Fatima Bhutto's Fan Club

Intelligence is sexy, period By Daily Post

2012-01-25T11:39:00.001+05:00

SUKANT DEEPAK

No talking about her skin-hugging jeans or the lovely black boots. Not a whisper about the way her long fingers caress her hair and make you so glad to be alive the moment you’re in front of her.

“Why is your guy taking so many pictures?” she asks. You die. Why can’t there be a holy war against those who take her pictures?

Author Fatima Bhutto can easily overshadow anyone on the third day of the Jaipur Literature Festival. Oprah Winfey included. And she wants to talk serious. Only serious.

A young, intelligent woman like her in the Pakistani society which seems to be falling apart — rising inflation, starvation, an army which may take over anytime... Is something wrong in the state of Denmark? The celebrated author offers a fascinating smile, “It must be understood that in the Pakistani society, the gulf between those in power and the ones who are being ruled has been widening at an alarming rate, with the former choosing to be absolutely insensitive towards the issues concerning the masses. Do you know, millions are starving, there is a tremendous energy crisis. In my country, people stand on one side. Power stands on the other. Sad, but true.” But there must be a silver lining. “Of course there is, interesting things are happening. People are trying to make themselves heard. Judiciary is waking up. However, the real issue still remains — people. Read the newspaper headlines in Pakistan; they all scream of who will get the power. Why do we fail to understand that power doesn’t ‘belong’ to anyone. It is very complex phenomenon.”

Mention the never-before role being played by the civil society in Asia in recent times, like Anna Hazare’s crusade against corruption in India, and the lawyers’ protest in Pakistan, and Fatima is quick to respond, “Who is the civil society? Do you know that most people in Pakistan may not even know about the protests being held, thanks to the fact that there isn’t enough electricity to feed their television. And also, why do we take only Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi into consideration while talking about Pakistan? Again, the issue of ever-growing gulf emerges. The most important issues including food, health, land reforms, energy aren’t taken up by the civil society. The problems being faced by far-fetched parts of the country are being ignored. Why aren’t we being sensitive to the needs of the majority? It’s so surprising!”

Now they say that for young Pakistani, India is no longer the enemy… “Yes, America tops the list. That’s because their occupation of Afganisthan is illegal and unjust. The drone attacks inside Pakistani territory are testing our patience like never before. I really wonder how many more Pakistani soldiers will need to be sacrificed at the American hands for us to realise that we don’t need them.”

As an educated young woman, does she feel that feudalism, still a dormant part in the Pakistani society also has a lot to do with the present-day chaos in Pakistani, though she also belongs to a huge landed family. “Sure, it is one of the factors, but then in every sphere- be it the industry, political power or any other institution, only a handful have all the power in that country.”

She has already made it clear that she would not join politics but remain a “critic”. So, how does she perceive the rise in former cricketer Imran Khan’s popularity? “Yes, he does have a personality. The question is whether he’s any different from the other politicians? The guy has always made it clear that he’s pretty cozy with dictatorship. He supported Zia, he has defended Musharraf. And yes, as a woman, I will worry if he comes to power. If you know, he has voted against the woman’s bill and his views with regard to the fairer sex are very orthodox. Don’t forget, that in 2009, he voiced that he was in favour of the Shria law.”

Bring up Kashmir, and she’s quick to respond, “It would not be fair to comment on this issue as there is no Kashmiri in attendance…”

Signing an autograph for a Canadian fan, she whispers, “Also, don’t you think internal borders restrict us to a great extent…?”

Source:http://www.dailypostindia.com/news/10234-intelligence-is-sexy-period.html

Voices from Pakistan: Controversial author Fatima Bhutto speaks out about India's western neighbour By ROHAN VENKATARAMAKRISHNAN

2012-01-23T11:19:00.003+05:00

Oprah might have been the big attraction at Jaipur Literature Festival on Sunday, but a few metres away a packed house got a glimpse of two famous visitors from across the LoC.

Controversial Pakistani author (and Benazir Bhutto's niece) Fatima Bhutto and renowned historian Ayesha Jalal spoke about the complex dynamics of India's ever-turbulent western neighbour at a panel featuring a huge audience - and a very vocal cow.

'A nod of agreement from a cow,' said panel moderator and television talk show host Karan Thapar, after a loud 'moo' interrupted Bhutto's assertion about the immense gulf that separates the powerful and the ordinary in Pakistan. 'That's a very holy thing in India.'

The cow would make itself heard a few more times after the first 'moo,' particularly joining in with the audience's loud applause when Bhutto made clear her distaste over the rise in popularity of another Pakistani who is well-known on this side of the border.

'Is he (Imran Khan) a saviour?' Bhutto asked and answered her rhetorical question, to sustained applause, with a 'No, I don't think so.' She listed a number of strikes against the World Cup-winning playboy cricketer-turned-politician whose anti-establishment message has been gaining tremendous popularity.

'As a woman, I worry very much about Imran's politics. I worry about a person who voted against the Women's Bill in 2006,' Bhutto said, informing the audience about the legislation that attempted to amend - to some extent - a Pakistani law that holds rape victims guilty of adultery.

She questioned Imran's credentials as a genuine alternative to the current political class, saying he didn't seem to be any different from the pro-Army, pro-Islamist characters who dominate Pakistani politics. On a lighter note, she also critiqued the effect the former cricketer is having on the country's punditry.

'We've got this enormous country with so much in it, and we only seem to be able to talk in cricket metaphors,' Bhutto said to laughs. 'It's embarrassing.'

The problem with Pakistan, for Bhutto, is that the political class is too far removed from the issues that affect people on the ground - the lack of food, devastating floods and the conspicuous absence of energy distribution.

Jalal, who teaches South Asian history at Tufts University, agreed. She pointed out that despite Khan's apparently unending support, his party had already began making compromises by accepting politicians who didn't share his outsider status.

'I don't see a major change. What we see is parliamentarians and politicians seeing him (Imran Khan) as the horse to bet on,' Jalal said. 'Which will hurt Imran. It will tie his hands.'

As an alternative, Jalal suggested that Bhutto could get into the political game. 'Fati can join a party. I will join her,' Jalal said, before Bhutto interjected saying she wouldn't do that.

'The difference between Pakistan and India is in terms of structures and institutions,' Jalal said. 'India has institutions that function. In Pakistan, the only institution that functions is the army. What you're witnessing now is that uncertainty because change is in the air. Still, I think that the army will continue to be the final arbiter for years to come.' It was grim thought to carry back home.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2090367/Voices-Pakistan-Controversial-author-Fatima-Bhutto-speaks-Indias-western-neighbour.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

'Chasm Between Pak Commoners and Elites Growing'

2012-01-23T09:59:00.000+05:00

One of Pakistan's leading young voices and estranged scion of the Bhutto family, Fatima Bhutto today lamented the fact that the chasm between the people of her country and those in power was widening by the day.

Speaking at a session to discuss Pakistan and its burning issues, Bhutto said while there is a huge gulf between the two sides of Pakistan, the people in power had little compassion for those they are supposed to take care of.

"There are two separate sets of people. One side is the common people and the other side is those who are in power," Fatima said.

"While millions are starving in Pakistan despite the fact that it is an agricultural country, there is disconnection between people and those in power," she said.

On the civil society in Pakistan, Fatima said while Pakistan was not new to street protests and movements, the basic problems of people had not been addressed.

"Still a larger section of society lack electricity and other basic needs," she said.

Comparing the institution of civil society in India and Pakistan, academic and author Ayesha Jalal said civil society in India was much better prepared to take to the streets.

She said energy crisis, food security and non-performing institutions were the major issues of concern there and these needs to be highlighted.

Jalal said while Pakistan is a society undergoing change, the Army is still likely to remain a dominant institution in the near future.

Source: http://news.outlookindia.com/items.aspx?artid=748634#.TxzGtBv_dIQ.twitter

Days of military rule over in Pak: Fatima Bhutto

2012-01-23T09:55:00.000+05:00

Jaipur: Allaying any fear of military coup, Fatima Bhutto said that the days of army rule in Pakistan is over now. “In the eyes of most Pakistanis, army is discredited, especially after the Abbottabad incident where Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was killed under the nose of the army by American soldiers. Moreover, army support to Americans in Afghanistan has not gone well with the average Pakistanis,” said Bhutto, attending the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival on Sunday.

Talking to Karan Thapar, another panelist Ayesha Jalal said that Pakistan army will continue to play an important role in the decades to come and it will be the final arbitrator in running the government. On Pakistan army’s need over US, she said that it’s the army which is most dependent on Americans. “But any action against the Haqqani network by Pakistan army is very unlikely,” she stressed.

On the growing popularity of cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, Bhutto said that the emergence of Khan has once again demonstrated the personality-based politics in the country. Rubbishing the theory that Khan is the future of country, she said that he could not be a saviour of Pakistan. His coziness with military and his defence of General Zia-ul-Haq’s legacy are well known to every one, added she.

Jalal said that though Khan has been plausibly projected as a good leader, he lacks organisational base.

Source:http://daily.bhaskar.com/article/RAJ-JPR-days-of-military-rule-over-in-pak-fatima-bhutto-2781214.html

Fatima Bhutto Blasts Imran Khan

2012-01-22T19:30:00.001+05:00

There was a short-lived rumor last month that Fatima Bhutto was flirting with the idea of joining Imran Khan’s opposition Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party.

Speaking at the Jaipur Literature Festival on Sunday, she made it clear this was unlikely to happen. Ever.

More In Jaipur Literature Festival

“He has an incredible coziness not with the military but with dictatorship,” Ms. Bhutto said of Mr. Khan, a cricket legend-turned-politician who has been billing himself as the face of change in Pakistan.

Ms. Bhutto accused Mr. Khan of defending the legacy of former dictator Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, who came to power in the late 1970s after overthrowing Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Fatima’s grandfather and the founder of the country’s ruling Pakistan People’s Party. She also mentioned Mr. Khan’s support for a 2002 referendum allowing Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who had come to power with a coup a few years earlier, to extend his term.

That’s not where it ended. In what appeared to be a well-rehearsed argument to debunk the political credibility of the former cricket captain, Ms. Bhutto went on to list more reasons why she opposed his political foray.

“As a woman I worry very much about Imran’s politics,” said Ms. Bhutto. She spoke of his opposition to amending a 2006 woman’s bill in favor of victims of rape. She also questioned Mr. Khan’s commitment to secularism and to defending minorities.

“Is he a savior? No, I don’t think so,” said Ms. Bhutto during a Pakistan-focused session at the literary festival.

“Well, that’s the end of Imran Khan,” said news anchor Karan Thapar, who moderated the panel.

Mr. Khan’s political weight, long dismissed as irrelevant, started to gain new relevance in recent months.

Although he started his party more than 15 years ago, only now is it starting to gain traction. On Christmas Day, over 100,000 people turned up to his rally in Karachi, where he vowed to stand up to the U.S. and to fight corruption.

In October, he drew an even larger crowd in Lahore, leaving some wondering whether the next general elections, slated for 2013, may “mark the moment that PTI went from being ridiculous to respectable in the mainstream,” as an article in The Caravan magazine recently noted.

: Mike Clarke/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images; Fatima Bhutto at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong on March 3, 2008.

At the literary festival, where Ms. Bhutto shared a stage with the Pakistani-American historian Ayesha Jalal, the tone was one of disillusionment with Pakistan’s political class. Ms. Bhutto spoke of the “gulf” that exists between the people in power and the rest of the country, saying that food scarcity – not squabbles between institutions – is the bigger worry for most people.

Despite her political lineage (another former Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, was her aunt), Ms. Bhutto has long eschewed direct involvement in national politics. Best known as a writer and a journalist, Ms. Bhutto hasn’t spared members of her family in her political critiques. Her “Songs of Blood and Swords,” a 2010 memoir centered on the Bhutto dynasty, exposedfeuding in her family and was damning of her late aunt.

Spokespersons of Mr. Khan’s PTI party did not respond to emailed requests for comment. Attempts to reach Mr. Khan or his spokespersons by phone were unsuccessful.

Source:http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/01/22/fatima-bhutto-blasts-imran-khan/?mod=google_news_blog

Fatima Bhutto [The Outlier]

2012-01-14T10:10:00.000+05:00

Born into one of Pakistan’s most influential political dynasties, Fatima Bhutto is the granddaughter of former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the niece of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and daughter of Murtaza Bhutto, but she has emerged as a political powerhouse in her own right. An author, journalist and poet, Fatima Bhutto’s rise to prominence began with the publication of her first book, a collection of poems, titled Whispers of the Desert. Her book titled 8.50 a.m. 8th October 2005 records those affected by the 2005 Kashmir earthquake. She is a tenacious supporter of democracy, critical of the birthright policies of her late aunt’s “Bhutto cult,” and her latest book, Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir, recounts the tumultuous history of the Bhutto family.

