Why would Zardari tell me, a fourteen-year-old girl, that my father had been shot if it had been serious?

FROM PTT ARCHIVES

“Six other men died along with Mir Murtaza that day. The blood was
quickly washed off the road, the glass swept up. (It was an eerie
foreshadowing of Benazir’s own murder 11 years later, when the
evidence was also instantly removed.) There was no independent
forensic inquest. The injured were taken to clinics that were not
equipped for emergency surgery, and Fatima believes her father would
not have bled to death if he had been brought to a hospital.

More disturbingly, the police would not let the family leave the house
until it was too late, citing as an excuse that it was dangerous
because a robbery had taken place.”
———————————————–

Touched by tragedy:

Exclusive extracts from Fatima Bhutto’s new book

TNN, Mar 28, 2010

Asif Zardari was on the phone. ‘Don’t you know?’ he said casually to
me. ‘Your father’s been shot.’ I dropped the phone. My body went numb
and cold and my heart beat so hard it drowned out everything around
me. Mummy picked up the phone. She saw my face, I looked ashen. She
must have known something was terribly wrong though I couldn’t get the
words out to say anything or even look at her. She screamed. I don’t
remember what she said. I was frozen to my chair, Papa’s green
armchair.

It must be the arm, I kept telling myself. He must be hit in the arm;
it can’t be serious, maybe the leg. Why would Zardari tell me, a
fourteen-year-old girl, that my father had been shot if it had been
serious? I couldn’t breathe. Mummy must have called for the car. The
next thing I knew she was running towards the door. I got up and ran
after her. ‘Stay here!’ she yelled. ‘No!’ I screamed back. ‘I’m coming
with you!’ Zulfi (little brother) was sitting in the lobby now, with
Sofi, his nanny from when he was a baby.

Sofi watched Mummy and me yelling at each other in the corridor by the
door. She held Zulfi close to her and tried to distract him from our
screaming.

‘Fati, it’s dangerous!’ Mummy shouted. But I wouldn’t let her leave
without me. ‘He’s my father!’ I cried and grabbed her arm, pulling her
with me to the car. She couldn’t stop me. Mummy held on to me as we
drove out of the house. The roads were clean, empty. I remember
looking out, searching the dark streets for some sign and seeing
nothing, calming myself into believing that whatever had happened
wasn’t serious. It must be the arm, I kept repeating to myself and to
Mummy like a mantra I was desperate for us to believe….

I don’t remember how we got to Mideast Hospital or how we found
ourselves in the large recovery room that Papa had been placed in. I
remember walking in and seeing only my father’s legs. I thought I
would collapse.

Mummy ran into the room and straight towards Papa, who was lying
unconscious on a low hospital bed. I saw him and froze. I stood before
my father, covered in blood, and wanted to scream but I couldn’t open
my mouth. I was paralysed with shock. I just stood there.

Mummy ran straight to Papa’s side and began speaking to him, as if she
hadn’t registered how frightening he looked, how much blood covered
his face and his chest. ‘Wake up Mir! Wake up!’ she yelled. I went
closer to him and crouched beside the bed. I touched Papa’s face but
got blood on my fingers and got scared. His face was still warm, the
blood dark and wet. I stood up quickly and walked to the end of the
room and sat down on a white metal chair. I couldn’t breathe.

Mummy sat with Papa as he was fitted with a heart monitor and as the
hospital staff scrambled to find surgeons to operate on him — there
were none on call, there never were at Mideast. People filtered into
the room, coming in to watch, to have a look, to see Murtaza Bhutto
die. I screamed at one of them, an odious magazine
editor-turned-politician who behaved as if she had bought tickets to
an event. ‘Why are you here?’ I screamed at her. ‘This isn’t a show!
Get out!’ She moved away from me, but she didn’t leave. Others,
friends and strangers, came. I couldn’t focus long enough to
understand how dire things were, how we ended up in a hospital with
not one surgeon to save my father’s life….

