by Ian Buruma
Burki also mentions the fact that in 1962 Bhutto wrote a long memorandum to Ayub outlining his idea for a one-party state in which the roles of the judiciary and the legislative branches of government were to be completely subservient to the all-powerful central authority. China and the Soviet Union were to be the models. When Ayub demurred, Bhutto called him timid and soft.
Z. A. Bhutto talked a lot about democracy, to be sure, but his instincts were those of the man of iron. The only hint of this in Benazir’s account is a reading list he thoughtfully prepared for his daughter when he was detained by Ayub in 1968 for inciting riots. His recommended reading included anything about Napoleon Bonaparte, “the most complete man in history.” This is not surprising, since Napoleon has long been a subcontinental hero. But the rest of the list included Bismarck, Lenin, Ataturk, Mao Zedong and, looking a little lost in this group of iron men, Abraham Lincoln. What they all had in common was their fatherhood of nations. That was how Bhutto saw himself.
Benazir was at Radcliffe, reading Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, protesting against the Vietnam War, and imbibing Western concepts of law and politics from Professor John Womack, when her father ran his highly successful campaign in 1970 as a populist man of the left. The urban workers, many of them dislocated, bewildered and left behind by Ayub’s high-speed economic development, loved Bhutto’s message of deliverance from bourgeois greed. Bhutto won the election in West Pakistan, while Sheik Mujib ur-Rahman, banking on the Bengali middle class disaffected with Punjabi domination, won in East Pakistan, not yet Bangladesh. Differences between the two were never resolved—something Benazir blames entirely on Mujib, who “showed an obstinacy the logic of which to this day defies me.” The Pakistani army quelled Bengali unrest with extraordinary cruelty. India intervened. Pakistan split in half. Bhutto, Benazir informs us, did his utmost to stop the tragedy and avert the generals from their slaughter. (Benazir compares the massacre of tens of thousands of Bengalis to My Lai—this is the Radcliffe Benazir speaking—and to General Zia’s suppression of his opponents in the province of Sindh—this the Larkana Benazir. Both comparisons are absurd.)
Again, this is not the way other people saw the same events. In Can Pakistan Survive? Tariq Ali, who helped Benazir with her speeches for the Oxford Union, clearly no friend of the generals, blames Bhutto for unleashing “a hysterical campaign” denouncing Mujib’s position, for whipping up “an atmosphere of frenzied chauvinism in the Punjab,” and for “colluding with the generals” in crushing the Bengalis. “Thank God! Pakistan has been saved,” he quotes Bhutto as saying after the butchery was done.
And so the stage was set for the Bhutto years, that mythical golden age which our heroine set out to revive through trials and tribulations. Yahya Khan, the general in power during the crisis in East Pakistan, lost so much face that he had to appoint Bhutto as chief martial-law administrator and president. A new constitution was promulgated in 1973: “The people of Pakistan enjoyed the first constitution in Pakistan’s history to introduce fundamental human rights and ensure their protection.… The first representative government of Pakistan finally had the legal framework within which to govern: the sanctioned authority that Professor Womack had brought home to me so clearly in his seminar.”
So speaks the Radcliffe Benazir. The Larkana Benazir finds more inspirational words to describe the heady excitement of hearing masses of people shout, “Jeay Bhutto! Long live Bhutto!” Here is a sample from The Way Out:
Jeay Bhutto. It’s a lovely word. It’s warm and wonderful. It lifts the heart. It elevates the spirit.… It means so much to us it drives us on. It makes us reach for the stars and the moon.
And another:
In 1972, we climbed the highest mountains and built the biggest bridges because of our leadership. We had a brilliant leader, a popular leader, a strong leader, a man who for his principles and his motherland would fight and fight and fight.