Describe your personality in 10 words or less.
Loyal.

If you were reincarnated, who or what would you like to come back as?
I’m not sure it works that way; I don’t think you get to choose.

Name your favorite …
Contemporary musician : This is entirely mood dependent. At this very moment I’m listening to Beirut.
Comfort food : Arabic food, all of it.
Wild animal : dolphin
Instrument : drums, only because I imagine I might be able to learn how to play them.
Founding Father : I’m afraid I don’t have one of those. Do you mean to suggest most people do?

What do you consider your greatest professional accomplishment?
My work ethic.

What are you pissed about right now?
Pakistan’s continuing flood crisis. The country has been inundated by rainwater for the second year running thanks to gross political mismanagement and corruption. In Sindh, 5 million people are still suffering the effects of the flood — some three months after the monsoons — and are homeless, without access to medical aidand food. (http://www.merlinusa.org provides medical relief to conflict zones around the world. If you’re interested please look it up and support its relief efforts in Pakistan)

What tunes would be on the five-song playlist to your life?
I couldn’t even give you the play list to last week. It changes constantly. But this week there would be a bit of Otis Redding, a little Dolly Parton, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Kanye West. And I’m also listening to a charming Pakistani punk band, The Kominas, this week, too.

What is your greatest fear?
That people have already become complacent about Pakistan. That Pakistan’s corruption doesn’t bother anyone anymore, regardless of its effects.

Who is the most interesting person you have ever met (and why)?
Professor Dennis Dalton. He taught me political theory in college and changed how I saw the world. His book on Mahatma Gandhi should be on every shelf.

Name three things you cannot live without.
Books. I can live without most other things.

You get one wish …
Justice.

Source: http://www.malibumag.com/site/article/fatima_bhutto_the_outlier/

In conversation with Fatima Bhutto

2012-01-04T22:53:00.002+05:00

Home > Interests > Culture
Amean J

Condé Nast Traveller contributing editor and author Fatima Bhutto picks her favourite authors, countries and the literary festivals worth travelling to

Tell us a bit about yourself and what shaped your journey into writing.
It's what I always wanted to do. It’s a journey that's constantly being shaped. As JG Ballard once said "If I don't write I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.” I’m currently working on a book on Karachi.

How would you describe your city?
It's a mad city, a mega city, a monster city; that’s filled to the brim with people (no one really knows how many - between 16 and 18 million) and sits on the shores of the Arabian Sea. It's where political battles are fought and lost, often violently. It's an uncensored city – liberal, diverse, complicated which makes it the sort of atmosphere that easily inspires joy and fear, usually at the same time.

What are you expecting at the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival 2012?
I’m looking forward to great audiences and compelling authors, which Jaipur does exceedingly well. I'm terribly excited about Ariel Dorfman, Richard Dawkins, Jamaica Kincaid, Hanan al Shaykh all being in Jaipur.

Who are some of the authors who have had a profound influence on you?
This changes constantly, but currently – Joan Didion, VS Naipaul, Rsyzard Kapucinski.
DID SHE SAY WHY?

Which book are you currently reading?
I’m reading George Orwell's Down and out in Paris and London. But anyone who hasn't read Oblivion by Hector Abad must – really – and go find it. I can't recommend it strongly enough.

Do you see Asian authors now having a greater influence on the world?
Certainly. But haven't Asian authors always had a profound literary influence? Rabindranath Tagore, Mahmoud Darwish, Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmed and there are so many others like them.

A country you most enjoyed travelling in?
It's really hard to beat Cuba. Really,really hard.

Your favourite Indian destination is?
I have yet to visit a part of the country I didn't immediately decide was a new favourite. My most recent though is Kovalam.

Your recommendation for a not-to-be-missed literary festival would be?
I'm not sure there's a city in the world without a literary festival now so you're really spoilt for choice. Ubud has an extraordinary festival - I'd have to say it's my favourite.
Condé Nast Traveller contributing editor and author Fatima Bhutto picks her favourite authors, countries and the literary festivals worth travelling to

Tell us a bit about yourself and what shaped your journey into writing.
It's what I always wanted to do. It’s a journey that's constantly being shaped. As JG Ballard once said "If I don't write I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.” I’m currently working on a book on Karachi.

How would you describe your city?
It's a mad city, a mega city, a monster city; that’s filled to the brim with people (no one really knows how many - between 16 and 18 million) and sits on the shores of the Arabian Sea. It's where political battles are fought and lost, often violently. It's an uncensored city – liberal, diverse, complicated which makes it the sort of atmosphere that easily inspires joy and fear, usually at the same time.

What are you expecting at the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival 2012?
I’m looking forward to great audiences and compelling authors, which Jaipur does exceedingly well. I'm terribly excited about Ariel Dorfman, Richard Dawkins, Jamaica Kincaid, Hanan al Shaykh all being in Jaipur.

Who are some of the authors who have had a profound influence on you?
This changes constantly, but currently – Joan Didion, VS Naipaul, Rsyzard Kapucinski.

Which book are you currently reading?
I’m reading George Orwell's Down and out in Paris and London. But anyone who hasn't read Oblivion by Hector Abad must – really – and go find it. I can't recommend it strongly enough.

Do you see Asian authors now having a greater influence on the world?
Certainly. But haven't Asian authors always had a profound literary influence? Rabindranath Tagore, Mahmoud Darwish, Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmed and there are so many others like them.

A country you most enjoyed travelling in?
It's really hard to beat Cuba. Really,really hard.

Your favourite Indian destination is?
I have yet to visit a part of the country I didn't immediately decide was a new favourite. My most recent though is Kovalam.

Your recommendation for a not-to-be-missed literary festival would be?
I'm not sure there's a city in the world without a literary festival now so you're really spoilt for choice. Ubud has an extraordinary festival - I'd have to say it's my favourite.

Source:
http://www.cntraveller.in/content/conversation-fatima-bhutto

JANINE DI GIOVANNI TALKS TO FATIMA BHUTTO

2011-12-19T22:31:00.001+05:00

Ghosts by Daylight, the latest book by award-winning foreign correspondent and war reporter Janine di Giovanni, is a memoir about war and the sharp edges of ordinary life – dealing with addiction, the pain of miscarriages, replacing one set of challenges with a different sort. For di Giovanni, who constantly follows stories that other journalists are too afraid to cover, from Rwanda to Algeria to the Balkans, travelling to report on the second Palestinian intifada while pregnant isn't necessarily as trying as giving birth in a Parisian hospital.

Fatima Bhutto: East Timor, Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan – what separates war zones for you?
Janine di Giovanni: There are no separations... meaning human misery is human misery, whether it is in Asia or Africa. But there are places in the world where I’ve reported that are closer to my heart, for whatever reason. Some places you feel utterly powerless to do anything – that is beyond frustrating.

FB: I mean, how does one leave Grozny behind when Tripoli is the next port of call, or is that impossible?
JDG: I think it's impossible. You don't forget people or images. They haunt you. For instance, in Sierra Leone I once saw a six-month-old baby who had been amputated by the RUF rebels so that she – and all the people amputated – would be grotesque reminders of their power and to instil fear. I see that child in my dreams at least once a month. Sometimes I respond to places less than others. Afghanistan never got under my skin the way it does for others. I think because the treatment of women is still so horrific, the abuse of children... even among the educated classes.

FB: How did you balance the difficulties of writing about the “sharp edges” of normal life in Ghosts by Daylight while living them?
JDG: It was a very, very hard book to write, for many reasons. Mainly because the characters who are the central ones are still alive – my mother, my friends, my husband. And it was writing about real pain and suffering, but this time my own. I felt very vulnerable exposing myself but at the same time I knew it was a part of healing, not just for me, but for other people who are spouses of alcoholics or who suffer from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). After I finished it, people who know me very well, my closest friends, wrote to say, “Why didn't you tell us? Why didn't you ask for help? We were here for you.” But I kept it very quiet. On many levels, I just don't tell people things about myself, I internalise a lot – on every level – stress, pain, suffering. The only thing I am very open about is love. When I love someone, I really love them. And I tell them. A lot.

FB: Where were you when you thought, “That's it – this is my last war?”
JDG: Well, for sure I thought I would die in Chechnya. So I wondered whether I would ever walk out of that country alive, let alone cover another war. I think the moment passes; you almost forget what you were feeling and then there is the terrible pull of going back to a place like Somalia or Zimbabwe, where you think there is darkness and you want to give a voice to people who have none. I have been frightened many times. But you forget it, the same way you forget the agonising pain of childbirth.

FB: Bosnia changed all the journalists who lived through it. You recently wrote an essay for Granta about returning to Bosnia and searching for a young boy, Nusrat, you met there. How do you carry Bosnia with you today?
JDG: It is in the face of the little boy I love most in the world, my son, Luca. He is seven, and I met his father there in 1993. If that meeting never happened, that life would not come to be. But aside from the personal reasons, I feel that country pulled me into its vortex – I fell in love, deeply, with this wounded place and I felt so much the horror and the injustice that happened there. I was completely and utterly gutted that the carnage and suffering people endured could have and should have been stopped. Let’s just say I did not emerge the same person I was when I first landed there in 1992. It changed me.

FB: You write about the first “real” death you saw, in Bosnia, and the autopilot mechanism it produced in you. About not knowing how many dead bodies you'd seen over the course of reporting from places like Rwanda and Sierra Leone. How does that sort of mechanism evolve the more wars you live through and the more violence you witness?
JDG: The French psychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik, who has done extensive studies on resilience (and who himself survived losing both his parents in the war), says that the people who survive such things just have an innate button that they push in order to keep their souls intact. I have no idea, but I do know I managed to stay sane on some level and I saw plenty of my friends and colleagues go down. I’m not stronger than them, I just think some people have more resilience in their make-up than others...

FB: Does the new sanitised language of war still allow you to do what it was that made you set out to become a journalist in the first place – giving a voice to people who had none?
JDG: I am just not built to be told where to go, what to write, what to look at.  I don't respond well to authority. I grew up in the 1970s, the “question authority” generation. And I think journalism has definitely suffered. Compare what was written in Vietnam by reporters such as Gloria Emerson or David Halberstam to the reporting that came out of Iraq. Just not the same quality.
FB: Which newspapers do you read when at home in Paris?
JDG: I read le Figaro and le Parisien, because I get them free at the gym. I don't watch TV but will check the 8pm news on France 2 and occasionally CNN and the BBC. I listen to the radio, France Info, and I check the BBC website. But I am not  a news junkie any more.

FB: General Patton said that the object of war isn't to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his. How has new technology, epitomised by American drone attacks, changed the nature of war?
JDG: What a terrible line. I am not sure war is worth the loss of a single life. I think technology has moved us so far militarily that we seem to have disassociated the victims. Drones are nearly freakish, science fiction-like vehicles operated by someone back in Arizona who has no clue what life is like on the ground. I remember reporting from a remote village, a wedding party in Afghanistan that had gotten bombed “accidentally” and finding pieces of people's lives scattered everywhere – their bloody clothes, the food they were eating, the smashed house. And the few living just sobbing, grabbing my arm and asking, “Why?”

FB: Why do some people escape PTSD while others are consumed by it?  Your husband Bruno's trauma from covering wars as a photojournalist was of a different form than yours. Is it the peculiarities of how one witnesses that kind of violence?
JDG: They say it's genetic, like alcoholism. They also say that you do not get it until you have a second jarring trauma – then the memories of the first come back. I am a great believer in old-fashioned Woody Allen-style therapy. It’s painful, it goes  on forever, it hurts like hell, it makes you feel worse before you feel better – but  it works. But you have to stick with it, and you have to be honest. Personally,  I have been tested relentlessly and thought I did not have it. Now, looking back over my reaction after the traumatic birth of my son, I think I might have. I mean,  I behaved like a madwoman hoarding water and medicine and afraid people on the street were going to harm me and my baby... But I would never put myself in  the same boat as someone in Srebrenica or Kigali who saw their family massacred.

FB: Where to next? Martha Gellhorn said she didn't write, she just wandered about. But she also wrote of this almost obsessive need to follow war wherever she could reach it. Which one is it for you?
JDG: At the moment, I would like to get to northern Kenya and Mogadishu to report on the famine. I can't believe I am seeing the same images from nearly 20 years ago – 1992 – that some of my friends took, and they are taking the exact same ones right now. Don’t we ever learn anything from history?

Ghosts by Daylight is out now, published by Bloomsbury Press.
janinedigiovanni.com

Source: http://www.tankmagazine.com/issue-53/talk/janine-di-giovanni.aspx

Fatima Bhutto has guts

2011-12-06T11:06:00.001+05:00

The Bhuttofamilie is the most powerful political dynasty in Pakistan. Fatima Bhutto is averse to. "My uncle, President Asif Ali Zardari, is a criminal, liar and murderer."

