Fatima Bhutto: Why I'm a public enemy in Pakistan

More than 100 policemen had stood waiting for my father, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, their guns loaded and their orders undeniable. I was 14 years old, my brother Zulfikar six years old, when our father was murdered on the streets outside our home.

My father, an elected member of parliament and a strong critic of the government of his elder sister, Benazir Bhutto - infamous for its corruption, human rights abuses, support for the nascent Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan and inept leadership - was shot several times. But he was killed with a point blank execution shot to his jaw.

My father and the six other men, all party workers who accompanied him that night as he returned home from a rally in the suburbs of Karachi, were left to bleed on leafy and expansive Clifton Road, a road that faced the British High Commission, the Italian consulate and other high-profile diplomatic enclaves. They died outside the beautifully decorated Clifton Gardens.

My aunt Benazir's government, in power at the time that her younger brother was murdered, stopped our family from filing a police report, a right we had to have returned to us by the Sindh High Courts. Her government arrested all the survivors and witnesses - keeping them in jail for the remainder of her term without access to lawyers, their families, or to us.

The police officers who had carried out the killings were internally cleared in a police review and put back on their beats. All promoted, to this day they remain powerful members of the Pakistani government and of police forces across the country.

Since Benazir's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan's first democratically elected head of state, had been overthrown and killed by a military coup in the late 1970s, my aunt had presided over a fractured family dynasty. Her youngest brother, Shahnawaz, was killed in mysterious circumstances in France in 1985. A year later Benazir entered into power-sharing negotiations with the military junta that had killed her father, jailed her and her mother, exiled her brothers and - she believed - had ordered Shahnawaz's killing, in order to take her place in the dirty pantheon of Pakistani politics.

For 14 years my family and I fought for justice in the Pakistani courts, and six years ago I set out to fulfil the last promise I made to my father, hours before he was killed outside our home, that I would tell his story.

I was in the middle of studying for my Masters degree here in London, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and I was 22 years old. I began the process of writing Songs of Blood and Sword and looking into my family's often tragic and violent histories by cold calling strangers. "Hello, you don't know me, but..."

I travelled across Pakistan to the northern frontiers of the country and across the southern shores of Sindh. I flew to London and Massachusetts and across Europe seeking out lost acquaintances and old lovers.

In 2007 my aunt Benazir was killed in Rawalpindi. In the aftermath, the streets were immediately cleaned up by the authorities, as they were after my father's murder. No police report was filed by the government led by her widower, Asif Zardari, and no criminal cases were launched against her assassins. I hadn't seen or spoken to my aunt for 10 years before her death and the questions I asked of her government's role in my father's murder went unanswered. Meanwhile the Zardari family keeps my grandmother - my father's mother - incommunicado in Dubai. We have not been able to see or speak to her for the past 13 years.

Two months ago, I launched my book in Karachi. That was the last time I was in my home, my city by the sea. To say that I expected outrage, writing as I had about the current Pakistani government's corruption, criminal past and increasingly worrying present, is to put it lightly.

What I didn't expect was the Pakistani establishment's decision to go nuclear. As I sit in London now, on the third leg of my book tour, politics in Pakistan seems ever so personal. Sulking family members, a lugubrious lot who benefited richly from the power and corruption of my aunt's two terms in office and now her husband's, came out of the woodwork.

The men who spoke to me of the violence they suffered under the state have been harassed and threatened. And I, flatteringly, have been turned into a public enemy of sorts. The years of research, pages of footnotes, interviews conducted over continents, and archive material sourced from libraries across Pakistan and Europe are no match for a hysterical state that has a dynastic reputation to protect and has powerful benefactors to answer to, who squirm when faced with the woeful tales of their billions of dollars of Pakistani aid money being squandered.

A fun fact: Pakistan is a nuclear-armed country that recently missed its millennium goals to eradicate polio. Not because we don't have the knowledge, but because we could not secure the constant refrigeration of the vaccines. Pakistan is a nuclear country that cannot provide electricity to its people.

The storm, exciting though it may be, around my book and me is ultimately not important. Persecution is a part of the Pakistani political ethos. What is worrying, however, is the direction of the feckless and autocratic regime of President Zardari, a man who once boasted to the British press that his government was hard at work fighting terrorism from al Qaeda to Aung San Suu Kyi, though no one seemed to have told the president that Miss Suu Kyi is a Burmese democratic campaigner and not an East Asian terror outfit. Details, mere details.

