On a previous state visit to the Nixon White House, the President was informed that it was his visiting Prime Minister’s son’s birthday. So Nixon sat at the piano and sung ‘Happy Birthday’ to Murtaza. It must have been Murtaza’s twentieth birthday, and he spent it like no other twenty-year-old – listening to wooden Dick Nixon serenade him. That story, however, Murtaza kept to himself.
Towards the end of his junior year at university, Murtaza started to prepare himself for his dissertation. It would be the culmination of all his hard work at Harvard. He discussed the matter with Professor Paarlberg. He wanted to write, he decided, about Pakistan and the nuclear issue. ‘It was the only time his father ever came up in our discussions,’ says Professor Paarlberg. ‘I was concerned about how he would get all the information needed to write a thesis in the face of secrecy and governmental blocks, but Murtaza laughed it off and said he was going home that summer and that he was confident he’d get the required information.’
At the start of his senior year, Murtaza was accepted as an undergraduate associate at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. His acceptance letter, which is postmarked 19 November 1975, sets the guidelines of his association with the Center, a prestigious honour for ‘seniors engaged in research and writing their theses’ and reminds the lucky few that while they have access to the Center’s activities and special seminars they ‘do not normally have access to Center supplies and Xeroxing’.
He was assigned an advisor in the government department to guide him through the process of writing his undergraduate thesis – the only problem, Murtaza wrote in his letters home, was that his advisor, a big name in the department, was also infamously known at the time as the ‘butcher of Vietnam’. His name was Samuel Huntington. Samuel ‘clash of civilizations’ Huntington was then known for his advisory role in Vietnam. Huntington advocated the herding of villagers into clusters away from the Vietcong, not appreciating that it made it much easier for the US army to bomb civilians in their separated enclaves. When I travelled to Cambridge in the spring of 2006, I found Huntington a frail old man. He wore a woolly navy sweater in April and drank Coca-Cola from a Starbucks espresso cup. He shrunk into his brown leather armchair as we spoke and seemed to be so much smaller than his frightening legend suggests.
Huntington told me he remembered Murtaza as a student but ‘not terribly well’.
When I told him that they had worked together on his senior thesis, for which Murtaza was awarded honours, Huntington nodded and mumbled, ‘That’s good’, sounding impressed at his involvement in this particular process. He told me that he and Murtaza met several times a month to discuss his progress on the thesis and that Murtaza ‘wanted very much to write on nuclear proliferation and that we discussed it and I encouraged him’. Of course you did, I thought. You’re Samuel Huntington. Nuclear proliferation must produce a Pavlovian response in a fellow like Huntington; I imagined it excited him terribly. He recalled that he and Murtaza had ‘lively discussions’ (unlikely), that they talked about Vietnam though ‘I can’t remember what he said or I said’ (thankfully), and that he knew the young student’s ‘background was extraordinary but that it didn’t affect him as a student’. He was impressed he didn’t flog his family connections as he struggled to research and write the thesis. I asked Huntington if he remembered my father’s work. ‘As I remember, it was a very good thesis,’ he replied, but struggled to give me more than that. He was a tough person to interview, most of our eleven minutes together were spent with Huntington sifting through notes printed out for him – most were, I noticed eerily, about me – and shrugging his shoulders admitting that he just didn’t remember. ‘I have to tell you,’ he said to me at one point, ‘I have a lousy memory.’12
Murtaza barrelled away at his thesis and threw himself fully into writing and researching it. ‘He was an oddity at Harvard because his senior thesis was on Pakistan having the bomb,’ remembered Bobby Kennedy Jr, another one of Murtaza’s Harvard roommates and friends, when we met at his New York home before an imminent Rolling Stone deadline. We had a spot of lunch – I did a lot of eating on my American research tour – and discussed old times. ‘Everyone, including his friends, was aghast at the idea – but he was unafraid to argue it. He had the capacity to defend his beliefs.’13
The final product, ‘A Modicum of Harmony’, was a neatly bound dissertation arguing Pakistan’s right to obtain nuclear power in order to safeguard its position in the region. Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation, Murtaza argued, would guarantee military moderation between it and its neighbouring nemesis, India, and would further stabilize the new country’s position in the region. Murtaza argued that India’s explosion of the bomb demanded that Pakistan follow suit, and if it did so, the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the subcontinent would not have an overly destabilizing effect on the international system; rather, it would balance it out.