Fatima Bhutto (29), the headstrong niece of the 2007 assassinated Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto and her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, the current president, is "an unguided missile". Say the friends of the president. Fatima late in her columns for The Daily Beast and including New Statesman, blogs and any chance go to the corrupt practices of her uncle revealed to.

"Fatima has guts," says Zubair Areesh (24), leader and guitarist of the popular pop group in Lahore Rizer, enthusiastically. "Our leaders shamelessly filling their pockets, dancing to the tune of America, do not care to poverty. Look at the floods in the south. Again, thousands of people displaced from their homes.Fatima would have to go into politics. " The three remaining band members, dressed in jeans and their hair stiff with gel, nodding furiously along. | Photo: Dutch Height

Pakistani Kennedys

In the family house of Bhutto in Karachi, once by her famous grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto designed laughs in New York and London trained Fatima to thank her fans. Once it was her grandfather, one of the most charismatic leaders in Pakistan's history, at the head of the Bhutto dynasty. The most powerful political family in the country, because the chain of doom and disaster that struck them, the Pakistani named Kennedy.

But just as averse as she is of her corrupt family, so she is averse to the political dynasty. "A dynasty is against change, excludes others outside the political process and makes people apathetic. Pakistan is the land of the silent majority has become. While we are on the streets en masse should go. "

Fatima Bhutto fights passionately the one-dimensional image in the West Pakistani youth there. "Most of the youth is liberal and peaceful." The U.S. war on terrorism after the attacks in New York in part on Pakistani territory served, and the widespread corruption in American aid money intended for the economic crisis, floating in her hopeless youth in the arms of the Taliban.

The brighter cousin Benazir President Zardari in the media for criminal, liar and murderer belongs, the more support she receives her blogs. She plays the voice of young people, now more than half the Pakistani population.

For every business deal would be a fixed percentage claiming Zardari. "When his wife, my aunt, Benazir was prime minister the first time, he was known as" Mr. 10 Percent ". During her second reign, he was upgraded to "Mr. 50 Percent".Since he is in power, we call him 'Mr. 110 Percent ". The New York Times, the couple would Benazir-Asif 2 to $ 3 million cash are diverted.

Before this former Playboy came to power in 2008, there were cases of corruption against him in Switzerland, Spain and England, and was in his own country accused of four murders. According to Fatima, he also had a hand in the murder of his brother, her father, in 1996. "Among the corruption in Pakistan Zardari has reached epidemic proportions," said Zardari Fatima.Ook muilkorft the press more and more. Any journalist who ridicules the president, risking the cell. Regularly go Facebook, YouTube and Google on black.

Apple and egg

But Fatima does more than just her uncle nailed to the pillory. In the slums of Karachi, she tools up for the poor. In the women's prisons brings them regularly used computers.

They still believe in Pakistan. Stability in the country turns its eyes back until the Americans withdraw from Afghanistan. The bombing militants to operate off extremism. U.S. aid crane can also be closed better, according to Fatima disappears 70 percent. "The international business community to invest in Pakistan. We need jobs. So the desperate youth, now for a song blow up from the street. "

This is a translation from a dutch source : http://www.depers.nl/economie/614966/Fatima-heeft-lef.html

‘Taliban never scared Pak, our federal laws did’

2011-12-05T18:07:00.001+05:00

What is it like to rediscover a parent as a grown-up ? "Full of surprises ," admits Song of Blood and Sword author Fatima Bhutto on the day two of The Times of India Literary Carnival. She was surprised when her father's first love, a Greek woman called Della, suspected that there was "somebody else".

And that they broke up only 10 months before Fatima was born. And she was shocked when she learnt that her father's thesis advisor in college was Samuel Huntington. Actor Kabir Bedi brought out more from Fatima in an informal chat at a session aptly called 'Fathers and Daughters'. Did the direct exposure to violence leave her scarred? "Violence, direct or indirect, scars."

Fatima stands for a clean Pakistan, but it's not something she means to achieve by joining politics. Perhaps, an anti-graft movement like Anna Hazare's , prods Bedi. "We have not seen such a movement in Pakistan yet, but there are movements to the contrary like the National Reconciliation Ordinance 'or National Robbers Ordinance' that grants amnesty to the corrupt." When asked if she bought into rumours that her father Murtaza Bhutto was killed because he shaved off Asif Ali Zardari's moustache, she said conspiracy theories were a South Asian speciality. So, why was Murtaza killed? "For pointing out corruption, for being an alternative and when politics revolves around a name (Bhutto), there is no space for two." Fatima isn't complaining only because her father was killed, "but because 3,000 people have been killed in Karachi in encounter killings".

Had her father lived would he have changed Pakistan? "I hope so, maybe, but power corrupts and he, probably, would not have been untouched by it," she says. "But he was a secular man, opposed the brutality of the Zia years when Hudood, (which holds a raped woman, and not the rapist, guilty) blasphemy laws and obscene powers came to be. Taliban never frightened Pakistan , our federal laws did that."

What about the father in Kabir Bedi? He was away during his daughter Pooja's formative years, after divorcing from her mother Protima Bedi, but he sees in her "the same strong, assertive, independent and outspoken streak; I see a lot of Protima in Pooja."

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Taliban-never-scared-Pak-our-federal-laws-did/articleshow/10976813.cms

Power not politics divided the Bhuttos: Fatima

2011-12-05T18:05:00.000+05:00

Mumbai: It was power, which is more destructive than politics, that divided Pakistan's powerful Bhutto family, feels the writer-poet scion Fatima Bhutto.

"Power is more destructive than politics. Everybody in the family had different ideologies from the start but when the family became powerful, things began to fracture," the 29-year-old niece of slain Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto said at the Times Literary Carnival.

Fatima, who finds penning memoir a strange process since it entails researching one's own family, says she took up writing because of a promise she had made to Murtaza, her father, who like her grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and aunt Benazir, died a violent death.

Fatima Bhutto was 14 years old when her father, Mir Murtaza, was shot dead by police after a gun battle outside his Karachi home in 1996.

"I took up writing because it was the last thing I promised my father Murtaza hours before he was killed," she said speaking on "Selective Nostalgia: Memoir Writing and Charitable Deception of Memory".

"I asked him (Murtaza) why doesn't he write about himself. He told me to do it after he was gone and few hours later he was killed," she said and described her father as a "fascinating figure".

About her latest book "Songs of Desert and Sword", which is an account of Murtaza's life seen through her eyes, she said it was strange to research about her own family while writing the book that dwells on the brutal and corrupt world of Pakistani power politics which claimed the lives of four members of the Bhutto dynasty in the past 31 years.

She said her target audience was the young Pakistani who viewed her writing with "sympathy, solidarity and curiosity".

While conceding that it was not possible to be neutral about people you love, Fatima said she had critically analysed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's handling of Balochistan.

"He could have made a difference by ending the repression of Balochi people but it continued," she said.

Source: http://zeenews.india.com/news/south-asia/power-not-politics-divided-the-bhuttos-fatima_745050.html

Sex, lies and the art of writing honest memoirs

2011-12-05T18:02:00.000+05:00

When a celebrated psychoanalyst declares to a packed gathering that facts are the least important part of writing a memoir, the audience sits up in rapt attention tempered with disbelief. "What actually happened is not important-what you believe happened is," said Sudhir Kakar, replying to an audience question on Day One of the Times of India Literary Carnival on Friday.

If memoir-writing was about the subjective recollection of life events for Kakar, for Fatima Bhutto, granddaughter of former Pakistan prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, it was about the necessity to urgently record events as they happened. "We have this amazing ability to erase our immediate past," she said about her country. With some candid revelations peppering the discussion between the three memoir writers-Kakar , Bhutto and historian Zareer Masani-and moderator Patrick French, the postlunch session audience didn't need any caffeine kick to stayawake and fully attentive.

When the debate swung to the topic of honesty, the session saw a bit of cross-fire . Referring to Fatima's soft approach to the controversial parts of her grandfather's life, Masani said, "Unlike Fatima, I need to be honest, brutally honest." (To which she immediately riposted "That's unfair!") But it was Kakar-whose memoir according to French is "very frank by subcontinent standards" -who was the most honest, even at the session. The psychoanalyst had the audience in splits with anecdotes of his time spent in Germany as a wide-eyed , 20-year-old and his six-week-long sea journey from Calcutta to Hamburg where he found himself ogling "young women's legs" . Kakar's brutally honest confessions did not stop there-he went on to narrate the troubles he faced when he danced for the first time with a woman, a German woman: "I had to tie a handkerchief when dancing . I won't say where."

Despite the outpouring of candidness and claims of brutal honesty from Kakar and Masani, they did not contradict Fatima's contention that a memoir was never a tell-all . "There is a strong sense of private-public space. Anyone who has written a memoir will say that they always keep some things to themselves," she said. Kakar had an interesting angle to add to the debate. "The problem with memoirwriting is the voyeuristic pleasure that a reader looks for," he said. "Readers want to know about the writer and do not pay much attention to the writing ." Ergo: "In fiction-writing, you want to convince people. In memoirs, you want to seduce people and so memoir-writing is on the seduction side."

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Sex-lies-and-the-art-of-writing-honest-memoirs/articleshow/10965692.cms

'There's something strange about a name being a part of an identity'

2011-12-05T17:47:00.000+05:00

As a 14-year-old , Fatima Bhutto loved listening to her father's stories about the ruthless politics of Pakistan. She urged him to write a book about his life, but Murtaza Bhutto merely laughed and said it would be too dangerous. "You write the book when I'm gone," he told his wide-eyed daughter, who readily agreed.

Neither father nor daughter could have known that this was to be virtually their last conversation. Hours later, Murtaza Bhutto was murdered in Karachi while his children cowered in their house, listening to gunshots. Small wonder then that Fatima grew up determined to keep her promise-and to write a book about his eventful life and suspicious death.

The outcome was the explosive Songs of Blood and Sword in which Fatima Bhutto relates the dramatic, tragic story of her family and country. Her grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, once Pakistan's most important political figure, was executed by General Zia-ul-Haq .

Before his death, he demanded that his sons avenge his humiliation. Shahnawaz and Murtaza embarked on this mission-but Shahnawaz was poisoned in France a few years later. Then Murtaza was killed in Karachi-possibly at the behest of his estranged sister, Benazir Bhutto. Later Benazir, herself, was assassinated.

This blood-splattered memoir catapulted Fatima Bhutto to the limelight-as did her trenchant criticism of Pakistan's leadership.

Watch the articulate 29-year-old discuss memoir writing with Sudhir Kakkar, Zareer Masani and Patrick French at the session Selective Nostalgia today , at Mumbai Fully Booked: The Times of India Literary Carnival.

How did it feel to grow up as part of the Bhutto family?

It didn't-and it shouldn't-feel like anything. I grew up in exile in Damascus so there wasn't any focus on my name. We went to school and lived and were raised without the shadow of our name hanging over us so it didn't really affect my brother and me as kids. I think there's something strange about a name being a part of an identity-it should be built upon what you do and what you think and feel rather than the random letters of a last name.

What was the story you set out to tell in Songs of Blood and Sword?

It was the last promise I had made to my father-that I would tell his story. It was something I always knew I would do, but when I began writing I was not only thinking of my father's life and death, but also the story of violence and politics.

You were born in Kabul, and have lived in Damascus , Karachi, New York and London. So where is home?

The experience of exile does strange things, it very much distorts the idea of home. You're never really at home anywhere, though you adapt easily to new places. I felt very at home in Damascus growing up. When I lived in London and New York, they were home. There's always a longing though, for somewhere else. My writing has largely looked at this part of the world-at South Asia, but this is where home is now.

Is there any way to quell the turbulence in Pakistan?

There's no easy answer to that question. Pakistan suffers from extraordinarily poor leadership-leadership that is pathologically corrupt and violent. It used to be that every once in a while, the faces changed though the politics remained the same. Now not even the faces change. Pakistan's people have no recourse against the state, no access to justice, no access to the most basic of services like health care or elementary education . Look at the floods. Months on from the second year of devastating flooding, there are still five million people who have been abandoned by the state. They have no medical relief, many are homeless, they have no food security. The turbulence doesn't come from the people, they bear the brunt of it.

Is there a fresh burst of creativity coming out of South Asia?

I don't think there's been a time when there wasn't creativity coming out of South Asia. You go back decades and you have the poetry of Sarojini Naidu, of Faiz, of Tagore. You go back centuries and you have great learning coming out of universities in Taxila and Varanasi and Nalanda.

Look at the last five years, you're spoilt for choice. I think South Asia has tremendous authors. Basharat Peer, Hari Kunzru, Hanif Kureishi, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Dilip Hiro are a bunch of the best.

As a child and teenager, what were your feelings towards India?

We share a past, a beautiful heritage. I have great affection for India. I always feel very welcome whenever I am there-and I hope Indians who have visited Pakistan will agree that that the same goes for them here.