In the past two weeks, the state has banned access to Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia and another 500 (or is it 1,000?) websites ostensibly because there is anti-Islamic material on those sites. Omar Zahid, a senior Pakistani television producer, has been raising alarm bells - falling on surprisingly deaf Western ears - reminding those who would excuse the Pakistani government's blanket censorship that "exchange of information has become a very powerful force in Pakistan".

Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, said: "I'm always suspicious of these broad bans. In every case we looked at, there is an official reason, then another reason. There is an awful lot of political criticism they are blocking at the same time. I am very suspicious here."

Meanwhile, business carries on as usual. On May 18 President Zardari pardoned his unelected interior minister, Rehman Malik, who had been convicted of corruption in 2004.

In the Frontier province, a seventh-grade student, Natasha, the daughter of a poor local stone crusher, was held by police officers and raped for 21 days. After bravely filing police reports, Natasha's family has yet to see a single one of her accused rapists discharged from the police force or brought to justice.

No10 Downing Street and the White House have kept shtum on both cases.

What, then, is the difference between the "democratic" regime of Asif Zardari - who, like the dictator Pervez Musharraf, disdained national elections and was chosen by his own parliament - and the burgeoning Pakistani Taliban? Both oppose freedom of expression, both use Islam to rally people around their oppressive causes, both would ignore the rights of women - under this government, a woman may still be stoned to death for adultery. Who needs the Taliban?

This is the state that Britain and the US support, financially and politically, as the only option to keep Pakistan's Islamists at bay. Perhaps it's time for a new argument to justify this indefensible support of Pakistan's regime? Or not.

FATIMA BHUTTO

Born: Kabul, Afghanistan, May 1982.

Age: 28.

Status: Single. Might adopt children.

Education: American school in Karachi; degree in Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia, New York; MA at London's School of Oriental and African Studies.

Lives: Bhutto family home in Karachi with Lebanese stepmother, Ghinwa, adopted six-year-old brother and 19-year-old half brother Zulfikar.

CV: Campaigning journalist.

Family history: No contact with her Afghan mother, Fowzier. Her father, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, shot dead in Karachi, 1996. In 1985, her uncle, Shahnawaz Bhutto, was poisoned in France. Fatima and her cousin, Sassi, found the body. Fatima's grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, fourth president of Pakistan, executed in 1979. Estranged aunt and president of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, assassinated in 2007.

Fatima Bhutto talks to Aminatta Forna at the Hay Festival on Bank Holiday Monday at 10am.

Source:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23839264-fatima-bhutto-why-im-a-public-enemy-in-pakistan.do

Frontline Club-Events: Insight with Fatima Bhutto on 26th May 2010

Date: May 26, 2010 7:00 PM

Fatima Bhutto, writer, political commentator and outspoken critic of Pakistan’s current regime will be at the Frontline Club in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones, BBC Pakistan correspondent between 1998 and 2001 and author of Pakistan: Eye Of The Storm, to talk about her new book Songs of Blood and Sword and her vision for the future of Pakistan.

Songs of Blood and Sword tells the story of the Bhutto dynasty a history that mirrors the tumultuous events of Pakistan itself. In September 1996, a fourteen-year-old Fatima Bhutto hid in a windowless dressing room, shielding her baby brother while shots rang out in the streets outside the family home in Karachi. This was the evening that her father Murtaza was murdered, along with six of his associates.

In December 2007, Benazir Bhutto, Fatima’s aunt, was assassinated in Rawalpindi. It was the latest in a long line of tragedies for one of the world’s best known political dynasties.

Fatima Bhutto is an Afghan born Pakistani poetess and writer. She studied at Columbia University, and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. She currently writes columns for The Daily Beast, New Statesman and other publications. She lives in Karachi.

Owen Bennett-Jones was BBC Pakistan correspondent between 1998 and 2001

Source:http://frontlineclub.com/events/2010/05/insight-with-fatima-bhutto.html?utm_source=Frontline&utm_campaign=40fb0c7307-Announcing+June+events&utm_medium=email

Campaign for Justice for Mir Murtaza Bhutto-May

Youth is beautiful; it’s fresh & full of idealism & the passion to be able to change everything that is the cause of pain, as its felt the most in these budding years. With all the carefree attitude in the air, these are the very years that define the rest of the life, lay the basic pattern for it. Those who take the rough path for fulfilling their ideals don’t get killed at the hands of the history; a death they refuse to accept; every other form of it faced with their chins up & clean hands.

