that she was still there, that things were going to be OK. 'I'm going to find him,' Papa said and walked out of the drawing room.
Ali Sonara was from Lyari, one of the most densely populated, politically radical and poorest neighbourhoods of Karachi. He belonged to a Katchi Memon family, a small Sunni community whose roots in the region can be traced back to the Ran of Kutch and Sindh desert regions. He had been a loyal supporter of the Bhutto family since his early schooldays. After Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been overthrown and arrested by General Zia's military coup in 1977, Sonara abandoned his studies and became one of Lyari's most prominent activists.
He joined the Save Bhutto Committee in his community and worked tirelessly to oppose General Zia's abrogation of the 1973 constitution. After Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was killed by the military government in 1979, Sonara joined the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) and worked closely with my aunt, Benazir Bhutto, for the next ten years. He was a member of the movement's Karachi Committee and spent his time distributing pamphlets against martial law and the illegality of Bhutto's execution, holding covert meetings to enlist local support and organizing protests and demonstrations.
In 1984, during the height of Zia's dictatorial repression, a bomb was planted in central Karachi's popular Bori Bazaar. Bori Bazaar is a busy market named after the religious sect of Bohri Muslims who wear distinctive long petticoats and blouses with hijab-like hoods. When the bomb exploded, scores of women and children who frequent the bazaar to shop for fabric, beads and colourful homeware were among the injured. Upon hearing the news Ali Sonara ran to the bazaar from his home nearby in Lyari.
He was certain that the bomb had been planted by the military but if Bhutto activists raised protests, the neighbourhood would be swept and men would be swiftly carted off to jail or, worse, to stadiums for public lashings. Resistance was dealt with severely by General Zia, and Sonara, who had spent several stints in Karachi jails for his leadership role within the Sindhi community, knew that the harder you fought, the more vicious was the punishment.
When Sonara arrived at Bori Bazaar he ran back and forth between ambulances helping to shift bodies onto stretchers. He coordinated blood donations and was dealing with the panicked families of the dead and injured as best he could when Zia's Chief Minister, Ghous Ali Shah, turned up surrounded by film crews to survey the wreckage.
Ali Shah claimed that the blast had been the work of the anti-military activists, terrorists they called them then, and that the state would soon find these terror mongers and punish them without mercy. As soon as Sonara saw Ali Shah, he raced over to him and punched him squarely in the face. It was the desperate act of a desperate man. The Chief Minister promptly arrested Sonara for planting the bomb in Bori Bazaar.
He was later released without charge.
When, in May 1986, Benazir returned to Karachi from self-imposed exile in London, it was Sonara, with the help of several other prominent activists, notably Ali Hingoro, who arranged for her reception in the city. At the time, General Zia's supporters in Sindh, the Muhajir Quami Movement (MQM) party, had been set up in Karachi to present an alternative to the People's Party, whose power base was in the province. The MQM were created to present an alternative, and, failing that, simply to frighten people into switching their allegiance. Lyari had been one of the neighbourhoods first seized upon by the MQM and it was a dangerous time to show your party colours, but Sonara took the risk. He organized a jalsa or rally for Benazir at Kakri Ground, an enormous sports stadium in Lyari. Benazir thanked him and the others at the rally, calling Sonara out from behind her where he was acting as her chief bodyguard. 'This is my brother,' she said. 'Yeh mera bhai hai.'
Benazir, new to organized party politics and intent on building a career that would see her reach the pinnacle of power, came to depend on Sonara. He was one of the naujawans, or youth leaders, who organized public meetings for her throughout the city and travelled with her as part of her security detail as she visited cities across Sindh. As a member of the Karachi Committee Sonara was a key player in the Pakistan People's Party grassroots politics and provided the backbone for Benazir's election victory.
But Sonara soon fell out of favour. His loyalty to my father Murtaza, Benazir's younger brother in exile, was proving difficult for Benazir to handle. By 1988 as Benazir began to appoint her first cabinet and bestow ministries upon those brought into the party fold by her new husband, Asif Zardari, Sonara's fondness for plain speaking had become wholly inconvenient. At a party meeting at 71 Clifton, the dispute between Sonara and Benazir came to a head. He was objecting to the apparent favours that were being distributed to members of Pakistan's business and feudal community when Benazir, who famously had very little tolerance for dissent or criticism, reacted. 'Sit down, Ali!' she commanded. 'Behave properly. I'm the chairperson of this party and you have no right to speak in front of me this way. 'Mohtarma,' Sonara began, using the title that Benazir now insisted on being addressed by, 'it is absolutely my right. I am a political worker and it is my right to tell you what I see going wrong.'
After Benazir's government fell in 1990, Sonara went underground. He had made too many enemies, powerful men who pushed him out of the party that he had helped build as a bulwark against military dictatorship. He resurfaced in 1993 when national elections were called. When my father filed his nomination papers, Sonara joined his campaign. It was what Benazir had feared.
That night Ali Sonara had been visiting Seema and Inayat Hussain, two old PPP stalwarts. Seema Hussain is a former labour leader who joined the party under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. She worked briefly with Benazir, but also found herself falling out of favour as the party began to veer blindly towards the pursuit of power and money. Seema, too, joined my father and worked as a leader within the women's wing of the Pakistan People's Party (Shaheed Bhutto or 'Martyr Bhutto', the party my father founded as a reform movement in 1995).
Things had become edgy around Lyari, especially for those who dared to openly criticise the government. Fearing the police might be looking for him, Sonara had moved with his wife Sakina and their two young children over to the Hussains'. But the police had tracked him down. Shortly after midnight they raided the house. The police produced no arrest warrant; they entered, picked up their target, and left. Sakina called our office at 71 Clifton minutes later. Sonara had made some phone calls from the Hussains' house and it seemed the police, waiting for some sign that he was nearby, traced the calls and swooped. 'Where are they taking him?' sobbed Sakina on the phone. 'What has he done?'
Genre:
- On Sale
- Sep 6, 2011
- Page Count
- 496 pages
- Publisher
- Bold Type Books
- ISBN-13
- 9781568586762
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