Interview: Fatima Bhutto, author By Catherine Deveney

Published Date: 17 August 2010

HER name, she thinks, enters a room before her. Such a weight of expectation. Her physical presence: the petite figure, the lively, almond-shaped eyes and translucent skin, the curtain of dark hair that hangs over one shoulder then the other, transferred constantly in conversation, give an impression of fragility and delicacy, like fine bone china.

But her words, though spoken lightly, are powerful, robust, more shatterproof than her appearance. That name of hers represents a political dynasty in Pakistan, generations of power, bloodshed and corruption: Bhutto.

Fatima Bhutto knows the price of Pakistani dynasty. It cost the lives of her grandfather, her father, her uncle and her aunt. Her grand- father, Ali Zulfikar Bhutto, was executed in 1979 by the military government of General Zia. His sons, Shanawaz and Murtaza, vowed to avenge his death but were both murdered. Shanawaz died of poisoning in mysterious circumstances in Paris in 1985. Murtaza, Bhutto's father, was assassinated in 1996.

Bhutto claims her aunt Benazir, who was Prime Minister at the time, was responsible for Murtaza's death and for clearing all evidence from the murder scene. Benazir herself would be assassinated in 2007 in similar circumstances, the crime scene being wiped of forensic evidence before any investigation could begin. It is Pakistan's way, says Bhutto: bloodshed followed by silence.

In her book Songs Of Blood And Sword, she breaks the silence surrounding both the Bhutto family and state-sanctioned violence in Pakistan and this month she appears at the Edinburgh Book Festival to discuss her work. "There is a culture of silence," she explains. "Not just in Pakistan but in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal — the whole region. It has this incredible history not just of violence but of state violence. It doesn't just kill dynasties or political figures but journalists and activists. We are expected to say nothing. The state, the establishment, the media … they ignore it."

Her book is a best seller in Pakistan but hugely controversial. When we meet, she has not been home for months. Benazir's husband, Asif Zardari, "Mr Ten Per Cent", one of the richest men in Pakistan who spent over a decade in jail on corruption charges, took over as Prime Minister when his wife was assassinated. Bhutto spared him and Benazir nothing in her account of what she considers their malign influence on her country. "It is probably safest for me to spend some time away," she admits.


Her hands are slender, expressive. It is hard to imagine her as a threat. She has a warmth, a humour, a kind of feisty intelligence.

But anyone who talks openly in Pakistan is subversive. What can she possibly achieve by speaking out? "There is a high premium on this but I think it is dangerous to keep quiet in a country like Pakistan because the violence keeps happening.The longer you are silent, the easier it is for the state to continue it's history."

But Bhutto's book is not just political. It's personal. Subtitled "A Daughter's Memoir", it was a promise to her father just hours before he died. Some critics have accused her of idolising Murtaza, of glossing over his foibles. Bhutto smiles. In Pakistan, she is accused of blasphemy. "You don't question your parents, especially if they are public figures. In Pakistan, people are attacking me for criticising. Over here, they say, ‘Oh, you were too soft.' I cannot fulfil other people's feelings about my family because this is a family that inspires very extreme emotions. You love them or hate them."


Her own emotions are more mixed: the pull of her blood ties against the pull of her intellectual judgments. People should never be idolised for their name, she argues. It is what a person says and does that is important, not what their name represents. Yet researching her family's words and actions disturbed her. "In a family like this one, where there was a lot of opportunity and privilege and power, but also a lot of tragedy, I suppose I just assumed that power was something that happened to my family, that they just found themselves part of something.

"But what I found very difficult is the way they didn't let go of it. It didn't happen to them, they sought it out. And when it wasn't near them, they went looking …"



20 SEPTEMBER 1996. Fatima Bhutto is 14. She is on the phone when the first shot rings out outside the Bhutto home in Karachi. Seconds later, a barrage of shots. She grabs her six-year-old brother Zulfi, carrying him into a small, windowless corridor. They huddle together while the shooting rages for several minutes. When things quieten, the road is filled with police who will not let anyone out of the house. Fatima sits with her brother and stepmother Ghinwa (who she considers her real mother) but her papa does not return.

She phones the Prime Minister, her Aunt Benazir, but gets Zardari. Where is Papa? Fatima cannot speak to Benazir, Zardari declares. She is too hysterical. As if on cue, loud wailing fills the line. "Your father has been shot," Zardari says. Murtaza, who has only recently returned from exile to Pakistan to fight the election, is dead.