It isn't about how old you are; It is about how you are when you become old. Make the right choices, fight for the right causes, speak up for the truth, be a better person.

Continue to seek justice...

In Solidarity
Fatima Bhutto Fan club

Disclaimer: None of the views expressed here are of Fatima Bhutto or any of her family members. These are views of the team...

Copyright: Fatima Bhutto Fan club.
Please do not reproduce this anywhere without permission.

Press TV-Epilogue-Dreaming of Baghdad by Haifa Zangana

Press TV-Epilogue-Dreaming of Baghdad by Haifa Zangana- Fatima Bhutto Ken Livingstone

Part 1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdEXyJGDbM8

Part 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciy-UXuIy_E

Part 3:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rxeat8epTRM&feature=related

Fatima Bhutto talks to the CBC radio about Songs of Blood & Sword

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU5KogbYKcw


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5KrdWLLQfI


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR6mMVTxxlY

Fatima Bhutto on Hard Talk

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p007g9z1/Hardtalk_Fatima_Bhutto/

Fatima Bhutto part of OTS Festival 2010

Off the Shelf Festival of Writing and Reading is thrilled that Pakistani poet & author Fatima Bhutto will be a part of OTS this year.

Festival Dates for 2010,9-30 Oct

The Off the Shelf Festival offers a wide range of events, including poetry, author visits, walks, exhibitions, workshops, & storytelling.There are free events, family events, city centre events & many events in libraries & venues in communities.

Source:
http://www.facebook.com/OffTheShelf/posts/124025287616343#!/OffTheShelf

A daughter’s song

Reviewed By Huma Yusuf
Sunday, 16 May, 2010



Halfway through her recently released memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword, Fatima Bhutto asks, ‘Why was everything in this family so complicated? Why was it so ugly, so violent?’ The same questions can be asked of the reaction to her book, which in Pakistan has comprised condemnations and refutations of the facts she presents.

Indeed, rarely has a book received more attention in the news and op-ed sections of papers than on the literary pages.

Songs is a first-person narrative that aims to memorialise Murtaza Bhutto’s life. To that end, it traces three generations of the Bhutto family and in broad brushstrokes recounts the political history of Pakistan from the late 1960s to the present.

Primarily a daughter’s attempt to piece together her late father’s tumultuous life, the book has earned criticism for stirring controversy on several counts: the claim that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto asked his sons to avenge his death; the assertion that Murtaza played the role of mediator, not instigator, during the 1981 hijacking of a PIA plane by the Al-Zulfikar Organisation (AZO); and the implication that Benazir Bhutto may have been complicit in her younger brother Shahnawaz’s death.

Speaking at the Asia House Festival of Asian Literature in London, Bhutto stood by her claims, insisting that all the details and anecdotes in the book have been cross-checked and double-checked over the six years it took her to complete the effort.

Rather than engage her critics, she pointed them to the 15 pages of sources listed at the end of Songs and told her audience that those speaking out against the work were ‘cronies’ who had benefited immensely from the governments of Benazir Bhutto and Asif Zardari. ‘The reaction to the book has been violent and angry,’ said Bhutto, ‘and it has changed my life in terms of my security and access to my country.’

What is not being said, however, is that Songs is a historical account of the Bhuttos, and that history is a necessarily interpretive act. Historical tomes posing as objective retellings of ‘the Truth’ have always been saddled with biases, presumptions, and preconceived notions.

In the case of Songs, those biases are laid bare. The book is subtitiled ‘A Daughter’s Memoir,’ and through most of the narrative Murtaza is referred to as ‘Papa.’ It should come as no surprise, then, that Bhutto’s narrative is sympathetic to her father’s experience and critical of her aunt Benazir and Zardari, who she has long held responsible for her father’s death.

Armed with this knowledge, any astute reader can enjoy Songs for the unique peek into the lives, loves, letters, notebooks, and photographs of the Bhuttos that it offers. Speaking at the Asia House, Bhutto said that she finds it difficult to refer to 70 Clifton as ‘home’, ‘because it is bigger than a home. It’s a monument in which generations [of Bhuttos] have lived, worked, and suffered. There are remnants of the confusing and difficult history of the family all around.’