I don’t know how we made it from the waiting room to the operating
theatre. I think I was being supported and held. I think Mummy was
holding me. Papa lay in the middle of the room, a thin white sheet
pulled up to his collarbone. His face had been bandaged with white
gauze, holding his jaw shut. His eyes were closed. There was dried
blood congealing on his face and flecks of blood in his hair. Papa’s
hair was always perfectly combed, the only time it ever looked that
messy was when he woke up in the mornings. I kneeled on the floor next
to his body. He wasn’t dead, he couldn’t be. There had to be some
mistake. I kissed my father’s face, his cheeks, his lips, his nose,
his chin, over and over again. I didn’t kiss his eyes; a Lebanese
superstition says you will be separated from anyone whose eyelids your
lips brush. I didn’t want to be separated from Papa….

Somewhere around three in the morning, while Mummy was still at the
hospital waiting for the autopsy to be completed and for Papa’s body
to be released so she could bring him home, the Prime Minister came to
Mideast. Benazir flew from the Prime Minister’s residence in Islamabad
to Karachi. She stopped at her home and then came to the hospital
barefeet — a sign, people assumed, of her grief. She was accompanied
by Wajid Durrani, one of the shooters that night who is seen saluting
her in many of photographs taken of her arrival, and by Shoaib Suddle,
another of the men who participated in her brother’s assassination.
Abdullah Shah, the Chief Minister of Sindh, and another accused in the
murder, would also be by Benazir’s side at Mideast. Benazir, my Wadi,
would say, years later in an interview broadcast days before her own
death, that it was Murtaza’s own fault that he was killed. She changed
the facts about his injuries, rambling incoherently, claiming he was
shot in the back by his own guards, that his guards opened fire on the
police, that Murtaza had a death wish. I did not see Benazir until
after Papa’s burial. Every time she tried to drive to Al Murtaza house
where Papa’s funeral was held her car was attacked by Larkana locals,
who pelted her car with stones and shoes.

The funeral in Larkana was intense and cities across the country
marked a three-day mourning period in solidarity…..

Joonam (Nusrat Bhutto, Fatima’s grandmother) arrived from a foreign
trip that day to find her second son murdered. No one had told Joonam,
who was beginning to suffer from Alzheimer’s, that her beloved elder
son had been killed. They told her only minutes before her car had
pulled up at the 70 Clifton gates. In the helicopter ride to Larkana,
Joonam beat her chest in the Shiia style of mourning and wailed
uncontrollably. She never recovered. The day after the burial she
walked up and down the corridors of Al Murtaza calling her son. ‘Tell
Mir he should change his kaffan, his burial shroud, it’s full of
blood.’

On the third day of mourning, Benazir came to Al Murtaza under cover
of darkness to evade the protestors who had been attacking her
motorcade. She said she wanted her mother to be with her for a few
days and swept Joonam out of our house. We never saw our grandmother
again. Joonam is now held incommunicado by the Zardaris in a garish
house in Dubai.

Fatima Bhutto: living by the bullet
With her father, aunt, uncle and grandfather all murdered, Fatima
Bhutto has written the story of the ill-starred dynasty whose name
once epitomised Pakistan’s political turmoil. Interview by Janine di
Giovanni.

By Janine di Giovanni

When Fatima Bhutto was a little girl, she would sit with her father as
he shaved in the morning and pretend to be him. Together, they would
wash their faces, brush their teeth, then her father, the political
activist Mir Murtaza Bhutto, would gently smooth his tiny daughter’s
face with shaving cream. And she imitated his movements, stroke by
stroke. What Fatima loves the most about that memory, she says now,
was that her father never scolded her, never told her that this was
something she should not do because she was a girl. ‘Lathering up and
shaving,’ she says, ‘was just our little routine.

When Fatima was 14, she cowered in the dressing-room of her parents’
bedroom in Karachi, her back against the locked door. She was
shielding her six-year-old brother, Zulfikar, from a barrage of
bullets outside her house. ‘It’s just fireworks, Fati,’ said the quiet
little boy. But Fatima, who was always wise beyond her years, knew
otherwise – she understood something about violent deaths. Her family
was plagued with them.