Do you think that exercises like literary festivals can help build bridges?

We need people to people contact desperately. It's amazing how little interaction we have between the two countries . Literary festivals demonstrate very clearly that we have a wealth of similar, connected stories. Our scars are the same. Our joys are similar. And they create a space for dialogue that is very important.

Source: http://m.timesofindia.com/city/mumbai/Theres-something-strange-about-a-name-being-a-part-of-an-identity/articleshow/10952212.cms

Jaipur Literature Festival 2012

2011-11-17T12:56:00.002+05:00

Fatima Bhutto is listed as one of the confirmed speakers for the Jaipur Literature Festival to be help in January 2012. For details visit:

http://jaipurliteraturefestival.org/attending-authors/

Fatima Bhutto...‘I am not doing a film...

2011-10-30T00:29:00.002+05:00

Fatima Bhutto has managed to stay in the news. While Benazir’s niece refuses to be a part of dynastic politics, she is putting the life of the Bhutto family in a book. But is she doing a film as has been reported? Her answer: It’s funny!

Whether it was her very vocal opposition to her aunt Benazir or her writing or her opposition to dynastic politics, Fatima always makes to the headlines. And the latest is that filmmaker Ahsan Hyder wants to cast her in his Breaking Free and, as the media has reported, has even got in touch with her agent? Fatima laughs it off as she says, “That story is the funniest thing I’ve heard in a long time. I’ve never heard of Ahsan Hyder nor do I have a secretary in Dubai, who apparently ‘reads’ me the scripts. In fact, I’ve never been offered any role in any movie. The last time I acted was in Class XI in an adaptation of The Odd Couple.”

‘I’m writing on the Bhutto family’:

I have been writing, travelling and speaking about Pakistan. I was in China and then in Cuba, where I had gone to write about living in the aftermath of the revolution and it was amazing. I am writing a book on the family at the moment. It’s been hyped as a lot of things; I don’t want to ruin the surprise by saying more.

‘Indian food is my weakness’:

I might not be doing a Bollywood film but I am very fond of India. I came there last for the Jaipur Literary Festival. I believe we’re sister countries. Like siblings, our similarities connect us far more than our differences tear us apart. I like the people, they have always been so kind to me, es pecially when they find out I’m from Pakistan. And I love the food… especially the thali. I’m a vegetarian so I really like South Indian food – dosas and idlis. There’s a place in Karachi that does South Indian food and chaat really well and I’m there embarrassingly often.

‘I and Benazir were never on the same side of any issue’:

My aunt is gone and I don’t want to drudge up the past. But people haven’t stopped comparing me with her. People see the fact that we’re both women, we both lost our fathers in violent ways, we were both educated abroad and immediately assume that we must be the same person. But those are completely cosmetic similarities. Benazir grew up in power, she grew up as
the daughter of a prime minister. I grew up in exile. She attended very pro-establishment, almost right wing universities, whereas I went to Columbia and SOAS, two of the most radically leftist and progressive schools around. As for our personal or political differences, there are far too many to count. Let’s just say, I’m not sure we stood on the same side of any issue.

‘I don’t believe in dynastic politics’:

I’ve never believed in dynastic politics, which has been as deadly for my country as dictatorships have been. I am political, very much so, but there’s so many ways to be involved politically and from what we’ve seen in Pakistan, government isn’t necessarily the most positive avenue. I work on several grassroots issues and I write about the corruption of the governments and the violence and poverty that has mired Pakistan’s people in this abject state.

‘I don’t know Bilawal well’:

I don’t know Bilawal well. Before his mother’s death, I last saw him when he was eight years old. He’s a young man and he’s been through a devastating loss. He is a student and I think he deserves some privacy.

Source: http://www.dilsedesi.co/forums/index.php?showtopic=4158

The Prodigal Daughter by GUNJEET SRA

2011-10-29T23:05:00.000+05:00

A writer, an activist and the controversial heir apparent to a splintered political dynasty, Fatima Bhutto talks about being the unofficial voice of Pakistan's young woman

The was 14 years old when her father Mir Murtaza Bhutto was shot dead right outside their home in Karachi, in a political conspiracy that was termed as an encounter. Scared, she had turned to her aunt, Benazir, the then Prime Minister of the country only to receive cold comfort. It is no surprise then that 28-year-old Fatima Bhutto, who fought for 10 years to bring forth her father's story, should want to shun the history that has bloodied her lineage; a history very similar to the country that she calls home. Staying clear of her country's complicated politics, she has now carved an identity for herself. One that goes beyond power politics. Famously quipping that the comparisons between her aunt and her were largely cosmetic and going on to add, "In terms of political ideology, what we read, how we think, we are very different. I don't think that I'm anything like her."
Quite true, considering the fact that she is openly vocal about her dislike of the political and military elite that has ruled Pakistan for over six decades. In the 2007-2008 elections she chose to campaign door to door, educating women about their voting rights, visiting almost 300 homes a day, working from morning till at least 10 at night. She says that it was the most 'oddly' liberating experience for her. "I was there mainly to drive home the point that they had to vote. That if they didn't, someone else would cast a vote in their name and that they had a responsibility to ensure that rigging didn't happen on their names." It was also during this time that she was exposed to the incredible dispossession that women, more than almost anyone else, face in Pakistan.
During one such election campaign at the time, news broke of Benazir's assassination. Fatima went home and wrote a column for The News, a bittersweet farewell that started with the words, "My aunt and I had a complicated relationship. That is the sad truth," and ended with the hope that "In death, perhaps there is a moment to call for calm. To say enough… We cannot, and will not, take this madness any more." An outcry against the existing system and an urgency for change. Insisting on the fact that there are more than three choices that Pakistan has more than the PPP (Pakistan's Peoples Party), the PML (Pakistan Muslim League) and the army she says hers 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 and has yet to live through a period where Pakistan is in control over its sovereignty and its foreign policy." She fears that if the next generation is not given a chance to take part in the country, "then we are closing a door to them, a door that they will eventually abandon. They will leave and go to other countries," she says. It is perhaps this need for a new order that is keeping this young Bhutto away from formally being part of the public system.
Having done her Bachelors in Middle Eastern Studies from Barnard College, Columbia University, USA, and an MA in South Asian Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, politics has always been a key area of interest, but it is writing that she is truly passionate about. Her first book was a collection of poems, titled Whispers of the Desert, written at the precocious age of 15. But it was only when she wrote her second book 8.50 a.m. 8 October, a collection of stories about the 2005 earthquake that killed 73,000 people in Kashmir and North West Frontier Province, did she finally enter the writer-activist mode. The shift from poetry to non-fiction is quite drastic, but she insists that poetry started as a school project. "There is a lot of fear and violence in those poems and I think this has carried through to what I write currently. This awareness of fear, thus the shift to prose or non-fiction wasn't much of a transit for me," she says.
Fear is a feeling that she is familiar with. It is perhaps what she felt when her father did not return home in 1996 to continue the basketball game he had challenged her to. It is the feeling of being abandoned by family. Of being told at school that there is a woman outside claiming to be your mother, while you lock yourself in the nurse's room trying to avoid the media and wondering how can you trust a stranger when the only mother you know is waiting for you at home the woman who brought her up like her own. The woman was Ghinwa Bhutto, her father's second wife, whom he married while in exile in Syria.

Her latest book, Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter's Memoir, is a tribute to her father and tells the story of the Bhutto family, and her father's life and death. It's set in the context of the whole canvas of Pakistan's history from Partition in 1947 onward.The book begins with its central event, her father's "encounter" outside the iconic Bhutto mansion, 70 Clifton in Karachi, where Fatima and her family still reside. The story revolves around the tragic split within the Bhutto family after the death of its patriarch, the charismatic social reformer Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was Pakistan's first democratically elected leader. This ultimately pitted his eldest child, Benazir Bhutto, against his eldest son, Mir Murtaza. She says her reasons for writing this book were more than personal. "Our history in Pakistan is written either by foreigners or by the establishment. There really isn't another layer, another transcript," she says, continuing, "What I hoped to do with this book was to write about that hidden transcript, the way people live, the way violence affects people, written by someone who watched it rather than by someone who perpetrated it," she says.

It is inherent patriotism that pushes her. "I talk and write about very serious issues that plague our country or the larger region, it's always been my choice to do so. I don't do it because I am someone's daughter. At some point, however, people suddenly realised that, I was a Bhutto and it meant something at that point," she says. But the love for her country is something that she attributes to her father. "Even while we were living in exile in Syria, my father would constantly have Bollywood movies on and even though he did not particularly like them, they just gave a sense of being home. Sindhi music was another strong influence," she says.
She admits that she could not understand her father's choking emotion for Pakistan initially. "We were in a limbo, we believed and inhabited a middle place. I didn't know for a long time, what he meant when his eyes would tear up, when he would talk about Karachi, his home. But when I went to Pakistan at the age of seven, everything made sense. I feel it now, especially since the book came about, I spend so much time travelling," she says with a smile and adds that her next book is all about Karachi.
Only time will tell if people's expectations will finally win her over, enough to cross over to the other side. Till then, she is happy to write about, rather than inherit, her political dynasty.

Source: http://www.magtheweekly.com/07may-13may2011/interview.asp

Trade between India, Pak around USD 2 billion: Bhutto

2011-10-06T21:24:00.000+05:00

Thiruvananthapuram. Ms Fatima Bhutto, grand-daughter of former Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and niece of slain former Prime Minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto, said trade between India and Pakistan is around USD two billion.

Ms Fatima Bhutto, who is in the city as part of the fourth edition of the Kovalam Literary Festival at Kanakakunnu palace here, said ”out of USD two billion, our volume of trade is a fraction, a single digit of the business that we do with strangers.” ”Described as ‘grim’ ‘unnaturally small’, we account for less than 0.5 per cent of your trade and you account for a little more than one per cent of ours as of 2010,” she said.

”This wasn’t always the case – in 1948-49, 70 per cent of our transactions were with you and 63 per cent of your exports were to us,” he added.

”Lazy economists casually float that trade could rise to USD ten billion in five years, or may be six. Or really may be 15 years. That’s just not fast enough. Especially if you consider that studies have shown potential for formal trade is 20 times greater than what we have – we should be hitting 40 billion. You don’t fight when 40-42 billion is in the way,” she observed.

”Our destinies are inexorably linked, just as our pasts were, and as they were largely peacefully. It is this that we must insist upon that for the course of our future. Justice is not outside ours border, it is within them collectively, we have to find a way to bring it out and guard it, protectively, fiercely. Our generations depend on it,” she noted. Agency

Source: http://jaipur.co/trade-between-india-pak-around-usd-2-billion-bhutto/

'Pakistan is a survivors' country'

2011-10-05T23:28:00.000+05:00

South Asia | 05.10.2011

'To be silent makes you more vulnerable'

Fatima Bhutto is a young writer and journalist from Pakistan, a country she criticizes for its political corruption and violence. And yet, it is a survivors' country, she tells Deutsche Welle.

Fatima Bhutto (29) is a member of the Bhutto dynasty in Pakistan: she is the granddaughter of former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the niece of Benazir Bhutto. Her father Murtaza Bhutto was assassinated in 1996. As a writer and journalist, she is an outspoken critic of Pakistan’s political elite, to which she herself belongs.

Deutsche Welle: You grew up in Pakistan, a country with huge disparities between the rich elite and the poor. What are your earliest memories of these disparities?

Fatima Bhutto: When you grow up in a place like Pakistan, you are struck by the gaps between people who have tremendous opportunities and privileges - and the millions who simply don’t. This is a nuclear country that couldn’t fight polio because it couldn’t freeze the vaccines… And seeing that from an early age makes you frustrated and helpless.

We have a government that hasn’t done dam maintenance for over 30 years, so we don’t have the infrastructure and have floods almost every year. I must have been in sixth or seventh grade and I remember seeing this flood, watching images on TV - and realising that nothing was happening. So with some friends, we started calling people and asked them for clothes and medicine.

Do you think collecting medicine and clothes is enough, particularly when you look at the spiralling violence in Karachi?

No, it’s never enough. But I think what you see that’s hopeful in places like Karachi is the community feeling. It's that when there is a tremendous amount of violence people don’t depend on the police or the state to protect them, but rather they depend on their community. And their community comes together to get the children off the roads in gang-infested areas and into tuition centres. And so, one thing is to support these community initiatives. But as you said, it’s not enough. What you need is an entire system overhaul so that these things are automatically provided for people.

What are the main problems facing Pakistan today?

'The government hasn't done dam maintenance in 30 years'The situation is getting much worse. Corruption seems to be a celebrated part of political ethics. Violence seems to be very easily absorbed by the state that thinks nothing of the fact that in four days a hundred of their people can be killed. And all the while the world watches. - The world watches because Pakistan is a front line state, so what does it matter if a hundred people die in the span of a day? What does it matter if children don’t have access to basic medical care and die of preventable deaths like malaria?