In essence, Songs throws open the Bhutto family archives stored at 70 Clifton, and emerges eminently readable because it treats the Bhuttos as people rather than political figures. Readers get a sense of Zulfikar the patriarch, hell-bent on educating and grooming his children; of Benazir’s girlishness as a teenager who read Mills and Boon and coveted Versailles; of Benazir and Murtaza’s time at Harvard; of Murtaza’s unflagging sense of humour, whether organising resistance in Kabul or imprisoned in Karachi; of the Bhutto brothers’ romantic nature as they courted different women (the love story between Murtaza and his Greek girlfriend Della is, in turns, charming and tormented); of the tedium of exile for AZO members, forced indoors after curfew was imposed in Kabul with no one to talk to except the telephone operators; and, of course, of Murtaza’s unflagging paternalism.

Bhutto also captures the dark side and emotional toll of being a Bhutto: There are descriptions of how the family communicated through smuggled notes and whispered messages in the late 1970s, and how political machinations came to replace familial bonding by the 1990s. We learn that Murtaza slept on the floor for weeks after his father was hanged, and hear morbid accounts of how the brothers kept vials of poison with them, which they were to take if apprehended by Ziaul Haq’s agents.

The retellings of the deaths of Zulfikar, Shahnawaz, Murtaza, and Benazir are all shocking and moving, with a focus on the human aspect which has long been buried beneath the fear, cynicism, suspicion and politicking that defined the events. Bhutto recreates Nusrat Bhutto’s distraught reaction to news of her youngest son’s death, and recalls how her mother, Ghinwa, wept at her husband’s blood-soaked deathbed.

That said, some sections of the book are too self-indulgent, painstakingly providing descriptions of things that only a grieving daughter would find interesting. For example, Bhutto not only recounts Murtaza’s habit of collecting newspaper clippings about his father, but also describes the Hamdam Book Binding Works notebook in which he pasted them. She also wastes pages recounting interviews that add nothing to her narrative about her father’s life — Samuel Huntington, for instance, is quoted saying he remembers little of Murtaza at college.

On the controversial point of the PIA plane hijacking, too, Bhutto falls short. Her account relies solely on interviews with two people: Suhail Sethi, Murtaza’s closest friend, and Dr Ghulam Husain, a former secretary-general of the PPP who was one of the political prisoners released as a result of the hijacking. The fastidious footnotes and citations from newspaper articles and other histories are missing in this case.

Explaining why she wrote the book, Bhutto told the Asia House gathering that she doesn’t believe in the ‘Bhutto curse.’ ‘I don’t believe that we’re fated for violent deaths, we need to examine why [each of the Bhuttos] died, and learn from it… The nature of politics is transformative, and it doesn’t leave anyone immune.’ Her point was that the actions and choices of all the Bhuttos — including Zulfikar and her father — should be analysed and debated to better understand Pakistan’s political history.

For all its flaws and controversies, Songs — despite the tenor of its title — could help debate triumph over death, and demonstrate that the pen could emerge as a mightier force than the sword in Pakistan’s brutal and bloody political history.



Source: http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/culture/03-a-daughters-song-ss-11

Fatima Bhutto's CBC interview

Fatima Bhutto with CBC on Songs of Blood & Sword

http://www.cbc.ca/video/player.html?category=News&zone=world&site=cbc.news.ca&clipid=1493358304

Sanam Bhutto should clarify her position

I HAVE read Fatima Bhutto’s book Songs of Blood and Swords. It was very well-written and gives an insight into the Bhuttos, especially the intellectual ones like Fatima herself.

Sanam Bhutto wrote in Dawn on April 30, stating that her brothers were wrong the whole time and the way they acted after their father’s hanging were not in accordance with his wishes.

She wrote that Benazir stood up and avenged her father’s hanging by taking the PPP to the polls. That’s the only criticism she has against Fatima’s book.

But Sanam failed to address Murtaza Bhutto’s death during her sister’s government and till now the killers have not been brought to justice.

Fatima’s book clearly shows how the killing took place and how her aunt Benazir failed to find the killers or was unwilling to do so.