Her grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a former prime minister of
Pakistan, was executed by General Zia-ul-Huq in 1979, and her beloved
uncle Shahnawaz Bhutto was poisoned in the south of France in 1985.
(That crime has still not been solved, though the family blames either
Zia or the CIA.) At the time of Mir Murtaza’s death in September 1996,
Fatima’s father was an outspoken opponent of the government – which
happened to be run by his estranged sister, Benazir Bhutto. He had
split from her party, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) founded by
their father, and created a splinter group, the PPP-Shaheed Bhutto.

Fatima, now 28 and one of Pakistan’s most outspoken political
commentators and social activists, had understood what it meant to
live with a hostile government since 1993, when the family returned to
Pakistan from exile and Mir was arrested at the airport, and charged
with 90 crimes by his sister’s regime. He subsequently spent many
months in prison. But the days leading up to his death were
particularly tense. ‘Since his birthday, September 18, tanks had been
rolling up around our house,’ she says. ‘And it just felt wrong that
day.’

She remembers that her father was preoccupied on September 27. He had
said he was going to a press conference. He did not eat lunch with the
family as usual. A precocious teenager, Fatima had just received a
contract for her first book of poetry, Whispers in the Desert, and she
needed a parent to sign it. ‘He said he would sign it in jail,’ she
said. ‘He expected to be arrested after the press conference. But not
killed.’

After the gunshots outside the house stopped, Fatima’s stepmother,
Ghinwa, who had raised her as a daughter since she was four, came for
the children and the family hid in the drawing-room. Then Fatima
called her Aunt Benazir. ‘She did not take the call,’ she says.
Instead, Asif Zardari, Benazir’s husband and the man who is now the
president of Pakistan, took the call.

‘Don’t you know?’ he said evenly. ‘Your father’s been shot.’

Six other men died along with Mir Murtaza that day. The blood was
quickly washed off the road, the glass swept up. (It was an eerie
foreshadowing of Benazir’s own murder 11 years later, when the
evidence was also instantly removed.) There was no independent
forensic inquest. The injured were taken to clinics that were not
equipped for emergency surgery, and Fatima believes her father would
not have bled to death if he had been brought to a hospital.

More disturbingly, the police would not let the family leave the house
until it was too late, citing as an excuse that it was dangerous
because a robbery had taken place. Medical records indicate that her
father was shot five times, and that the shot that killed him was
fired at point-blank range.

It haunts her that while he lay bleeding not far from the house, she
was trapped inside by the police.

‘When we got to the clinic, I saw his legs,’ she says. ‘That’s all I saw.’

Significantly, it has never been determined who was responsible for
the assassination, and some of the policemen accused were not properly
brought to justice. ‘They were imprisoned, but in luxury hospital
suites, not proper prisons,’ Fatima says. ‘And not for long either,
given the gravity of the charges against them. They were never
convicted.’

Zardari was arrested after Benazir’s government fell in November 1996,
accused of corruption and Murtaza’s murder (of which he was cleared),
and remained in jail until November 2004. ‘Again, jail is a loose term
for how he was kept,’ Fatima says.

After her father’s death, Fatima’s relationship with her famous aunt
became estranged, although previously they had been close. Fatima
claims that Benazir would often try to persuade her to come to family
events and ‘get the camera crews along so she could prove she had
nothing to do with it.’ One bizarre detail of the event is that when
Benazir rushed to the clinic where Mir Murtaza lay dying, she was not
wearing any shoes – an act that Ghinwa and Fatima always saw as deeply
suspicious, as though she were trying to prove she had been caught off
guard.