Corruption, violence, preventable deaths - is Pakistan in danger of becoming a failed state?

I always thought that was outrageous to call Pakistan a failed state because as a country, it is only 60 years old. The system of government is absolutely failed, yes. This government and the government before it, yes they failed. But the state itself cannot be a failure. If we look in Pakistan outside of the government, it is a tremendously hopeful place. It’s a rich country. Its full of natural resources. It has a large, young population. And it has a young country’s hope for what it can accomplish.

Pakistan’s foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, is young and she’s a woman…

What is sad about the political culture of Pakistan is that we don’t talk about ideas, we just talk about people. Gender is never a substitute for ethics or justice. I don’t care whether she is young or old, or a woman. I want to know what she is saying. And what she is saying seems to be exactly the same thing that people have been saying before for the last 30 years. What I want to know, is how can an independent country like Pakistan have a foreign policy that makes us subservient to almost every country we deal with? That to me is outrageous. How do you have a nuclear country, a rich country whose policy is based around begging for aid?

Khar, like yourself, is part of the small elite that rules Pakistan. Is there any space for democracy in Pakistan?

I think there is a problem with the dynastic culture of my country. Until democratic institutions are strengthened and run freely, something like dynasty just subverts the democratic process. I don’t think this will change in my lifetime. I think it needs generations to fix and a commitment to democratic ideas. We don’t see that in Pakistan. Making someone like Khar foreign minister sends a message especially to young people that the only way into politics in Pakistan is through families - and for a country of 180 million people that’s a really rotten thing to tell them.

You are very outspoken. Are you afraid something might happen to you?

Violence in Karachi You know I think everybody in Pakistan is afraid, because there is no recourse against state violence. And that’s historical: The violence ebbs and flows. Some governments are more violent than others. This is a period of intense violence. But in a place that is as dangerous when it comes to violence and freedom as Pakistan is, to be silent doesn’t make you safer, it makes you more vulnerable.

You’ve painted a picture of violence, of corruption, of poverty - what do you love about Pakistan?

I think it’s a survivors' country, I think it’s a place that survives against the odds: the ordinary people that make it run. I think that it’s a place that has always been open, in terms of hospitality, in terms of warmth, to new people, to new cultures. I think that it’s a place that struggles to build something that is more just, that is different than what is imposed from above. I think that is unique about Pakistan.

Interview: Naomi Conrad

Editor: Rob Mudge

Source:

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15435001,00.html?maca=en-rss-en-all-1573-rdf

Fatima Bhutto slams Hina Rabbani Khar

2011-10-05T21:51:00.001+05:00

Fatima Bhutto, granddaughter of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto criticized Hina Rabbani Khar for towing the line in her new role as Pakistan’s foreign minister.

Bhutto told Deutsche Welle in an interview that she was not concerned with Khar’s age or gender — what mattered for her was Khar’s work.

“What is sad about the political culture of Pakistan is that we don’t talk about ideas, we just talk about people. Gender is never a substitute for ethics or justice… I don’t care whether she is young or old, or a woman. I want to know what she is saying. And what she is saying seems to be exactly the same thing that people have been saying before for the last 30 years,” Deutsche Welle quoted Bhutto.

Answering a question about Khar being a part of the small elite that rules Pakistan, Bhutto said that if democratic institutions are not strengthened, dynasties that have ruled Pakistan in the past will supersede the democratic process.

Deutsche Welle quoted Bhutto saying “making someone like Khar foreign minister sends a message especially to young people that the only way into politics in Pakistan is through families – and for a country of 180 million people that’s a really rotten thing to tell them.”

Talking about the problems faced by Pakistan, Bhutto said that corruption has become a part of the political culture and violence has become an acceptable thing. However, she called Pakistan a survivors’ country.

“I think it’s a place that survives against the odds: the ordinary people that make it run,” Bhutto said.

Source: http://tribune.com.pk/story/267597/fatima-bhutto-slams-hina-rabbani-khar/#comment-365017

People of India, Pakistan not enemies: Fatima Bhutto

2011-10-04T08:50:00.004+05:00

Noted Pakistani writer, journalist and grand daughter of former Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Fatima Murtaza Bhutto said that the people of Pakistan and India are not enemies and there is no enmity between the common people of both the countries.

She spoke with Arun Lakshman on the sidelines of the Kovalam literary festival, which she inaugurated on Saturday.

There has been vehement criticism that your book Songs of Blood and Sword is a work done to legitimise your father Murtaza Bhutto (son of former Pakistan premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and brother of Benazir Bhutto) and that it does not reflect the history, politics or the social situation of Pakistan in the right perspective?

The book is indeed a memoir of my father Murtaza Bhutto, but it does reflect the history and politics of Pakistan. I have done extensive research to cover the history and I feel I have done justice to the work. Regarding the political and social aspects of Pakistan, I have been clearheaded in writing it. Also, a major part of the history has been before I was born and I had to depend on lot of research material available for writing this book.

Noted Pakistani writer and political activist, who was once a student leader and then advisor the Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Raja Anwar in his book The Terror Prince. The Life and Death of Murtaza Bhutto has said that Murtaza was behind the Al-Zulfikar organisation and it was formed to avenge the death of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Your comments on this?

Raja Anwar wrote this book after the tragic death of my father. He should have written it well before my father was assassinated because then he could have defended the writings against him in the book. Now there is no such defence as my father is no more. Also, Raja Anwar was in a Kabul prison from 1982 to 1985 during the period when these incidents occurred, as claimed in the book. This means he has relied on hearsay and not on facts. There have been several other mistakes in the book including the name of persons and places.

Your book has been published in English, French, Italian and even in Hindi but not in the most popular medium in Pakistan, Urdu. Why is it so?

Urdu is the language used by the local and ordinary people of Pakistan, while English is used by the elite of the country. The elite is lazy and afraid, and does not act, so the rulers don't find it a major threat for a book published in a language read by the elite of Pakistan. But every ruler is afraid of the local people and rightly so; the Pakistani establishment also fears that. No Urdu publisher has come forward to print my work in the Urdu. No distributor was willing to sell this book.

Do you feel that the strong-arm tactics employed by the Pakistani establishment is the reason behind Urdu publishing houses not bringing out your work?

What else can be the reason? As a writer I want millions of Pakistani people who speak and read Urdu to read this book rather than the elite class, who are always afraid to act and speak out. If published in Urdu, local people will know and understand what happened to my father and where the country was headed to. This could have had a major impact on the society of Pakistan.

How is the young generation in Pakistan? Are they actively involved in cleansing the political system in your country or are they aloof from all this?

I can't say in one shot about the young generation of Pakistan. They are from different classes in different areas. For instance, the youth of Sindh province may be different from other areas and Sindh is a place that I know well. Here the youngsters are restless and want to change the system or rather want to move out and do something for the country. Throughout Pakistan youngsters are for freedom; to think freely, just like youth of any country.

Do you think Pakistan will see a youth uprising just as it happened in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and some Arab countries like Oman and Bahrain?

I don't see it is coming now, but youths want freedom and they want a corruption free democratic political rule and not a dictatorship or the corrupt administration of today. However, we cannot rule out the possibility.

How do you rate the present Pakistani government?

There is nothing much to say about the present Pakistani government and they are already into major acts of corruption and nepotism at the cost of the country.

Several Pakistani writers and authors and journalists have gone on record that the feared and dreaded Inter-services Intelligence has threatened them and that they were being followed. Have you ever been threatened by the ISI?

The ISI has never threatened me. But after my book Songs of Blood and Sword was published, there have been several actions by the establishment on my family that can be considered as a threat or more than that. In fact, the car in which my mother was travelling was shot at. Those who went to complain about this and to register a first information report were beaten up by the police.

Are these threats the handiwork of the Pakistani establishment as such or a single individual, Asif Ali Zardari?

I cannot say that. But Asif Ali Zardari is still an accused on the allegations raised by me and he can very well employ any means against me. Moreover, he is at present the President of Pakistan and is very powerful.

You are a vehement critic of social networking siteFacebook. Why is it so?

Facebookintrudes into our personal life and can easily produce all our details at a click of a button to any agency around the world. This is not good for a civil society. However,Youtube and messaging are excellent.Facebookalso intrudes the websites we visit.

Facebookhowever gave inspiration for the Jasmine revolution (2010-2011 Tunisian Revolution). Didn't it play a good role?

Of course. Other than Facebook other social networking sites, mobile messages and Youtube too have been used well. I do say that as freedom is ultimate, people are welcome to use anything that they like, but there is skepticism about Facebook,as it can provide any information it has to anyone or any country.

Do you feel that Pakistan is a failed state?

No, never. Pakistani people have self determination. Our country is rich and abundant in oil, minerals, gold, rice and other agriculture produce, and the people have the will to work. Around 60 per cent of the population is under 30 years of age. The handiwork of one or two corrupt and power-hungry individuals who run the country as their fiefdom is creating problems. So I think Pakistan has a good future and that it will rise to its potential and abundance.

What is the situation of the minorities in Pakistan?

The minorities do have their problems in Pakistan as they have in India. However, the nature of the difficulties varies from place to place. There are mandirs and churches in the Sindh area, but may be in other parts it is not seen much. The problems being faced by the minorities of Pakistan is the one faced in other countries also. Just before this visit I had entered the Swami Narayan Temple in Karachi and did not face any problems.

What about the situation in Balochistan?

Baluchistan is one of the areas of our country that is rich in mineral wealth. There are issues in Balochistan and there are thoughts that it is the handiwork of foreign powers. If the Baluch people are naturally uprising for their rights, then there is no wrong in it, but if there are foreign powers involved in it, then we have to know what their motive is.

There were uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya recently. Your comments on this?

The revolution in Egypt and Tunisia has been organic and from the locals. We know that students had taken to the streets in these countries to overthrow corrupt rulers and administrations.

In Libya, the situation is different. We don't know who is behind these forces who have led the movement. Is it the Al-Qaeda, is it some other forces? It is interesting to note that the American embassy has issued a notification that there is huge oil wealth in Libya.

You come from the famous Bhutto family. In India there is the noted Gandhi family. Do you find anything in common between these two families, as both have ruled their respective countries and there have been tragedies in both the families?

I can't say that there is anything in common between these two families. I am of the opinion that one should not enter into politics one fine morning claiming to be from a family which has political history and lineage. This is not the right thing to do in politics.

Any new book in the offing?

Yes, I am planning a book on Karachi. However, it will take time as I am presently in a tour to promote my new book Songs of Blood and Sword throughout the world.

Source: http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-people-of-india-pakistan-not-enemies-fatima-bhutto/20111003.htm

Kovalm Literary Fest 2011: Pakistan, Peace And Prose

2011-10-02T10:51:00.002+05:00

Fatima Murtaza Bhutto mirrors as well as hugs her homeland in her writings and seeks nothing less than peace as an absolute solution to the Indo-Pak cold war. Shameem Faruque in an exclusive chat with Fatima

She is not just a beautiful author, she is also an author who is beautiful. Totally at ease answering our questions, comfortable as she ties up her tresses, the liberal voice from Pakistan that she is, she is an intellectual and someone who is genuinely seeking peace between her beloved country and India.

Her pedigree is impeccable. Benazir Bhutto for an aunt, Murtaza Bhutto her father and her grandfather the very charismatic Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Yet this bold and the elegant Fatima is an author in her own right – truly an individual to reckon with. She means it when she says that “violence can never be the solution. Peace is the only way out.” She recognises that the countries that were born out of each other, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh face more or less the same problems which can be easily dealt with if they care to help each other out. She can’t fathom why both India and Pakistan refuse to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty when so many countries have.

Fatima Bhutto

Yentha caught up with the 29 year old Fatima after she had just delivered the 6th Annual K C John Memorial Lecture at the 4th Kovalam Literary Fest. She authored the poetry 'Whispers of the Desert' (written when she was 13) '8.50 a.m., 8 October 2005' (the accounts of Pakistan earthquake victims) and the ‘Songs of Blood and Sword’, a daughter’s memoir (published in April 2010).

When asked whether the memoir was a daughter’s gesture of repaying her father, Fatima says, “It is actually my promise to my father. I gave him my word that I will write this. This is what my father asked of me just a few hours before he was killed. He cannot bring one out like this when he is alive, he said. He told me to write after he is gone. And that is the memoir.”

She is a Bhutto - the most popular political family from Pakistan. Was she compromised when introduced as the niece of Benazir Bhutto? “I am listened to and I receive a warm welcome wherever I go,” quite diplomatically giving the question a skip. She has seen four of her family members assassinated but she still lives in her home at Karachi. As a woman how secure and free does she feel especially in a conservative society like the one in Pakistan? Her reply was quick “Where in the world is a woman safe, for that matter? Women, being the minority, have to face their insecurities in whichever part of the world they live. The same applies to Pakistan too. But I don’t change for the sake of the society in which I live. I remain the way I am.” The turmoil has not deterred this lady from being the crusader for her homeland, if we can call her one.