Murtaza and Shahnawaz both had no choice but to flee abroad after their father’s arrest and tried to get support from foreign states, especially Muslim countries which had good ties with Pakistan thanks to Z.A. Bhutto. But all this failed as he was hanged and as a result two ‘terrorists’ were created.

Were they really ‘terrorists’, Ms Sanam Bhutto? They were avenging your father’s hanging against Zia’s regime. To some they were freedom-fighters, and to some terrorists.

Fatima Bhutto has claimed in her book that while in exile Murtaza Bhutto would plan attacks on Zia’s regime only and not on civilians as claimed by Zia and Sanam.

Murtaza was willing to face court to fight all the cases levelled/led by Zia and his sister’s government.

So I hope Sanam would come out in the open and is willing to listen to the facts that her own niece has compiled. She should clarify her position rather than coming out and claiming that her brothers were terrorists and didn’t represent the ideology of the PPP. I would ask her to read the book again with an open mind.

ZAEEM SIDDIQUI
Lahore


Source: http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/letters-to-the-editor/sanam-should-clarify-her-position-750

Fatima Bhutto: Time to break dynastic stranglehold on Pakistan Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/05/13/f-qa-fatima-bhutto.html##ixzz0nszq

(Timothy Neesam/CBC)

In 1996, when Fatima Bhutto was 14, her father Mir Murtaza Bhutto — Benazir Bhutto's brother and political rival — was shot dead by police in a barrage of gunfire outside the family home in Karachi.

Fatima and her six-year-old brother heard it all from inside the house, huddling alone in their parents' bedroom, terrified and confused.

Not knowing what was going on, but being the determined and resourceful girl that she was, Fatima did the logical thing. She picked up the phone and called her aunt Benazir, who just happened to be prime minster of Pakistan.

Benazir Bhutto's husband, Asif Zardari, picked up the phone. He told the distraught girl that Bhutto couldn't come to the phone. Fatima heard wailing in the background, then Zardari said, "Oh, don't you know? Your father's been shot."

In that moment, Fatima Bhutto's childhood was over.

She lost a beloved father and became estranged from her aunt, who Fatima became convinced was complicit in his killing.

Fatima went on with her life and education, attending first Columbia University and then the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, but her life had been irreparably changed.

"Anyone who grows up witnessing that kind of trauma or violence, you learn how to survive," she says. "It means you'll have to steel yourself to certain dangers around you. But I hope that doesn't mean that you let go of part of your life. You just learn to adapt."

Since then, 28-year-old Fatima Bhutto (who still lives in Pakistan in the Bhutto family compound where her father died) has become an outspoken journalist and writer. She is highly critical of the political and military elite that has ruled Pakistan for generations.

She has just published a book, Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter's Memoir, which tells the story of the Bhutto family, and her father's life and death. It's set in the context of the whole sweep of Pakistan's history from Partition in 1947 onward.

Central to the story is the tragic split within the Bhutto family after the 1979 assassination of its patriarch, the charismatic social reformer Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was Pakistan's first democratically elected leader.

His murder by General Zia ul-Haq, who subsequently took power, ultimately pitted his eldest child, Benazir Bhutto, against his eldest son, Mir Murtaza (Fatima's father), who had competing visions for Pakistan's future and political strategies.

Benazir rose to become the first woman elected to lead a Muslim state. She served as prime minister twice (1988-90 and 1993-96), before she was assassinated in 2007.

By contrast, her brother Murtaza (and Fatima's father) lived the life of a political exile, embracing the idea of armed struggle against the military regime until his return to Pakistan in the 1990s and his eventual murder.

CBC producer Jennifer Clibbon interviewed Fatima Bhutto in Toronto.

---

CBC News: This is a moving book. It's both an exploration of the life of a father you clearly adored, but also a fascinating journey through Pakistan's modern history. What was your motivation in writing this book?

Fatima Bhutto: Our history in Pakistan is written either by foreigners or by the establishment. There really isn't another layer, another "transcript."

What I hoped to do with this book was to write about that hidden transcript; the way people live, the way that violence affects people, written by someone who watched it rather than by someone who perpetrated it.

CBC News: Describe the profound rift that happened in your family between Benazir Bhutto and your father.