In a letter to her son around the time he had been drafting his thesis, sending his father sections to read, Nusrat writes:
Papa remarked how well you write now and how very mature you are and I suddenly felt you are a grown-up person and not my little baby. I suppose subconsciously I looked on you as a little son of mine, now you are my grown-up son and a man; oof I don’t know what I am writing I have become sentimental – can’t help myself, I love you too much. May you have a happily successful life and may you live to be a hundred years old.
Where Zulfikar was strict and orderly with his sons, Nusrat was effusive and affectionate with all her children. She was a devoted mother who sparkled when she was around her babies, ignoring all norms of discipline and protocol that Zulfikar would strictly insist upon. While Murtaza was at college it was his mother who carried on his habit of cutting out newspaper articles, diligently posting him a packet every two months or so.
‘A Modicum of Harmony’ was read and marked by three college readers. The first called it ‘perversely refreshing’ and found the author’s insights ‘quite elegant’. The examinor continued to applaud the thesis’s integration of political philosophy, mainly that of Hobbes, Rousseau and Machiavelli, ‘a linkage of technical policy analysis and the larger problems of politics which is unfortunately all too rare in writing on nuclear weapons’. The thesis was deemed ‘provocative and well argued’. The second reader, however, was less impressed. Michael Ng Quinn found that the author failed to ‘answer one central question: despite his recommendation that Pakistan should also go nuclear, why hasn’t she done so?’ The third reader was caught somewhere in the middle. While he found the thesis was ‘argued persuasively’ and felt that the author was ‘able to argue, against what one might first think, that nuclear proliferation may have positive effects on world order and, in particular, may raise the Indo-Pak dispute to a higher level of responsibility’, he had objections with the author’s analysis of the regional dispute in ‘abstract’ and theoretical terms.
But critical though the readers were, the thesis was awarded a distinction and Murtaza Bhutto was awarded honours. His father, Zulfikar, sent a telegram through Western Union on behalf of the family when he received news of Murtaza’s success. The telegram, dated 16 June, is excited and rushed; almost none of the words are spelled correctly. ‘Mumjy, Gugail and I actullay everone of us here join in congratulating you on graduating with honou rzgfrom Harvard (.) It is the outcome of your vhard and devoted labou (.) may you score greater su ccesses in the ffuture. Your loving Papa’. Murtaza graduated from Harvard in 1976 in the top 15 per cent of his class, cum laude.
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I n the autumn of 1976, Murtaza was en route to England. He had applied to his father’s alma mater, Oxford, and had been given a place at Christ Church to read politics, philosophy and economics. The letter offering him a place was dated 28 November 1975, and cautioned that he might have to do some preparatory work in economics – further proof that one does need maths now and again – before starting his degree, but that, nevertheless, ‘it will give everyone here great ple
asure that the family tradition is being continued’.
At Oxford, Murtaza would once more be around his elder sister Benazir. They had overlapped at Harvard, along with Sanam, their younger sister, but though they lived close enough to each other their circles were poles apart and they led conspicuously different lives. They communicated, it would seem, mainly by letter. Benazir sent her brother postcards from her travels. One card from 1974 reads: ‘A fortune teller told me I’d marry at 27 live abroad at a farm and look after sheep and cows’ and is signed BB. Another, from when she started at Oxford, a year before her brother, began: ‘My dear creep’ and goes on to complain that Benazir ‘had to pick up Michael Foot, the minister of unemployment, in my little MG sports car’. That letter is signed Pinky, her childhood nickname. From New Zealand, on a state visit with their parents, she writes, ‘New Zealand was terrific and I met lots and lots of charming people – charming being all those who fell in love with me.’ From Sri Lanka, on another state trip with their father, on a postcard of male Kandyan dancers, ‘Last night three Sinahlese minister’s [sic] helped to cover me so I could smoke a cigarette after the banquette without Papa seeing.’ But the best was sent from Paris: ‘Had to walk for one hour through the Louvre for Mummy’s sake. I loved Versailles. Will you get it for my birthday? Love Pinky.’