Under the umbrella of the Kovalam Literary Fest, two authors stand out not only for their books but also for opening doors to their homelands - Basharat Peer for Kashmir through his ‘Curfewed Nights’ and Fatima Bhutto for Pakistan through her memoir ‘Songs of Blood and Sword’. To the question whether she could be considered as a goodwill ambassador of her country, she smiles “Living in Pakistan, I see a side of the country which people normally do not see. So I try to bring that side in front of the world.”

She intently listens to your words as the cameras capture her various moods. Obviously she is gifted with a lot of charisma but she has an excellent educational background. A BA degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Columbia University, New York and a Masters in South Asian Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London have made her dwell deeper into the socio-political as well as economic metamorphosis of not just her country but also countries around the world.

Fatima in conversation with Shameem

Basharat Peer talks about a new generation growing up in Kashmir ‘who have become far too intimate with war and fear’. Is the same happening in Pakistan? Fatima Bhutto nods, “What the youth see are the generals and today’s rulers. So there is a chance of the same happening there.” Pakistan is mired in controversies. But aren’t there people, alive, who are fit to guide Pakistan? She catches the pun quickly and pat comes her answer, “Sure, there are quite a few fascinating personalities in Pakistan, Muhammad Hussain for one.”

Fatima Bhutto

I just got time to thank this strong lady before Fatima was frisked away by the organizers. The room falls silent. An emptiness that seemed too serene to be ignored. I pick up my notepad and notice that I have hardly written a word. Words get imprinted in your heart sometimes that you hardly need to write anything. I wonder what impact her written words would have on me …

Source: http://www.yentha.com/news/view/4/13986

‘In Pak, it’s impossible to escape politics’

2011-10-02T10:48:00.003+05:00

October 2, 2011 By Ayyappan Ramachandran

Fatima Bhutto, writer-niece of Benazir Bhutto who became embittered with her aunt following suspicions of her regime's role in her father’s assassination, is in Thiruvanant-hapuram for the Deccan Chronicle Kovalam Literary Festival. She talks to Ayyappan Ramachandran

What does it feel like to be a Bhutto? Does it bring a sense of responsibility towards your country? For how long can you keep politics at bay? Is some of your writing aimed to secure that end?

This is a point I’ve always tried to make. It doesn’t matter what one’s last name is; it should be the content of your work, your character, your ethics and principles that count. Thankfully, my brothers and I were raised to be sure that those were the things that defined us, not the six letters of our last name.
I genuinely believe that we serve our nations in many ways. Some may choose to do it through politics, others through art, through literature, through teaching. There's no proof in Pakistan that politics is the most progressive way to serve the country, or that it's the most positive way. I always wanted to be a writer. So the question of politics is urgent or looming in other people's minds, not mine.

Why do you think you memoir Songs of Blood and Sword has not yet been translated into Urdu?

It’s strange, though not surprising at all. Thousands of people read English in Pakistan, but millions read Urdu. It’s sad that the book has been translated into various other languages but has yet to find an Urdu version. But I hope that will change in time.

Being a vehement critic of the establishment, do you live in Pakistan for the most part, or abroad?

I don’t live abroad. I live in Karachi. I do travel a lot with Songs of Blood and Sword, speaking at festivals, and promoting it in the countries it’s been published. But Karachi is home. It’s always been risky to speak out against the establishment in Pakistan, but I do believe that silence is far riskier.
After the hugely successful memoir, what are you working on now?

A book on Karachi, but it’s still in very early stages.

A lot of good new writing in Pakistan is in English. Is there anything interesting happening in other languages — Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Baluch?

There's always been fascinating work published in Urdu - whether poetry or plays or satire. And the same goes for the other regional languages. Sindhis, one can tell immediately, are very attached to their language, for example. They make sure it is taught in provincial schools and that it is a living, breathing, language and not relegated to the back of bookshelves. But really, the problem in Pakistan is illiteracy. It’s a tremendous barrier and there are no efforts to change what is a dismally low literacy rate… the qualification for literacy is the ability to sign one’s name, so official numbers are grossly inflated.

Do you read your Pakistani contemporaries’ writing in English? What about Indian writers? Have you met any?

Yes, of course. There’s such wonderful work coming out of Pakistan, and, as you say, out of South Asia in general. A really good book that flew sort of under the radar a few years ago was Children of Dust by Ali Eteraz. I’d recommend it as it’s a rare offering of non-fiction. Indian writers — I’ve admired the work of Basharat Peer, Suketu Mehta and Tishani Doshi in terms of current authors.

Why does so much of the Pakistani writing have to do with politics, indirectly or directly? Are there historical or social novels, or novels about love, chiclit, in Pakistan? Are good short stories and plays being written?

It’s impossible to escape politics — the best art thrives under difficult political situations. People don’t have a lot of forums open to them — they don’t have political spaces where they can express themselves. Those spaces are shut off except to the very few. So you find that people’s writing becomes an outlet for political thought. There’s also people’s art, some really fascinating and really brave art is being created in Pakistan at the moment, especially by women.
I think artists like Faiza Butt and Sana Arjumand in the art world are tremendous because they don’t shy away from difficult issues. Your question seems critical of the presence of politics, but I think it’s urgent and necessary and very inspiring to witness. Imran Aslam is a great playwright in Pakistan. He’s very witty and very political again, he’s a big favourite of mine.

How do you feel when you visit India? Does it seem like Pakistan, or different? Have you been initiated into the charms of Bollywood?

I am always very happy to come to India, it feels like home. The people are very warm, very friendly, and really I can’t say I feel as welcome as a Pakistani anywhere else. There are so many things that are similar to Pakistan - we’re the same people, we have the same attitudes, the same language, the same culture, the same history. There are differences of course, but what defines India for me is its warmth. That is true for Pakistani people too. I wish it was easier for people to have access to each other, to travel freely to each other’s countries. It would break so many barriers and be so powerful to see the two countries work in harmony together.

What stops Pakistan from being friendly with India? What do you think should be Pakistan’s priorities?

That’s a two-way street. I think when it comes to Pakistan-India relations, priorities of both our nations must urgently centre on peace. We are sibling countries, we are far stronger together than we are against each other. Our destinies are linked, the three of us — India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and my generation has had no part in the hostilities that has defined South Asia. We want peace, we want to connect with each other, we want openness. We must stand strong when it comes to those values, to the values of non-violence, and of solidarity with each other. I hear it all the time in Pakistan, and I hear it whenever I am in India too.

Source :

http://www.deccanchronicle.com/editorial/op-ed/%E2%80%98-pak-it%E2%80%99s-impossible-escape-politics%E2%80%99-807

I want to establish as a writer : Fatima Bhutto

2011-10-01T23:59:00.004+05:00

Thiruvananthapuram: Noted Pakistani writer Fatima Bhutto said she did not want to enter politics, but would like to establish herself as a writer. She is here to attend the two-day long "Kovalam Literary Festival".

Fatima, granddaughter of former Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, told reporters dynastic politics in her country had not produced anything progressive in the last 30 years and it was important for the Bhuttos to be kept out of politics.

She said she did not subscribe to the view that her country is a 'failed nation', though governance was a failure.

"Pakistan is not a small or failed nation. But the system of governance there is a failure. It has nothing to do with people in Pakistan," Fathima said.

"People in Pakistan aspire for hundred per cent democracy and there should be fair elections," Fatima said.

Fatima, 29, who has penned three books including collection of poems "Whispers of Desert" and "Songs of Blood and Sword", said "the question of 'why I did not become a politician' is just like why I did not become a dentist."

Fatima, also the niece of slain Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, said she had good memories about her aunt before she had entered politics. "She was a courageous woman" who stood for some values and standards.

On freedom of expression in Pakistan, Fatima said she had written books and columns in newspapers. But she had to stop her columns since 2008 when the new government came to power.

Her book "Songs of Blood and Sword" was published in India and they were later circulated in Pakistan. "A large number of good literary works and films come from Pakistan these days and the"difficult conditions there have produced a major chunk of them," she said.

A best-selling author, Fatima said her new book would be on Pakistan and Karachi. It would not be a story about herself, but about a 'misunderstood place. "I visited Mumbai and Delhi before.Now I want to see another side of India and learn more about south India. That's why I have come to Kerala. People here are warm and welcoming," she said. Asked about 'accumulation' of arms by Pakistan, she said not only Pakistan, but none in the world should do so.

Source:
http://english.manoramaonline.com/cgi-bin/MMOnline.dll/portal/ep/contentView.do?contentId=10162195&tabId=18&channelId=-1073865025&BV_ID=%40%40%40

Fatima Bhutto draws road map for India-Pakistan peace

2011-10-01T23:57:00.000+05:00

By IANS,

Thiruvananthapuram : The road to peace between India and Pakistan will have to be mapped by building on the shared heritage and the common social malaise confronting the two nations. And the onus of the task lies on the youth, author and peace activist Fatima Bhutto said here Saturday.

"We (people of India and Pakistan) are the same."

"You are like me. We need more people-to-people contact to promote peace. Our destinies as countries are inextricably linked as our past were... Justice is within the borders and not outside it," the Karachi-based writer said.

She was delivering the sixth K.C. John Memorial Lecture on "India and Pakistan: Road to Peace" at the Kovalam Literary Festival 2011. The two-day festival began Oct 1 at the Kanakakunnu Palace, a former summer retreat of the erstwhile rulers of Travancore, in the capital.

"Despite being separated at birth and shared heritage, India and Pakistan have created enormous gulf between their people. They cannot visit each other's country without going through enormous official procedures," Fatima said.

Fatima harked back to the 5,000-year-old civilisational roots of the people of India and Pakistan along the Indus Valley to emphasise the need to hammer out common policies to battle hunger and underdevelopment.

"India and Pakistan over the centuries have shared something hopeful, peaceful - a joint heritage that modern day hostilities could not erase," she said.

"But there is lack of coordination," she lamented. "We could develop policies together... But we don't do that - instead we feed the world when the hungry in our country starve."

Analysing the areas of serious conflicts, Fatima said there were "three countries in the world that did not sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty - India, Pakistan and Israel."

"India and Pakistan are still suspicious of each other while the Israel government has managed to get itself out of it," she said.

And the suspicions were very elementary, she added.

Fatima is the grand-daughter of slain Pakistan prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and the niece of Benazir Bhutto, the country's first woman prime minister, who was killed in 2007. Fatima's father Murtaza Bhutto was gunned down in a political battle in 1996.

Fatima said "India and Pakistan have the largest migration history in the world with the biggest displacement... When we parted, the world shook".

"The freedom movement was iconic but the only problem was that we quickly turned on ourselves. What Pakistan did to India, Bangladesh did to Pakistan. Punjab was almost a holocaust," she said.

She said Bangladesh and Pakistan have one of the uncertain food policies and "terror has displaced millions of people who are hungry".

"But nearly 50 percent of the world's hungry are in India," she said identifying the problems endemic to both the nations.

"Trade between India and Pakistan is a fraction of the trade that we do with strangers. Trade between the two countries was much larger and we should be giving 40 billion dollars in trade. Many other arch rivals have better trade ties," she said.

The young Indians and Pakistanis had made peace a reality, she said. Clad in one of her grandmother's saris, Fatima stole the show with her appeal for lasting peace across the border.

Fatima is the author of three books, including a new biography of the Bhutto clan.

Source:

http://twocircles.net/2011oct01/fatima_bhutto_draws_road_map_indiapakistan_peace.html

Kovalam Literary Festival inaugurated by Fatima Bhutto

2011-10-01T23:28:00.001+05:00

The fourth edition of the popular Kovalam Literary Festival was inaugurated on Saturday by Fatima Bhutto, the author of Songs of Blood and Sword.

Bhutto, in her inaugural speech, said that both India [ Images ] and Pakistan have a common heritage and nothing can separate that rich legacy.

The world shook when Pakistan and India were divided, said Bhutto, adding that this happened again when Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan in 1971.

India and Pakistan shared a rich cultural background and the unified strength of the two countries could beat the world, she said.

Noted writer Paul Zachariah and Binoo K John, director of the Kovalam Literary festival, were present among the audience.

Bhutto's address was followed by a detailed discussion on Binoo K John's book Last Song of Savio De Souza with journalist and writer Suresh Menon and the author.

Aswhin Sangi spoke about his work Chanakya's Chant and shared his experiences with the audience.

Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunathilake spoke about his book Chinaman that is based on cricket.

Authors Mohammed Haneef [ Images ], Meena Kandaswamy and Paresh Mehrotra are expected to participate in the festival on Sunday, the last day of the festival.