Bhutto: My father felt that no negotiation, no compromise with the military, was acceptable at all. Benazir was willing to make certain compromises to make it to the office of the prime minister [she first became prime minister in 1988]. She was willing to allow the army to set her cabinet posts. She was willing to let the army dictate foreign policy specifically in regards to India and Afghanistan. She made those compromises to take power.

CBC News: Your father has been consigned to history as a terrorist, because he lived in exile in Afghanistan and Syria in the 1980s and, for a time, organized armed struggle against Gen. Zia ul-Haq's repressive regime. Your book refutes that portrait of him, describing his years of diplomatic lobbying that led to frustration.

Bhutto: He was 24 [when his father was killed] and his brother was 21, and they made a decision to confront the military regime directly. They were children of the 1970s. Their heroes were Che Guevara and [Congolese independence leader] Patrice Lumumba. They had a romantic notion of what an armed struggle would mean. Their fight was with the military, not with civilians.

To me it is an incredibly difficult decision to make. It is a noble choice and cost them lives and privileges.

CBC News: Your views about Benazir Bhutto are well known. You believe she saw your father as a political rival and bears a "moral responsibility" for the police killing of him in 1996. In your book, she comes across as Machiavellian. Seen from the perspective today, what do you think she accomplished and what were her failings?

Bhutto: If we look at her first government (1988-90), we know that in her two years as prime minister no legislation was passed. Not a single piece of legislation. Nothing of Zia's legacy was dismantled.

When we look at her second government (1993-96), this was a woman prime minister who allowed the Hudood Ordinance to stay in place, the most violent piece of law against women.

[The Hudood Ordinance was a controversial set of laws enacted in 1979 by Zia ul-Haq that pertained mainly to women. Under the law, to prove she'd been raped a woman had to provide four male witnesses to the crime or face the penalty for adultery, which included lashings or stoning. The law was amended in 2006.]

This is a woman who presided over the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan. When the Taliban took over in 1996, only three countries recognized them: Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Pakistan. This was not someone who fought for women's freedom at all.

If you ask me for one of Benazir's strong points, I would have to take you to the time before she was in power. That was before she was compromised. She was a very brave and courageous campaigner. She was a very courageous voice against dictatorship.

CBC News: Her husband is now president, a man who spent years in prison on charges of corruption and who, you allege, was behind your father's murder. You live in Pakistan and write critically about the regime there. What dangers do you face?

Bhutto: This is a government that is in power on the basis of my family name. He has laid a claim based on a name that is not his to own. As someone who is part of that family, that makes me a threat.

Now after [the book] talking about the government corruption, acquiescence to the Americans, their enthusiasm of the Predator drone attacks that they sanction and assist in, and his role in not only my father's murder but many other criminal cases, it does put me at risk.

Not because the book is published in Pakistan, they don't care what Pakistanis think. But when you go to countries like Great Britain, the United States, where the money that props up [President Asif Ali] Zardari's government comes from, the politicians that support and enable his regime, they don't like it when you do that. It puts me at risk. It puts the people who spoke to me at risk.

CBC News: You've long been critical of U.S. policy in Pakistan. How is it detrimental, in your mind, to reform in Pakistan?

Bhutto: This is not an accident in American foreign policy. From the 1950s 'til now, America has interfered in Pakistan's politics to Pakistan's detriment. It has done the same in any country that is strategic for economic or political reasons.

America sends billions and billions of dollars to corrupt and violent regimes: to Zia ul-Haq's regime, to Gen. Pervez Musharraf's regime, and now to Asif Zardari's regime. These are all regimes with countless human rights abuses in their resumés; governments which preside over such a state of corruption that we have a nuclear country that can't afford electricity for its people.

When Barack Obama's administration carries on where George Bush left off, by supporting governments that are criminal and corrupt, he does that at the detriment of Pakistan.

CBC News: You have said you aren't interested in entering politics. What's the way forward in Pakistan? Does the new generation in Pakistan give you hope?

Bhutto: Absolutely. We have to break the dynastic stranglehold on Pakistan. For as long as we say "yes" to dynasty and we say that you have to be part of one family — or two families, or three parties, or two schools — to rule, we are continuing the cycle.

We are a country of 180 million people. We have more than three choices; we have more than the PPP (Pakistan's Peoples Party) or the PML (Pakistan Muslim League) or the army.