Murtaza was the eldest son of Ali Zulfikar and just 24 when his own father was killed. Until then, he led a privileged life, studying abroad like his brother Shanawaz and sister Benazir. He was living in London when his father was executed and he and Shanawaz immediately gave up their westernised lives to oppose the Pakistani military dictatorship.

They went into exile, forming the left-wing political group Al-Zulfiqar, which was charged with various terrorist attacks including the 1981 hijacking of a Pakistani plane. They were later cleared of the crime and Murtaza always denied supporting terrorism.

Fatima Bhutto grew up in exile in Syria but Murtaza's intention was always to return to Pakistan. When Shanawaz died in Paris, suspicion for his death fell on his own wife, Rehana, who was arrested then released. The family believed the government was ultimately responsible but Murtaza was married to Rehana's sister and their relationship fell apart. The couple divorced and Murtaza married his second wife, Ghinwa, when Fatima was just four years old.

Fatima loved Ghinwa but she and Murtaza remained exceptionally close. "My father cut my hair until I was seven so I looked like Mowgli from The Jungle Book. He bathed me and took me to the doctor," she says. But Murtaza put avenging his father's death before his own family's security. Did she not feel angry or rejected? Bhutto considers the question carefully. "He and Shanawaz were only 24 and 20 when those choices were thrust upon them. I wish they hadn't seen that as their only course of action. But after that they moved, and they grew, as men and as people."

Growing up, Bhutto and her brother were never taught that violence was a solution. They never believed they must avenge Murtaza's death in the way he felt he must avenge his father's. "There had to have been a lot of transition, a lot of movement, in a person's mind and their life, for them to pass on a different message to their children."

When Benazir first came to power, Murtaza wanted to return home from Syria. "She said to him no, not now. It's difficult for me. Please don't come. He didn't." But he became a vocal opponent of corruption and human rights abuses under her regime, Bhutto says. Certainly, Benazir was charged with corruption, though the charges were later dropped in a deal to bring her back to office, but she was posthumously awarded a United Nations prize in the field of human rights. People interpret Benazir and Murtaza's lives so differently. Perhaps Benazir was right to see Murtaza as her rival. Did he not have a sense of political entitlement as the eldest Bhutto son? Absolutely not, insists his daughter. "I was the eldest daughter. I had a brother. My father never made me feel my brother was more important. Never.

"It must have been very difficult for her," she continues. "I understand how diminishing it is to be told your gender doesn't make you valued. Progressive as Benazir's father was, he clearly says in his letters to his sons, you, my sons, personify me and you are the people who will take my history forth. But Benazir had all the same things that were afforded to her brothers and was sent away to study."

As a child, Fatima, was close to Benazir, or "Wadi" as she called her.

But Benazir's behaviour in power was not the behaviour of the young woman she once knew. "I remember a period when I was a child, before she was in power. I remember her not just as brave, but she really suffered so much, she sacrificed her own well being, her health, her freedom, for things she believed in. But then she did things I don't understand. There is the Benazir in power, who I don't recognise, the person who caused very similar suffering to what she endured. Then there is the Benazir I knew before power and when I think of her, I feel sad, because I felt like I lost her a long time ago, a long time before she was killed."

A year after her brother Shanawaz was murdered, Benazir started to negotiate with the military government that the family held responsible. "The very establishment that killed her father and brother. She entered into power sharing. Her mother and my father thought it was the wrong move. She appointed a man whose signature was on her father's death warrant. She also agreed not to open a case into Shanawaz's murder. And she didn't."

But it is a leap from failing to investigate one brother's death to actively participating in another's. Zardari was accused of being involved in Murtaza's death though no charges were proved. Even if they had been, could she be certain Benazir was involved? "The very tribunal that she put forward to investigate had no legal authority. I think they intended it to be a time-stalling mechanism. It backfired because the judges on that panel concluded that the order to assassinate could only have come from the highest level of government. She was the highest level of government."

If Benazir didn't know, says Bhutto, her later behaviour was inexplicable. "Why did she stop us filing a police report? Why did she stop us taking criminal charges, going instead for a tribunal that would have no legal authority? Why did she arrest the witnesses and not the police? I questioned my aunt on a number of these issues and she never answered."