Source: http://www.rediff.com/news/report/kovalam-literary-festival-kicks-off/20111001.htm

Kovalam Literary Festival: Fatima Bhutto Unplugged

2011-10-01T14:17:00.004+05:00

Hailing from arguably the most powerful political family in Pakistan, Fatima Bhutto sees her visit to God's own country as a learning experience | By Yentha

Trivandrum: The fourth edition of the Kovalam Literary Festival is sure to be highlighted across the world with some help coming from the latest emerging name from the Bhutto family – 29 year old Fatima Bhutto. Unlike her predecessors this young and talented woman has earned her name through her prowess in transforming words to grasp the imagination of literature loving people from around the globe. In a glittering ceremony held at Hotel South Park, Fatima Bhutto was introduced to the media by Binoo K John, founder, Kovalam Literary Festival.

Talking to the media, Fatima Bhutto said that this was her first time in Kerala and that she was excited to be here. “There are not many South Indians who have visited Pakistan, and there aren't many from Pakistan who have visited this part of the world. So I see this as a learning experience and expect some cultural exchange. Kerala has a great culture and equality among its various religions. It has a high rate of literacy and of course you have great food.”

As a recognisable name in contemporary world literature, Fatima Bhutto holds high regard for Indian literature. “Everybody reads Indian novels nowadays,” she noted.

Belonging to the younger generation in the world of literature, Fatima Bhutto raised many eyebrows with her candid remarks on her dislike of Facebook. “Facebook intrudes into people's privacy and the people willingly surrender themselves to this intrusion. As a person who respects privacy, I am not a fan of Facebook.”

Talking about her view point on the political legacy of the Bhutto family, this young Bhutto opined that it was time for the Bhuttos to restrain from politics
“Bhuttos need to be outside politics to let the field to open up in Pakistan. As for me, I have not envisioned politics as an option in my career anytime.”

She also answered questions regarding the current state of chaos prevailing in the political and social scene in Pakistan.

“It would be absurd to term Pakistan a failed nation. But the system of governance we have there has certainly been a failure. The country is called a democratic state because public elections are held every five years. But it is only when these elections are conducted in a fair manner that the nation can be truly called a democratic nation. Also, there is the need for peace both in the national and international scene for the development of a country. I am against the accumulation of weapons by anyone anywhere in the world.”

When asked about her next book, the young Bhutto replied that all though she is yet to begin work on it, the book will be 'about Pakistan, about Karachi, about a place that's highly misunderstood by the rest of the world.'

The Kovalam Literary Fest is to commence at Kanakakunnu Palace grounds on Saturday, October 1. Fatima Bhutto will be delivering a lecture on politically relevant subjects between India and Pakistan at 10 in the morning. The festival is open to public and will also have book reading sessions by renowned authors like Shehan Karunatileke (Chinaman) and Mohammed Hanif (Our Lady Of Alice Bhatti). The festival will be inaugurated by the Union Minister of New and Renewable energy, Dr. Farooq Abdullah.

Source: http://www.yentha.com/news/view/1/13985

Pakistan not failed state: Bhutto

2011-10-01T14:12:00.002+05:00

Pakistan is now lorded over a by a man Fatima Bhutto calls 'my aunt’s oleaginous husband', but she insists the country is not a failed state.

The moment Asif Ali Zardari took over the reins of Pakistan her column in The Nation was discontinued, but Bhutto says Pakistani aspirations have always been democratic.

“Governments might have failed, systems might have failed. But Pakistan is a country that could be immensely rich,” she says.

Bhutto is in Kerala to inaugurate the fourth edition of Deccan Chronicle Kovalam Literary Festival on October 1.

“Don’t mistake what you see in Pakistan today as democracy. The country is notorious for its corruption and mismanagement. While the country is reeling from the onslaught of two consecutive floods, the government has the gall to put out a $3-million advertisement in The Wall Street Journal. You can’t call this democracy,” she says.

Politics seems to repel this young Bhutto. “I don’t see politics furthering anything progressive. I never wanted to be a politician. I always wanted to be a writer,” she says.

Bhutto keeps Face-book, too, at an arm’s length. “The intrusion is tremendous. Amid all the fun, people willingly surrender their privacy. Facebook is not my favourite medium,” she says.

Bhutto’s memoir Songs of Blood and Sword might not have been translated to Urdu, but it can be found in Hindi. Among Indian writers in English, she loves Rushdie and Naipaul.

Source: http://www.deccanchronicle.com/channels/cities/kochi/pakistan-not-failed-state-bhutto-618

Govts have failed, not Pak: Fatima

2011-10-01T14:05:00.001+05:00

Pakistan is now lorded over a by a man Fatima Bhutto calls “my aunt’s oleaginous husband” but she insists that Pakistan is not a failed state. The moment Asif Ali Zardari took over the reins of Pakistan her column in the Nation was discontinued but Ms Bhutto says that Pakistani aspirations have always been democratic.

“Governments might have failed, systems might have failed. But Pakistan is a country that could be immensely rich,” said Ms Fatima Bhutto on Friday. She is here to inaugurate the fourth edition of the Deccan Chronicle Kovalam Literary Festival on October 1. “Don’t mistake what you see in Pakistan today as democracy. The country is notorious for its corruption and mismanagement. While the country is reeling under the onslaught of two consecutive floods, the government has the gall to put out a three million dollar advertisement in the Wall Street Journal. You can’t call this democracy,” she said.

Politics seems to repel this young Bhutto. “I don’t see politics furthering anything progressive. I never wanted to be a politician. I always wanted to be a writer,” she said. She keeps Facebook, too, at an arm’s length. “The intrusion involved is tremendous. Amid all the fun, people willingly surrender their privacy. Facebook is not my favourite medium,” she said.
Fatima has her differences with Benazir Bhutto but she still harbours soft feelings for her aunt. “She was a courageous woman who held steadfastly to certain values. It is these memories of her that I treasure the most,” she said. She has a special place for India, too. Her memoir Songs of Blood and Sword might not have been translated into Urdu but it can be found in Hindi. Among Indian writers in English, she loves Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul.

And on the day, Ms Bhutto was found flaunting the most Indian of symbols: a blazing red bindi. “It’s is the first time I am applying one. The staff at the hotel where I stay did this,” she said.

Source: http://www.asianage.com/india/govts-have-failed-not-pak-fatima-196

I started writing poetry when there was fear, says Fatima Bhutto

2011-09-29T15:34:00.001+05:00

In times of trouble, children find their own ways to cope and come to terms with it. Fatima Bhutto who always loved the written word, sought poetry.

As a 14-year-old, she had hidden in a windowless room, shielding her little brother when there was shooting outside her home in Karachi. Her father Murtaza was murdered that day. It cost her dearly to be Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s granddaughter and niece of Benazir Bhutto, former prime ministers of Pakistan.

“I started writing poetry at a time when there was a lot of fear in the city that I lived in. Karachi was a city on fire in the early 1990s,” says Fatima.

“It was a time and place that was, as it is now in many similar ways, ruled by violence and by overwhelming fear. Poetry was a way of looking at it from a distance, all the while knowing how close it was. I suppose our way of expressing things that we'd rather hide shifts as we are constantly moving and adapting. Then it was poetry, now it’s prose.”

It would seem her poems, written years before she was even aware of the intense political atmosphere and tensions in the family, had sensed the tragedies that awaited her. Her first book of poems — Whispers of the Desert — was published when she was 15.

Fatima wrote again after observing the wreck caused by an earthquake in Pakistan’s northern areas in 2005 in 8.50 a.m. 8 October 2005.

She says, “As a writer you want to examine what moves you, what frightens you, what is most perplexing to you. I’m most attracted to a subject when I feel there's a disconnect between how the subject — whether it was the earthquake in Pakistan in 2005, the war in Lebanon in 2006, or violence in Pakistan — is reported and how it is lived.”

Her third book, Songs of Blood and Sword tells the story of ‘four generations of a family defined by a political idealism that would destroy them’.

The 29-year-old writer who will be visiting Kerala to attend the Deccan Chronicle Kovalam Literary Festival 2011, loves quite a few Indian writers.

“I think some of the best writing at the moment is coming out of the subcontinent — out of India and Pakistan. As for Indian authors, Suketu Mehta, Aravind Adiga, Basharat Peer are all contemporary writers I admire and enjoy reading. Agha Shahid Ali is one of my favourite poets of all time and Naipaul and Rushdie are classics I keep returning to. It’s a hard list to narrow down!”

Source: http://www.deccanchronicle.com/tabloid/all-rounders/i-started-writing-poetry-when-there-was-fear-says-fatima-bhutto-630

Bhutto to be star attraction at Kovalam litfest

2011-09-20T22:51:00.000+05:00

Fatima Bhutto, a Pakistani poet and granddaughter of former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, will be the star attraction of the fourth Deccan Chronicle-Kovalam Literary Festival to be held at the Kanakakunnu Palace here on October 1 and 2.

Fatima will deliver the sixth annual K.C. John Memorial Lecture and will also read from her latest book ‘Songs of Blood and Sword,’ which narrates the trouble-torn history of the Bhutto family.

Apart from her, a heady mix of writers from India and outside is taking part in the festival which will be inaugurated by the former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister, Dr Farooq Abdullah.

“This is the first time Fatima is visiting Kerala,” said Binoo K. John, author and founder director of KLF. “We also have two major Israeli writers, Metti Lerner and Savyon Liebrecht, taking part in the festival.”

Further, noted writer David Davidar will read from his latest book ‘Ithacca’ and will interact with the audience.

Lovers of literature will also get to hear Anuradha Roy reading from ‘A Folded Earth,’ Ashwin Sanghi from ‘Chanakya’s Chant’ and Shehan Karunatileke from ‘Chinaman’.

Mohammed Hanif, the Pakistani writer who attracted much attention in the last instalment of the KLF, will present his latest work ‘Our lady of Alice Bhatti’ and Basharat Peer will draw the attention of the audience to the sorrows of Kashmir by reading from his ‘Curfew’d Night’.

Other writers slated to attend the festival are Kanika Dhill, poet Meena Kandasamy, Palash Mehrotra, and Suresh Menon.

Source:
http://www.deccanchronicle.com/channels/cities/kochi/bhutto-be-star-attraction-kovalam-litfest-059

'Poetry was a way of making sense of madness'

2011-09-10T22:38:00.003+05:00

Blood, sword and suffering are the heartbeat of Fatima Bhutto's literary soul. And it was fear that propelled her poetry, says the heir to Pakistan's tragedy-scarred Bhutto family.

An accomplished poet, Fatima, 29, captures love, loss and the solitude of her circumstances in her verses.

"I have not written poetry for a very long time, but poetry like prose is ultimately a means of expressing what seems difficult otherwise," Fatima, who will be in India for the Kovalam Literary Festival from Oct 1-2, told in an email interview from Karachi.

"Kovalam will be my first visit to South India. And I'm looking forward to seeing more of the country and interacting with new audiences and opening bridges between our cities and stories."

She won't be reading out just from her poetry. Fatima has authored ' Whispers of the Desert' , an anthology of poetry, as well as ' 08.50 am ', an account of the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, and 'Songs of Blood and Sword' , a searing document of the turbulence that had ripped her family apart on her native turf.

Born in 1982 in Kabul to Murtaza Bhutto, the son of former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Fatima carries the illustrious and violent lineage on her young shoulders.

Her grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged to death in 1979. In 1996, Fatima's father Murtaza was gunned down in Karachi by the police during the tenure of 'aunt' Benazir Bhutto. Eleven years later, Benazir Bhutto met with a similar fate in Rawalpindi in 2007 when she was shot dead at a rally.

Fear propelled her to poetry, Fatima said.

"It (fear) was a strong emotion. I started writing during a very violent time in Karachi's history. And it was a way of trying to make sense of the madness around," Fatima said.

Poetry helped. She railed at the rage that tore through Pakistan in the 1990s and defined in words the affection she harboured for 'papa' Murtaza.

"To my darling papa, with all the love in the world...this is our story...," she penned in an ode to Murtaza Bhutto in the 'Whispers of the Desert'.

For Fatima, poetry still touches the subcontinent's young sensitivities despite the proliferation of prose.

"I don't think youngsters are shying away from poetry. Tishani Doshi is a fascinating poet from the subcontinent and is part of a young generation of writers who seem to be able to do both - poetry and prose," Fatima said.

But there is nothing wrong with a focus if there is one on story-telling, Fatima said.

"Remember that for hundreds of years during colonial rule we were not allowed to tell our own stories here in the subcontinent," the writer said.

Fatima is currently writing a book on Karachi. "I am still in very early pages at the moment," she said.