Bhutto did not read Napoleon for nothing. Like Sukarno in Indonesia, a man he resembled in many ways, he had a personalized view of nation-building: the strong leader, the great man, who would fight and fight and fight, the erector of stadiums and phallic monuments, the chief cock of the country—only this kind of steely superhero could father a great nation. Those who opposed him were obstacles to progress: greedy merchants, selfish tribal chieftains, evil generals, reactionary politicos, uppity bureaucrats, obstinate judges and so forth. And so, to build a great nation and foster progress, the power of such selfish reactionaries had to be curbed. Burki quotes from one of Bhutto’s speeches made a year before his downfall:
In 1970, I promised you democracy. In 1973, I gave you democracy.… You and I have trusted each other, worked together. We understand each other. But there are people in this country that don’t approve of our association. These people have attempted to put obstacles in our way; to stop us from building a new Pakistan. They can do this because we have allowed them to do so. Should we continue to permit them this freedom? Mustn’t we change the rules of the game so that our progress towards a new and dynamic Pakistan is not continuously thwarted?
In fact, according to Burki, as well as many others, the rules had already been changed long before Bhutto made that speech in 1976. The tragedy of Bhutto is that he set in motion the very forces that brought him down. He curbed the bureaucracy by withdrawing constitutional guarantees from civil servants and concentrating more power in his own hands. Civil servants he considered hostile were jailed or dismissed. More serious, as far as his own ultimate fate was concerned, was his tampering with the constitution to limit the power of the law courts. They were denied jurisdiction over government decisions taken under the Defense of Pakistan Rule, an emergency measure enforced during the crisis over Bangladesh and retained by Bhutto for political purposes. The government appropriated the power to dissolve political parties by adopting the so-called Suppression of Terrorist Activities (Special Courts) Ordinance. The main opposition party in Baluchistan, the National Awami Party, was banned under this rule and many of its members were jailed. (Soon after her own election as prime minister, Benazir ran into trouble in Baluchistan herself; her followers allowed the Baluchistan provincial assembly to be dissolved.)
Four months after Bhutto promised freedom of the press, three periodicals were banned and their editors and publishers were arrested. According to Tariq Ali, “The bulk of the media at all events was kept firmly under government control, serving the Bhutto régime as loyally as it had done its predecessors.”
Most damaging of all were his maladroit dealings with the army. The first thing he did upon attaining power was to put the commanders-in-chief of the army and air force under house arrest. Protective custody, he called it. (General Zia used the same term when he had Bhutto arrested in 1977.) Then he appointed General Tikka Khan, known as the “Butcher of Dacca” for his zeal in crushing the Bengalis, as his chief of staff. Bhutto chose him for his loyalty, and turned out to be correct in this. (Tikka Khan is still close to Benazir.) In the case of General Zia, whom he appointed as chief of staff some years later, he was wrong.
Benazir describes Zia variously as a stage villain and an ignorant, unscrupulous, unintelligent, tin-pot dictator. This is as it should be in a myth. In fact, however, he was a rather intelligent and effective dictator and, though he looked like a villain, he had a soft-spoken charm. Like General Suharto, who has ruled Indonesia since the demise of Sukarno, Zia was a “smiling general,” with all the steel but none of the flamboyance of the Napoleonic populist he replaced. He was certainly not a democrat. He set himself up to be a Muslim leader who would turn Pakistan into a real Muslim state, based on Muslim law—adultery, consumption of alcohol, gambling would result in cut limbs, whippings or death by stoning. Some of these punishments took place, but in fact he never went as far as the mullahs wanted. Aside from Pakistan’s crippling national debt, perhaps Zia’s worst legacy sprang from the source of his greatest political strength: the guns, drugs and general corruption of Pakistan
society wrought by the Afghan war.
In hindsight one must conclude that Bhutto asked for trouble. He should never have called out the army to control the turbulent opposition after he was accused of rigging the 1977 elections. Once out of the barracks, and faced with a country running out of control, the generals did what came naturally to them: they took over.
Bhutto was arrested, and in confinement he read one of his books about Napoleon. Certainly he and his family were cruelly treated by Zia. He was sentenced to hang for murder in a farcical trial, and spent his last years in filthy jails, his only comforts his favorite cologne and the odd Havana cigar. At that point Benazir strode to the center stage. Bhutto, in his fetid cell, grabbed his daughter’s hand and said, “My daughter, should anything happen to me, promise me you will continue my mission.”