Even though a judicial tribunal ruled the murder could not have
happened without the approval of the highest level of government and
that Benazir’s administration was ‘probably complicit’, she and
Zardari always denied involvement. ‘The police pulled the trigger, but
Benazir and Asif had the moral responsibility,’ Fatima says now,
sitting on the terrace of the Karachi house, 70 Clifton, which is one
of the most famous addresses in Pakistan. It was here that Benazir
grew up, here that she married Asif Zardari in the lush garden in
1987, and outside these gates that Mir Murtaza was murdered. It is now
the home of the last of the Bhuttos: Ghinwa (whom Fatima calls
‘Mummy’); Fatima; her adored adopted six-year-old brother Mir Ali
(pronounced ‘Miralee’), and her brother Zulfikar, when he is back from
England, where he is at school. Fatima’s cousin Sassi, the daughter of
the murdered Shah Nawaz, also stays here when she comes from her home
in America.

Fatima is tiny and beautiful, but largely unaware of her beauty. She
wears skinny jeans that she buys in a street market, ballet slippers
and T-shirts from the Sunday bazaar (Bob Marley, Lynyrd Skynyrd) or
traditional Pakistani kurtas that friends make for her. She does not
eat sugar and practises yoga daily. Her face is clear of make-up
(unlike her aunt, who adored red lipstick and thick foundation). Also
unlike Benazir, who liked to play up to the cameras, Fatima does not
wear a veil, except, ironically, at funerals. She wears sleeveless
dresses, not really the norm in conservative Pakistan. ‘I wear them
because I live in a hot country. It’s the Saudis who brought the burka
to Pakistan. My grandmother always wore saris to state visits, and
they were short-sleeved and elegant.’

Fourteen years have gone by since her father’s death. But every day of
her life, Fatima lives with that murder in her head. She has to live
with the fact that it is now Zardari who runs the country. She is a
thorn in his side, but has no relationship with him. She sees

him go to the White House on official visits. She sees him with Gordon Brown.

The bond between Fatima and her father was extraordinarily strong.
When she talks about him, she still cries. But neither she nor Ghinwa
– a tall, big-hearted woman who left her native Lebanon to follow Mir
Murtaza to Pakistan – harbours anger. ‘Anger eats you up, makes you
ugly and ultimately kills you,’ says Ghinwa, who is a political
activist and chairman of the PPP-Shaheed Bhutto party. ‘And if it
kills us, then those killers have done their job, not only killing
those men, but killing their families as well.’

‘I was angry for a long time afterwards, but at some point I realised
that itself is an act of violence,’ Fatima says. ‘It is better to seek
justice.’

Her way of seeking justice was to write her father’s story. Songs of
Blood and Sword is published next week. It’s a daughter’s memoir, but
it is more than that. Through the history of the Bhutto family, rich
feudal landlords of a warrior caste, she tells the story of the newly
created state of Pakistan. It is a book about the power of love, but
also about a search to avenge her father’s brutal murder.

She also did it to preserve his memory. ‘I used to say, after he died,
well, he’s been dead five years, but I had him for 14,’ she says. ‘And
this year it is 14 years since he died.’ She wipes her eyes. ‘He’s
been dead for as long as I had him.’

Fatima Bhutto was born on May 29, 1982, under curfew, in Kabul,
Afghanistan, at the height of the war between the Soviet-led
government and the US-backed Mujahideen. Her father was in exile from
the Zia regime with his brother, Shahnawaz. Fatima’s mother was an
Afghan, Fowzia (Shahnawaz married Fowzia’s sister, who was later
accused of his murder). Fatima and the family have no contact with
Fowzia or her sister, though they do see her daughter, Sassi.

On the day Fatima was born, as if a harbinger of the drama her life
would later hold, Afghan-istan’s Najibullah government placed special
troops around the hospital in anticipation of her birth. They were
worried that the hospital might become a Mujahideen target.

Her father adored her from the beginning. ‘Tall, like me,’ he wrote on
the back of one photo taken when she was four weeks old. Her
relationship with her biological mother, however, was strained. ‘She
always frightened me,’ Fatima writes in her book. Eventually, the
family left for the Middle East, and when Fatima was three years old,
Fowzia and her father split up. Fatima stayed with her father and
rarely saw her mother, although there was a bitter custody battle
after Mir Murtaza died.