As Murtaza’s October arrival at Oxford neared, the Dean of Christ Church wrote to the senior censor regarding the young man’s arrangements. Murtaza had been housed at No. 2, Brewer Street, and it was decided that his address would not be printed in the list of lodgings and residences. The Dean instructed the porters not to give out Murtaza’s address or confirm that he was a student at the college. The note ended presciently. ‘If at any time during his residence here, tension builds up about the politics of Pakistan, special measures may have to be taken, e.g. advising him never to take the same route at the same time of the day if it can be avoided.’
It was summer when the army finally struck. Elections were getting close and the embattled Zulfikar had been doing his best to appease his opponents. As an understanding between the PPP and a newly formed alliance of opposition parties was reaching its culmination, General Zia declared martial law. He closed down the country on the night of 4 July 1977 and appointed himself chief martial law administrator. Elections would be held in ninety days, he promised on television, adding that the Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was under ‘protective custody’.
Zulfikar was released several weeks later. He immediately set off on a political campaign across the country, rallying crowds and attacking the military’s attempt to discredit him and seize power. As millions of people came out to hear him, whatever political credit Zulfikar had lost during his time in power had been regained. He was unstoppable. General Zia realized that Zulfikar would not lose the election, no matter when it was held. ‘It’s either him or me,’ the General is said to have prophesized. ‘Two men, one coffin.’1
It was summer in Karachi, hot and stifling, and Murtaza was home from his first year at Oxford. As soon as his father was arrested, a message was sent to his eldest son: ‘Go to Larkana, begin the campaign.’ Murtaza went straight to the family constituency, accompanied by his younger brother, Shahnawaz. He was twenty-three years old and singlehandedly, as Zulfikar and his lawyers began a process of legal protection, began to work for his father. He met with peasants, with local notables, with those he had first worked alongside as a young boy campaigning for his father’s first election.
After several arrests and releases the military government placed a ‘conspiracy to murder’ charge against Zulfikar, accusing him of attempting to murder a political opponent, Ahmed Raza Kasuri. Three years earlier, gunmen had fired at Kasuri’s car, killing his father. At the time Kasuri – a former member of the PPP – blamed the government. A tribunal was called to investigate the matter and rejected the allegations, after which Kasuri rejoined the People’s Party – the party he claimed had attacked him and killed his father. The claims, sensational and provocative, were factually weak. But a man, even a Prime Minister, could be hanged for murder. Kasuri cooperated with the military and charges were filed against Zulfikar. They finally had him in their sights.
It was in Larkana that Murtaza saw his father a free man for the last time. Zulfikar had come to the city from Lahore. He hadn’t slept in two days. Gudu was working in the ruins of Moenjodaro, thirty minutes from the Bhutto home, at a job Nusrat had recommended him for, and was living with Murtaza at the time. It was late at night, past midnight, when Gudu, who was in the bathroom, opened a window because a noise outside had startled him. There was a commotion of sorts, but not the familiar noise of crowds outside Al Murtaza that one grew used to hearing, the chants of slogans and exuberant chaos. There was something more orderly and alarming about the racket. Upon opening the window Gudu saw that the walls of the house were being scaled by men in uniform. ‘I panicked’ he recalled. ‘I ran to Mir and told him what I had seen. He was as calm as ever. He told me to calm down and then we went to tell his father.’
By the time they reached Zulfikar, an army officer was standing in front of him. Gudu remembers the soldier apologizing to the Prime Minister. ‘Sorry, sahib’, he said before escorting him to the car waiting outside.