She also questioned Benazir closely about the murder scene. "I remember saying to her, how could they clean up the streets? And she said, this is not the movies, as if I had understood how things worked from Hollywood where they don't clean up forensic scenes but real life is different. But the same thing happened to her. Had she protected the victims instead of the state at that point, it wouldn't have happened to her too."

Benazir and Zardari were accused of accruing vast personal wealth from their time in power. But for Bhutto, the greatest corruption has nothing to do with paper trails or bank receipts. "It is about the fact that for 18 hours a day in summer we have no electricity. We are a nuclear country. We have oil, gas and coal. We are a rich country. If a country can make a nuclear bomb, I think it is fair to say it can light its streets. That's what corruption is in Pakistan.

Corruption is present every day, everywhere, on every street."

There is no system of sanitation. Rubbish piles up on the streets. In the monsoon rains of summer, people end up electrocuted. Benazir did nothing to address that and in the two years of her first government, not one single piece of legislation was passed. Neither was any repealed, not even the hated 1979 Hudood laws which many regarded as anti-women, holding women accountable even for their own rape.

So why did Benazir do nothing? "That was the question she should have been asked. She never was. I try very hard to judge her on her record. The fact is that in her first government, no legislation was passed and her government was overthrown on grounds of corruption and humans rights abuses. Her second was overthrown on the same two grounds." It was also under Benazir's second government that the Taliban was not just recognised but supported by Pakistan. "Only three governments in the world recognised the Taliban and Benazir's was one of the them."

The Bhutto family always claimed to support democracy. Why did they never achieve it? "I think the thing that changed all of them was power. It's the nature of the beast. To find someone who enters politics and isn't overwhelmed and transformed by it is very rare. That's the danger isn't it? I think there was a sense of entitlement. I think Benazir felt they owed her. They killed her father. They killed her brother. Fine — but she owed them too."

When she heard about Benazir's assassination, did she feel any sense of justice? "No, I never thought blood was justice. I didn't want her to die. I wanted her to be alive to answer questions," she says.

Writing about her father was like breathing life back into a murdered man. She met his American college friends. She met Della, his intense first love, who now calls herself Bhutto's Greek mother. People thought it scandalous to write about the blonde, non-Muslim older woman who was her father's lover. But it moved Bhutto to confront Murtaza's frailties. "Della said to me, ‘The way he treated me when we broke up … the letter was very cruel.' I kept trying to defend my father, saying I am sure he didn't mean to hurt you. Then when I looked at the dates, it was ten months before I was born and I thought ooh..." She laughs. "There was no wriggle room. Had he been alive, I would have had the chance to disagree with my father and have big arguments. But I lost out, didn't I?"

Yet she felt him close during the years of writing. What of her mother? She adored Ghinwa but in her book seems to have an almost fearful relationship with her biological mother. "A month after my father was killed she came to my school and said, ‘I'm here for my daughter.' She filed for custody when I was 15." Wouldn't she expect her mother to want custody of her? "But this is not someone who called me every weekend or sent letters. I called her actually.


I got letters once a year on my birthday."

Was that her father's fault? Did he block her from Fatima's life? No, Murtaza wasn't like that. "A child has an innate sense of love, but it was something I didn't get from her as a child. I called her up when my father was killed. There was nothing to stop her picking up the phone or saying, can we meet? But she didn't."

As part of the family, she might be expected to have political aspirations. But she disapproves of dynasty, of entitlement through inheritance, and it would be almost a betrayal to use her name in that way. But she has political aspirations for her country. She loved her father and she loved Pakistan; those two facts weave together like intertwining branches on a tree.

She was brought up in Syria, her stepmother is Lebanese and she goes regularly to these countries. They are places of safety. But they do not provoke the same sense of longing in her as Pakistan. "I can think about them and dream about them, but I was never prevented from being in those countries."

That sense of exile is crucial. But while the danger might delay her but it will not prevent her. "For me, Pakistan is a permanent condition. Maybe there will be times when I have to be outside it for a bit. But I will always return." n



Bhutto appears at Edinburgh International Book Festival, today, 3pm. Songs of Blood and Sword,Jonathan Cape, £20


Source: http://www.scotsman.com/features/Interview-Fatima-Bhutto-author.6475955.jp?articlepage=1