What we have seen which is hopeful to me is the voice of a new generation of Pakistanis. It's a voice that is not just secular, but moderate, anti-the war on terror, that has yet to live through a period where Pakistan is in control over its sovereignty and an independent foreign policy.

This is the generation that is coming up. If we do not allow them the chance to take their part in the country, we are closing a door to them, a door that they will eventually abandon. They will leave and go to other countries.

In Toronto there's a phenomenal South Asian community here of Pakistanis that is ethical and hardworking and brave. We have to wonder why they did not feel that they had that opportunity in their own country … So we have to say, "No more [dynasties]." We have to say, "You've had your chance. We allowed you these chances. Enough."

source:

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/05/13/f-qa-fatima-bhutto.html#

Fatima Bhutto on Pakistan, power and dynastic politics

Fatima Bhutto, the granddaughter of former Pakistani prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and niece of Benazir Bhutto, meets with the Globe and Mail editorial board on Wednesday. Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail

Her family fought for power in Pakistan – paying a deadly price, she tells the Globe

Hours before he was gunned down outside his family home in Karachi, Murtaza Bhutto told his daughter, Fatima, that it was too dangerous for him to write a memoir, and made her promise to write it for him after his death. She was only 14 years old at the time, in 1996, but the young teen, who has grown up to become a poet, writer and activist, kept her promise.

Songs of Blood and Sword is Fatima Bhutto’s memoir about her father, her family’s political dynasty and the violence that killed her grandfather, her uncle, her father, and most recently, her aunt, Benazir Bhutto. Fatima Bhutto, now 27, spoke with The Globe and Mail’s Kate Hammer.

In four years of researching and two years of writing about your own family, did anything you thought you knew about them, or about yourself, change?

I supposed growing up that power … was something that just tended to happen to my family. I suppose I thought that it was something that one couldn’t control. And the more I researched the book, and the more I researched everybody, whether it was my grandfather and his government and his attempt to hold on to power, or … currently, a government that rests on the six letters of my last name, it became very clear to me that it wasn’t something that just happened, it was something that people fought for and they fought to the detriment of their family, of the safety of their community.

And what did you learn about your country?

One of my favourite fun facts of the book is the fact that Pakistan missed its millennium goal to eradicate polio. Not because we don’t know how … but because we could not refrigerate the vaccine. So we are a nuclear country that cannot refrigerate your most basic vaccines to keep its people free from polio.

What has been the reaction to the book in Pakistan?

The book is selling very well there. Last I heard it was No. 1 in the country, but of course those affiliated with President [Asif Ali] Zardari and those who’ve benefited greatly from the corruption of his wife’s two regimes, my aunt’s two regimes, have launched what seemed to be quite a vitriolic attack not just on the book but on me personally. What’s fascinating is they don’t attack the stories of corruption, they don’t attack the crimes that they were accused of, but they’ve attacked me for being critical of my grandfather.

Some of the criticism has come from your own family, which has become famously divided. How did that rift begin?

I think the rift began around 1986 when Benazir … made the decision to negotiate with the military to share power with the very regime that not only killed her father but who her family believe killed her younger brother and really dismantled much of Pakistan.

Do you see yourself ever going into the family business, ever pursuing a career in politics?

No, I don’t. And I think partly why I’m able to talk about [politically sensitive] issues, why I’m able to talk about them openly and freely is because I’m not indebted, I don’t owe anybody anything, I’m a free agent. … That’s a freedom I wouldn’t give up easily. Certainly what we’ve seen is that we’ve had a history of dynasty and the one thing that it does more than anything in Pakistan is it negates participation. And if one truly believes in democracy … then the first thing to go has to be dynasty.

Source:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/fatima-bhutto-on-pakistan-power-and-dynastic-politics/article1566853/

Fatima Bhutto's poetry in Mascara Literary Review

Fatima Bhutto

Fatima Bhutto was born in Kabul in 1982. Her father Murtaza Bhutto, son of Pakistan's former President and Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and an elected member of parliament, was killed by the police in 1996 in Karachi during the premiership of his sister, Benazir Bhutto.

Fatima graduated from Columbia University in 2004, majoring in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, and from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 2005 with a Masters in South Asian Government and Politics.

She is the author of two books: Whispers of the Desert, a volume of poetry, which was published in 1997 by Oxford University Press, Pakistan when Fatima was 15 years old. 8.50 a.m. 8 October 2005, a collection of first-hand accounts from survivors of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, was published by OUP in 2006. Her third book, Songs of Blood and Sword, will be published around the world in 2010.