I have dwelled at some length on the rule of the father, because the daughter took his mission seriously: it is as Bhutto’s daughter that she challenged her political opponents; in every campaign poster showing her face it was the image of the father that loomed behind her, like a guardian god. What she felt as she walked away from the prison is summed up in The Way Out: “If the people of Pakistan ever saw their leader kept in such a disgusting and disrespectful manner their blood would boil and from Khyber to Karachi a fierce fire would rage which no guns could wipe out.”
Benazir slipped into her new role with great aplomb. The way it is described suggests the mystical transfusion of a spirit, or sacred flame. Such is often the nature of dynastic politics in Asia. The same process was described by Cory Aquino, who, kneeling in prayer, felt the flutter of her husband’s spirit entering her soul, enabling her to carry on the struggle. It is impossible to pinpoint the precise moment when the visitation took place in Benazir’s case. Was it in the jail scene evoked above? Or did it happen earlier, perhaps the first time Zia’s thugs entered the family house in Karachi (the famous 70 Clifton) and lolled about on the begum’s Louis XV chairs? This is how she tells it in Daughters of the East:
Once again I watch my father being driven away, not knowing where he is being taken, not knowing if I will ever seem him again. I waver for a moment, half of my heart breaking, the other half turning to ice. “Pinkie,” I hear a voice call. I turn to see my brother Shah Nawaz lined up with the staff in the courtyard. “Usko choro! Leave him!” I shout at the soldiers holding him. I am frightened myself at the new tone of my voice. But the soldiers step away.
The new tone of voice: perhaps that was it. It seems, from her own telling of the story, as though her entire life was a kind of dress rehearsal for the main act: the crusade to avenge her father, to return the Bhutto family to power. This is as true for the Larkana Benazir as for the Radcliffe one. The day she left for America, her father spoke of her debt to the people of Pakistan, “a debt you can repay with God’s blessing by using your education to better their lives.”
There is nothing wrong with this sentiment; in fact, it is a noble one. But it is important to know just how Benazir sees the nature of her political power, or, indeed, not just her own power, but political power in general. The Radcliffe Benazir realizes that politics must be divested of mythology to be lawful and subject to critical reason. Does the Larkana Benazir know this? Or, to make things even more complicated, are the Radcliffe Benazir’s political ideals perhaps part of the Larkana Benazir’s myth? This particular confusion is encouraged by the Western taste for exotic morality tales casting her as the fairy queen. Are her politics, and by extension the politics of Pakistan, to be a matter of compromise, regular elections and the same rules applying to all? Or will they remain a contest between Good and Evil, between great leaders and reactionary, obscurantist, wicked, uneducated hoodlums? Will the same rules apply to those who are born to lead as to those deemed beyond the pale? Her political opponents have given her little cause to feel conciliatory. Even as she toned down her fiery rhetoric during the elections, her rivals, a combination of big businessmen, Muslim fundamentalists, and former protégés of General Zia, mostly from Punjab, often used highly provocative language about her, hinting at Western decadence and communist connections. Although her Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) did well all over Pakistan in the national elections, it did less well in the provincial elections. One of her rivals for the prime-ministership, Mian Nawaz Sharif, a former Zia man, still controls Punjab, the richest and largest province in Pakistan. Another strong opponent, Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, once a close associate of Miss Bhutto’s father, was elected to the National Assembly. An opposition party, the Muttaheda Quami Movement, controls Karachi and Hyderabad, the two biggest cities in Sindh.
It will be interesting to see how she deals with her opposition. Will she be accountable as a leader, or will she carry out her mission with the arrogance of a dynastic ruler or the messianic zeal of those who think they represent that mythical concept, the will of the people? So far, she has done well: she has compromised, played by the rules, kept her cool. But these are still important questions, because it was precisely that zeal, that Napoleonic hubris, which destroyed her father.
