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/