Fatima wrote a weekly column for Jang - Pakistan's largest Urdu newspaper and its English sister publication The News – for two years. She covered the Israeli Invasion and war with Lebanon from Lebanon in the summer of 2006 and also reported from Iran in January 2007 and Cuba in April 2008.

Fatima’s work has appeared in the New Statesman, Daily Beast, Guardian, and The Caravan Magazine.

Her latest book, Songs of Blood and Sword, will be published by Jonathan Cape in Australia this spring.

Photograph: Benjamin Loyseau

Karachi air

Breathed in through the lungs

Is sickly sweet

Like honeycomb left out to rot

In the warm, unrepentant heat.

Or else,

It is thick, smoky

Like mesquite

The evening scent of garbarge burning

At the first break of dusk’s early light.

Mynah birds and ravens caw

A jealous chord

Singing to the street.

At midnight

I can hear the poor sweeper man

Sweep sweeping

The moonlit littered roads.

I sleep in bed

Covered in a sheet of sweat.

There is no electricity now

In this deadened August night

I trawl

Middle Eastern airlines, terminals and luggage belts

Stuck alongside students,

Honeymooners in black robes and white thobes

And slave labour, working through the night.

Hiding my name on my boarding passes,

A thumb obscuring the sight of letters, destinations and foreign nights

And inventing new fictions,

Identities

And family trees.

My legs are close to clotting

And my bags unnecessarily heavy.

Qatar, Etihad and Emirates

I count them off as lovers

I use in desperate times of need.,

Flying out every month

Pretending that I’m free,

Subsisting on airline meals.

Parting from Karachi

At departure gates

And onwards worldwide.

I wish it well

My love unkind.

Good riddance,

Farewell.

Memories are dulled as the pilot starts the plane

Nostalgia side swept as stewardesses buckle belts and enquire about meal time.

Nauseated

Goodbye.

From above,

Even our city’s lights

Look bright.

Even the noisy traffic

Seems mild,

The congestion meek,

The airwaves clear.

From the sky,

From a passenger plane,

Filled with labourers

Dressed in January sandals

And drinking whisky

They’d never get otherwise,

Neat

And singing ghazals

To lull them to sleep,

This mangled city,

This wretched, wretched home

Loses so much heart.

But,

Three days later

My chest hurts for a sound

Of something familiar

An exhaust broken on a motorcycle.

The smell of the salty, smoky air.

The taste off a broken beetel nut

I’d never eat at home

And I imagine

It’s worth

Love

Some of the time.

He moved my body

continents,

Pressing gently

On the underside of my knee.

It was winter

When he sold me,

Seventy five degrees

I sleep on tarmacs

Eyes half closed.

I have become an exile

With an open home.

My valise holds all my shirts

And coats

I’m packed for winter

Wearing summer clothes.

I left behind a country once,

I can’t remember when.

Underneath it all

I’m bare boned

Afraid

Very simply alone.

On white ironed sheets

I wait,

Cold.

A knock on the ceiling

A boot against the floor

Sticky remote control at the foot of the bed

I cower

Concierge

Bellhop

Fire escapes winding under my window

And an alarm reminds me

I ordered room service way too long ago.

In nine years

I hardly wrote a red line

The crawl inside me subsided.

In the car,

Sunday, past noon,

The freeway pulled me down

And drudged up my lines.

I spoke for him,

For his embrace,

Coated with warm sweat

In a parking lot,

For the kiss,

And the scrape of his beard

As I breathed him in

One more hurried time.

So, I wrote him these lines,

Meaningless,

But mine

I go,

Leaving him,

My only memories

Inside a kiss,

Held in by his lips

In a claustrophobic garage

In which our farewells were disguised.

Source :

http://www.mascarareview.com/article/214/Fatima_Bhutto/

The Caravan Conversations; Fatima Bhutto Vir Sanghvi Aiyar Nandy

The Caravan Conversations Fatima Bhutto Vir Sanghvi Aiyar Nandy

Part 1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-V2P73ixOg


Part 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgJhiHeVZsI


Part 3:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b40ND5Xp-Y4


Part 4:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_ZoIQnKqOw


Part 5:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4ZYix-r5dw