Her book, admittedly written with a campaign in mind against the man she rightly holds responsible for her family’s grief, is not entirely reassuring, because it is so full of myth, and because the heroes are above the rules which are applied to the villains. The treatment of her two brothers, for example. While Benazir and her mother were taken from jail to jail to stop them from agitating against the Zia regime, her brothers, Mir Murtaza and Shah Nawaz, were in Kabul organizing a group called Al-Zulfikar to carry on the struggle by violent means. There was the hijacking of a passenger plane, there were bomb attacks, and Mir promised to “turn Pakistan up and down.” Zia tried to link mother and daughter Bhutto to these violent acts, but never produced any evidence. Indeed, both women suffered greatly on account of the two brothers. Benazir was locked up in solitary cells where she received inadequate treatment for an ear disease that could have killed her.
Nonetheless, Benazir writes about her brothers with reverence. Shah, a spoiled and handsome playboy—Swiss school, frequent attendance at Regine’s in Paris, flat in Monte Carlo—“was so generous you never knew what he would do.… He had empathized with the poor since childhood. He had built a straw hut in the garden at 70 Clifton and slept in it for weeks, wanting to feel the deprivations of the poor.”
Shah was interested in intelligence work: “Just remember you have a little brother who can help you if you give him a high post in intelligence.” It was not to be. During a family holiday in Cannes he died of poisoning. His Afghan wife, who sounds like an even worse brat than her late husband, was recently found by a French court to have been criminally negligent in letting Shah die. The marriage, by all accounts, including Benazir’s, was not a happy one. The exact cause of his death is still mysterious, except to the Bhuttos, who are all convinced that he was murdered by Zia’s agents. Or, as Benazir suggests, “had the CIA killed him as a friendly gesture towards their favourite dictator?” But whatever the cause of his death, it is clear that Shah was playing dangerous and nasty games.
Which makes Benazir’s sentimental description of his funeral sound nauseating: “I wanted to take him past the lands where he had hunted with Papa and Mir, past our fields and ponds, past the people he had tried to defend in his own way. The people, too, deserved the chance to honour this brave son of Pakistan. The Martyr’s son has been martyred.” Note the “in his own way.” Zia ruled Pakistan in his own way too. But he was evil; he was not a Bhutto. The Larkana Benazir has taken control. But there is more to come:
In every generation, Shiite Muslims believe, there is a Karbala, a re-enactment of the tragedy that befell the family of Prophet Mohammed PBUH [Peace Be Upon Him], after his death in 640 AD. Many in Pakistan have come to believe that the victimization of the Bhutto family and our supporters was the Karbala of our generation.
Many in Pakistan probably do believe it, but, more significantly, so does Benazir—or at least everything points to
that conclusion. Power still has magic in Pakistan; people want to be near it, touch it, feel it. When Benazir was paraded through Pakistan, from morning until late at night, perched on top of a truck, lit by a spotlight, proud, aloof, every inch the aristocratic leader, people fought each other to touch the vehicle. Many treat her like a divine ruler. It is to be hoped that she knows better. Honor has been served; she has restored power to her family. But her cause is to restore democracy. That cause would be ill-served by perpetuating the dynastic myths of Larkana.
1989
ST. CORY AND THE EVIL ROSE
Imelda Marcos today has a mellow beauty in which the radiance has the quality of emotion. When she speaks—of her husband, of her children, of her life—her voice becomes so full of feeling the very air seems to throb, and the great splendid eyes deepen, darken, and dazzle with tears. She has adjusted, she has accepted, she has signed, and she is happy, but whatever the effort may have cost her shows in a deepened glowing of her charm. The loveliness has become poignant.
The fresh-flowers look is what Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos have brought to Malacañang.
Mrs Marcos has been busy with mop and broom too.… Whatever her other images—as cultural patroness, as social workers, as a great beauty—she knows that the basic one is her image as housewife: she must show she can run a palace as efficiently as she did her home.
“I do not want to be known as having some friends I prefer to others.… Nor do I want people to think I’m a social butterfly going from one party to another.”