‘Maybe it is my fault,’ she writes in her book. ‘Maybe my heart was
too full and I never cleared it to make space for Fowzia.’ She was
cared for by Mir Murtaza. The two were inseparable. He took her to her
dance classes, swimming, to meetings. ‘He cut my hair, dressed me,
bathed me,’ she says. ‘I was a tomboy.’ Every picture I see of the two
together in the Bhutto compound shows a tiny, round-eyed little girl
on her father’s lap.

She went to the American School in Karachi, and after her father’s
death, Fatima continued to study, as if to make Mir Murtaza – a
Harvard graduate – proud. She did Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia
in New York, graduating top of her class – summa cum laude. Then she
completed her MA at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
Later, returning home to Pakistan after years away, she worked as a
campaigning journalist, a human rights and women’s activist and a
columnist. She wrote a book about the 2005 earthquake and its victims,
which was hailed as sensitive and perceptive.

In December 2007, Benazir was assassinated. Fatima was in Larkana, the
rather gloomy family estate in Sindh province, eight hours’ drive
through dusty fields from Karachi, at the time. Although she was long
estranged from Benazir, she was very shocked. ‘It was like a terrible
déjà vu; it’s almost as if every 10 years someone in our family is
violently murdered. And the way the police cleaned up the blood from
her murder scene as quickly as they cleaned up my father’s brought
back terrible memories.’

These days, life in 70 Clifton passes slowly and languidly; the house
is an oasis in Karachi, which is now violent and plagued with gangs,
corruption, poverty, and a breeding ground for radical jihadists.
Despite this, Fatima has many friends that she grew up with at the
American School, and goes out to small restaurants and her yoga
classes. She has guards, but they are more like family members –
friends of the party – than armed militia. And she travels often to
Europe, although she likes to keep her life as private as possible.
Anything she does ends up in the press, so she keeps a low profile.

At home, life is quiet, with the sound of the mynah birds coming from
the garden outside.

It is a simple, family life with a lot of love in the household.
Ghinwa, a committed vegan, cooks amazing dishes and bakes cakes. Mir
Ali plays with his Spider-Man toys and delights the household. (Ghinwa
adopted him when he was a month old as a way of attempting to heal the
pain after Mir’s death.) Fatima writes and oversees various charities
– one morning, we go to a home for abandoned girls for which she has
been providing computers, donated by friends in London. Another time,
we go to the Sunday market to buy cotton T-shirts, which she will take
to women in prison to embroider and sell. She loves to write. ‘It’s
all I ever wanted to do,’ she says. When she was little she used to
‘interview’ her father with a hand-held radio. She is passionately
worried about the state of her country and its 162 million
inhabitants, but says she will never go into politics. ‘It’s not about
birthright,’ she says.

She is single, and not worried about it. She wants children very much,
and will probably adopt as well as having her own, as she sees the joy
Mir Ali has brought to the family. She says she will marry for love,
not for religion – and the stories that have appeared in the tabloid
press about her and George Clooney are rubbish. She misses her brother
Zulfi terribly when he is away at school. They speak every day, and
she bosses him around like a big sister would. She says that she and
Ghinwa jokingly refer to each other as ‘an old married couple’ as they
are so close. ‘I still sit on her lap sometimes,’ she laughs.

We do yoga in the mornings in Zulfi’s old painting studio – Fatima is
excited that she can now do the crow pose – and drink a lot of tea.
She talks about her next project, a reportage history of Karachi, of
its gangs, poverty and corruption. She can’t really go out by herself
but nothing seems to frighten her, although she admits that she had
panic attacks for a long time after her father’s death. She is also a
chronic insomniac, like her father.

One night we have dinner at home at the round table overlooking the
gardens with her dear friend Sabeen Jatoi. Sabeen is six years older
than Fatima. Her father, Ashiq, was also killed that night by the
police – he was a political activist along with Mir – and the two
women have a very strong bond.

‘I remember my brother was late getting to school in England that
year,’ Sabeen says.