Mir, Shah and I were alone in the house then. We stayed up all night, I packed my clothes and planned to quit my archaeological gig at Moenjodaro in the morning. Mir was worried, of course, but he held himself together. Zulfikar told him something before he was taken away. It was private. The next morning he got on a plane to Rawalpindi to join his mother, Nusrat.
In Rawalpindi, the sons met with their mother. She had been cloistered in the compound since the arrest and was sick with worry. Since Zulfikar’s first arrest in July, Nusrat had been unable to sleep at night. The sound of boots climbing the steps to her bedroom to arrest her husband, frightening her children, haunted her. She wore earplugs from then on. I remember her always putting them in when she retired to her room for the night, to block off the sound of boots in her sleep. It simply wasn’t safe for Murtaza and Shahnawaz to be in Pakistan. The regime was building its case against Zulfikar personally, not just politically, and the danger to those around him grew. Zulfikar sent word to his sons to leave the country. He asked one of his friends to arrange to send Murtaza and Shahnawaz out of Pakistan. Do it legally if you can, he asked, but if not then find other channels. If there was a vendetta against Zulfikar being played out at the highest levels of the state’s military, his sons would be the next natural targets. Murtaza tried to argue, but Zulfikar’s reply was final.
Murtaza returned to Oxford and Shahnawaz to his college in Switzerland, but not for long. The brothers immediately mounted an international campaign to save their father’s life, the Save Bhutto Committee, and its base of operations was to be in London. Sometimes with their mother, who remained in Pakistan with her daughters, but most often travelling with other political workers belonging to the PPP or alone, the brothers set off on diplomatic missions. They met Colonel Gadaffi, a close friend of their father’s, in Tripoli. He offered his support to Murtaza and Shahnawaz, going so far as to extend asylum to them should they ever need it. After the General’s military junta was firmly in place in Pakistan, the government several times asked Gadaffi to extend an invitation to General Zia for a state visit. Gaddafi always refused, out of his affection for Zulfikar and his memory, even though a number of Pakistani servicemen were stationed in Libya for long-term training.
Murtaza and Shahnawaz flew to Beirut to meet the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat. A Palestinian friend from college arranged the meeting for Murtaza and his brother, and for his part Arafat confidently told the Bhutto brothers that their father’s life would be spared. He recounted a story of running into General Zia at Mecca while both men were performing the Hajj. Arafat told the brothers that he asked General Zia in front of the Kaaba to spare Bhutto’s life and that the General had promised clemency. They
met Giscard D’Estaing of France, who sent a strong letter of support for Bhutto to General Zia, called on Kurt Waldheim, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, and received support from the Pope and the friendship and assistance of Hafez al Assad of Syria among many others.
Murtaza and Shahnawaz, twenty-three and nineteen years old respectively, were carrying out a gruelling schedule. Together they met with dignitaries, spoke at press conferences, picketed Pakistani embassies and lobbied journalists and Pakistani communities to raise their voices against the abrogation of the 1973 constitution, all the while carrying on with their studies and sending in their work by post or speaking to their tutors by phone. But they were still young men, raising their eyebrows at each other over Arafat’s effete and handsome young assistants. They often found small moments of levity to amuse each other in the face of such daunting odds.
Travelling in the States alone, without his brother, but accompanied by Bhutto’s one-time Chief Minister of Punjab, Mustafa Khar, Murtaza became exhausted by the older man’s finicky ways. Khar, a man whose chequered domestic history prompted his wife Tehmina Durrani to write My Feudal Lord, a wildly successful tell-all about their marriage, could not start the day without half an hour of yoga in the morning, which he insisted on practising in the nude. Murtaza would have to wait outside the room until Khar had found his morning zen. He quickly grew tired of the monotonous morning schedule. One day, to liven things up, Murtaza decided not to place the ‘Do not disturb sign’ outside their hotel door as Khar had asked him to do. Instead he hung the ‘Please make my room’ sign. Murtaza waited in the corridor for the housekeeper to arrive and collapsed laughing when the startled housekeeper ran out of the room screaming after she had walked in on Khar in a naked downward dog pose.
Songs of Blood and Sword Page 15