‘What could he say? Excuse me for being late, my father was just
gunned down by police.’ She puts down her fork. ‘That does not exactly
help to make friends.’

Jatoi is a lawyer, and as passionate and committed to finding out the
truth as Fatima. We talk for a long time about anger, about how it
perpetuates vengeance. ‘Eventually I just had to let it go,’ Jatoi
says. ‘Which does not mean you forget.’

Fatima goes back to the night of the murders. While waiting in the
hospital to give blood to her father, she bumped into Sabeen. ‘Papa
needs blood, Papa needs blood,’ she kept repeating. Sabeen was looking
for her own father. Later, at the 40-day ritual condolences, Sabeen
came up to Fatima and embraced her. ‘We don’t blame you,’ she said.

‘All I remember after it was a lot of love,’ Fatima says. ‘People kept
coming to the house to comfort us, to console. I felt surrounded by so
much love.’

Songs of Blood and Sword is powerful. Fatima wrote it as a journalist
would, using her investigative training. In some ways, she had to put
her love aside and be objective. Does she think her father was immune
from the corruption that plagued the Bhuttos? What did she find out
about him along the way?

‘That he did not like Woody Allen movies,’ she says. ‘I never knew he
did not like Woody Allen movies.’ Then, growing more serious, she says
how painful it was to delve into the process of recording a father’s
life and death. ‘I did not want to write a hagiography,’ she says. She
knows her father was flawed. So she began a voyage around the world
that took her from Greece – where she found one his first loves, a
woman named Della, who helped her unravel pieces of her father through
letters, memories and friends, to Texas, to Harvard, to visits to the
Karachi police and medical examiners who tended her father when he was
dying.

She saw lawyers in France who worked on the case of her uncle
Shahnawaz. She trawled through documents from the infamous 1981
Pakistan International Airways hijacking, and concludes in the book
that while her father was involved in the negotiations of the
hostages, he was not involved in the hijacking. (He was posthumously
acquitted of this charge in 2003.) ‘Look, he and my uncle were young
and passionate and trying to overthrow a military dictatorship. But
they did not take lives.’

While writing, she locked herself away in the family home in Sindhi, a
long way from internet and mobile phone networks. She also spent time
in an apartment in France, talking to no one but herself for three
weeks. ‘I got paranoid while I was writing,’ she says. ‘I did not want
people in Karachi to know what I was doing. I just wanted to get this
book out. I wanted to document it, have it on record, have an
archive.’ (Penguin India has bought the Pakistan rights. It will be
published in India and distributed in Pakistan.)

She is serious and ‘sober’, as one of the Pakistani papers calls her,
a bluestocking, an old-fashioned intellectual. At times girlish – she
gives great beauty advice about how to apply eyeliner and use mustard
oil to condition hair. She always wears a small bronze sword around
her neck. It belonged to her father, and it reminds her, always, of
her birthright. Not as a political dynasty, but as a fighter, as
someone seeking truth.

As if by chance, lying in my bed at 70 Clifton – in the rooms once
used by her father and her uncle Shahnawaz, surrounded by their books
and briefcases and family photos – I see that in the notebook I have
used to take notes on Fatima, I also have notes from an interview I
did with a famous French psychiatrist, Boris Cyrulnik. Cyrulnik is
renowned for his work on trauma and resilience, and victims of
violence. It is his belief that despite horrific incidents that happen
to individuals, they can go on to achieve extraordinary things.

I had asked Cyrulnik how people heal from trauma, how they forget.
‘They never forget,’ he said. ‘The wound remains. But they begin to
build great strength from that, they have the capacity to create, to
live, to go on and do great things.’

I think of the 14-year-old Fatima hiding in a dressing-room,
protecting her little brother from the killers of her father. I think
how traumatic her life has been, then I think of what she has done –
and what she will do. And I can think of no one better to carry the
word ‘resilient’.

‘Songs of Blood and Sword’ by Fatima Bhutto (Jonathan Cape, £20) is
available for £18 plus £1.25 p&p from Telegraph Books (0844-871 1515;
books.telegraph.co.uk)