Source: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-09-09/books/30134379_1_fatima-bhutto-poetry-murtaza-bhutto

Fatima Bhutto attacks dynastic politics in Pakistan

2011-09-04T23:56:00.002+05:00

The details can be viewed at the following link:

http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/fatima-bhutto-attacks-dynastic-politics-in-pakistan-131231

Karachi street eats

2011-08-10T11:45:00.002+05:00

One of Pakistan’s most famous daughters, Fatima Bhutto, says her country’s best food is found at the road-side stalls of her home town.

Most of the images the world sees of Pakistan are of political unrest and violence, but this incredibly rich and spirited country is made of so much more than its recent and accursed reputation as a home base for terrorism, corruption and Al Qaeda retirement opportunities. It is a country of myriad languages, ethnicities and religions… and exquisite food.

Karachi is Pakistan’s feistiest city, its most multi-ethnic, its most tolerant, and the capital of its Sufi culture. It’s where the nation’s artists are freest, where the adventurous can mix in a city whose boundaries were always fluid, and where the irreverent can always be assured safe passage. And it’s where you will find some of Pakistan’s best eating.

Sydney may have groovy Argentinean grills and grand art deco steak houses, as I discovered on my recent visit, but Karachi can’t be beat when it comes to its road-side offerings. Let’s call it our version of dude food. There are plenty of restaurants serving fussed-up tikkas and paltry mimics of home-style curries, but to eat well in Karachi you have to head to the streets.

Bun kebab, the jazzed-up Pakistani version of the burger, is the stuff from which food dreams are made: minced meat (most likely mutton) is spiced with black cumin and red chillies, and comes with a fried egg, onions, a coriander and mint chutney spiked with green chillies, and sometimes lentils, all served between charred buns. If red meat isn’t to your liking, you can opt for the vegetarian version, the aloo bun kebab (made of potato, and without the egg), or perhaps a paratha chicken roll. Chicken smeared in ginger, garlic paste, turmeric and mustard is necklaced with pungent white onions and then rolled into an oily and deliciously chewy paratha. It’s impossible to eat just one: order three. At more upscale establishments, these rolls come with modern affectations such as melted cheese, Thai green curry and aïoli. And consider yourself warned: there is a divide between bun kebab and chicken roll aficionados. Only the greedy claim to be both.

Not so hungry? Try the roasted corn, doused with lime juice and red chillies, sold on the cob or in little serving dishes fashioned out of old newspapers. Or perhaps pakoras, dipped into a sweet runny ketchup. These bite-sized vegetables fried in a batter of chickpea flour, coriander seeds, salt, coriander and red chillies are a favourite during the holy month of Ramadan. You can choose potato, okra, onion, spinach… just about anything can be made into a pakora.

Crunchy round golgappas (or pani puris) stuffed with potatoes and chickpeas and floating in liquid flavoured with cumin, black pepper, red chilli powder and tamarind are another city favourite. Karachi’s golgappas are legendary.

If you’ve a sweet tooth, avoid the ghee- and sugar-laden sweets – trust me, most South Asians can’t stomach them either, unless obliged to eat them at weddings and ceremonial functions – and satisfy the need for pudding discerningly.

The pick of the bunch is jalebi, curly fermented knots made from semolina flour and curd, deep-fried until they are golden, then dipped in a sugar and saffron syrup (sometimes rosewater or cardamom are added to the mix). Falsa, a fruit not unlike the blackberry, is great with mango in shakes and juices. And gola gundas (ice slushies), with or without condensed milk, are the perfect summer cooler.

So, what are you waiting for? Make Karachi your next food destination. I’ll see you there – we’ll do lunch.

Source: http://www.gourmettraveller.com.au/Content.aspx?id=10654&mch=snlink&cmp=art_10654

The Artist of Disappearance - reviewed by Fatima Bhutto

2011-08-06T17:53:00.002+05:00

You can find the review at the following

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/a865aa7a-bcf6-11e0-bdb1-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1UFfk6nQO

Why Karachi's violence shouldn't define city by Fatima Bhutto

2011-08-01T20:48:00.002+05:00

Author Fatima Bhutto's latest book is "Songs of Blood and Sword," a memoir of dynasty and politics in Pakistan. She is a member of the Bhutto family: her grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was Pakistan's first democratically elected head of state; her aunt is the late Pakistani premier, Benazir Bhutto. Fatima Bhutto lives and writes in Karachi, Pakistan. Visit her website and follow her on Twitter @fbhutto

Karachi, Pakistan (CNN) -- Karachi has long been the face Pakistan wished to show to the world. The port city, one of the largest cities in the world -- placed sixth or seventh, depending on whom you ask, with a population of more than 18 million -- once represented the ideal of what Pakistan ought to have been.

Karachi was and still is the nation's most ethnically diverse, carrying a reputation for being generously accepting and accommodating; a city that opened its doors to refugees, to migrants, to traders, artists and business communities who sought a harbor from which to connect to the outside shores. With communities as varied as Zoroastrians whose philanthropy built much of the city, Jews at one time, Baha'is and Hindus amongst many others, Karachi is undoubtedly the most religiously tolerant of its fellow cities. But this is no longer the face of Karachi that the world can see.

It is a city now plagued by internecine violence, targeted killings and lawlessness. Karachi has become the battleground, as it always has been, for the country's inept and corrupt political elements. Even though 70% of the total annual tax revenue collected by Pakistan's government comes from Karachi -- the country's stock exchange is here, and it is the commercial pulse of Pakistan -- the government has been content to let the carnage in Karachi fester.

While Karachi, like all big cities, has always had its fair share of crime, the violence here mutates and constantly changes form. At times it is gang-related as it is now, the bloodshed mercilessly fought out between powerful criminal mobs with high-level political patronage from the ruling parties. At other times it has been more outward looking, and embassies and foreign fast-food franchises have been the target of ire against the War on Terror, a war most Pakistanis see as unjust and illegal.

And then there have been brutal suppressions of democratic protests here -- movements against martial law, various dictators and politically oppressive dictates have been cruelly put down by state forces in the city.

But we are not a city that operates under religious extremism. Karachi's violence has nothing to do with Islam, with Islamic fundamentalism or the ugly manifestations of religious violence. In fact, it is a city that in recent years has largely managed to hold itself away from this growing trend. The Danish cartoon riots in the city were less enthusiastic than in other parts of the country. The recent violence against the blasphemy laws was almost totally confined to the Punjab province, and religious parties in Karachi have traditionally been viewed with a mixture of antipathy and disinterest.

It's not Islam. Our violence has to do with politics.

The ruling Pakistan People's Party -- under its current leadership nicknamed the Permanent Plunder Party or the Pakistan People's Problem by the more creatively frustrated -- have been fighting their coalition partners the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, an ethnic Muhajir party based largely in Karachi, almost since the start of their tenure in power.

Just this month, the PPP's senior provincial minister Zulfiqar Mirza fueled deadly protests in Karachi after he attacked the MQM, referring to it as being a party of "criminals, target killers and extortionists." The name-calling prompted the MQM to label the comments as hate speech, and Mirza apologized. A week later it was the MQM that accused Mirza of running "killing brigades," staging a walkout from the National Assembly with the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) in protest. The prime minister has ordered an investigation --- one of the many he has ordered this year in the face of growing outrage over his government's mishandling of the law-and-order situation in Karachi.

Two weeks ago Karachi saw a death toll of some 100 people killed in just about five days, casualties in a turf war waged between activists from political parties. Perhaps one shouldn't be surprised. In the mid-1990s, when the PPP and the MQM last formed a coalition government the two also fought a war on Karachi's streets; some 3,000 people were killed during what's known as "Operation Clean Up."

Meanwhile, the MQM is attacking the Pushtoon-based Awami National Party for control over the city's transport routes, an economic turf war that has been increasingly bloody. When the violence becomes inflamed, as has happened this July, the MQM threatens to walk out of the government, sometimes does, and then duly returns a few days later. And so the cycle continues, although leaders of the three parties met this week and agreed to work toward peace in the city.

The violence, which reared its head in 2008, has seen bodies dumped on roadsides in gunnysacks, riots that paralyze the city, journalists killed, and hundreds upon hundreds of innocents killed and maimed. Political activists saw a high death toll last year; as many as 237 were killed as were 300 other civilians in the city, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has calculated that 1,100 people have been murdered in the first half of this year, a murder rate that matches that of Cuidad Juarez, Mexico's infamously dangerous city caught in a brutal drug war. Juarez, however, has seen its homicides and violent crimes decline in recent months, while ours is escalating.

The Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies claims that overall violence in Karachi last year rose by 288% from the previous year, thanks to sectarian and political violence, crime and lawlessness. The government has responded to the violence by issuing orders for Karachi's paramilitary Ranger forces to shoot on sight armed men. But that's it for political solutions to our city's bloodshed: more bloodshed.

But Karachiites still hold on to a view of their city that is untarnished by this violence. Businesses open their shutters every day and run their trade without electricity -- cut for hours in the hot summer months and hours more in the winter. Couples still stand on Netty Jetty Bridge, built at the time of the Raj to connect the port to the rest of the city and make wishes into the salty sea.

We are aware of the many problems this city must face because we know that this violence doesn't define our city. It is imposed upon us, but it is not of us. Drive around the streets from Saddar to Korangi, and you'll see amongst the ubiquitous political sloganeering painted Urdu paeons to Karachi. This is a survivor's city.

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/07/28/bhutto.karachi/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

Pakistan v. Pakistan: On Anatol Lieven by Fatima Bhutto

2011-06-30T21:32:00.002+05:00

To write a book about Pakistan and give it the subtitle “A Hard Country” is a bit like writing a book on Russia and calling it “Russia: A Cold Country,” or dubbing one on Australia “A Far Away Country.” As Anatol Lieven explains, the accidental author of his book’s subtitle is a landowner-politician in the Sindh province of southern Pakistan. “This is a hard country,” the man told Lieven, a place where anyone not in government needs protection from the police, the courts, the bandits, from practically every corner of society. As Lieven shows, while Pakistan may not be hard to understand, it is a dangerous, fearsome country, a hard place to live and harder still to govern. Besides, “A Hard Country” has a nice ring when you consider that the preliminary title of Lieven’s project was “How Pakistan Works.” That would have made for a very short book.

One could also say that Pakistan, despite having the sixth-largest population in the world, is the most familiar unfamiliar country. Everyone knows why they should be afraid of Pakistan—terrorism, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Asif Zardari (the country’s current president). But good explanations of what any of these menaces mean in a Pakistani context, and how they came to be a part of the nation’s nightmarish social fabric—if indeed they are—are hard to come by. It is a relief that Lieven begins with a calming down, stressing that for all the country’s problems, and contrary to the sensationalism of headline editors in the West, Pakistan is not a failed state. Nor are its problems regional exceptions; insurgencies, rebellions, corruption, autocratic tendencies and inept elites, he reminds us, are rampant throughout southern Asia.

Lieven has written a sensible and thorough exploration of Pakistan’s political sphere—from its politicians, provinces and state structures to the burgeoning Taliban, which are unfairly coming to define the sixty-four-year-old country in Western minds. The terror inflicted on Pakistan by the Taliban, Lieven assures, is a sign not of the group’s strength but its weakness: the surest way to fail at building a mass movement is to kill the people most likely to offer support. Absent institution building, a revolt within military ranks and alliances with popular uprisings, the Taliban are a guerrilla movement operating in a blind alley. Pakistan is not, then, in danger of imploding—not unless the United States allows its disastrous war in Afghanistan to spill over into all of Pakistan, or dispatches the Navy SEALs to kill an Al Qaeda lieutenant living in the country.

Surveying four decades of politicians and their legacies, Lieven is neither exaggerating nor engaging in hyperbole when he says that all of Pakistan’s leaders, whether elected or installed by a military coup, have failed to change the country’s status quo: “Every single one of them found their regimes ingested by the elites they had hoped to displace, and engaged in the same patronage politics as the regimes they had overthrown.” No one is spared from this stinging assessment, and rightly so. When it comes to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Lieven is for the most part fair, if not contradictory. He acknowledges that Bhutto, who founded the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) in 1967 and in 1971 became Pakistan’s first democratically elected head of state, “tried to rally the Pakistani masses behind him with a programme of anti-elitist economic populism, also mixed with Pakistani nationalism.” It was the only time a civilian administration sought to enact radical change. But in retrospect, Lieven explains that Bhutto’s government, which was in power for six years, was more dictatorial than the regimes of Gen. Ayub Khan (who ruled from 1958 to 1969) and Gen. Pervez Musharraf (whose nine-year reign began in 1999). Expanding his powers in defiance of the Constitution, certainly an authoritarian move, was one of many egregious mistakes made by Bhutto during his otherwise popular rule as president and prime minister. Still, Bhutto was no dictator. His mandate came directly from the people, and can’t plausibly be compared to that of Khan or Musharraf, generals who ruled Pakistan according to the pulse of the army barracks and the many defense agreements with the United States.

There are certain errors in Lieven’s discussion of Bhutto’s career that demand clarification, and the fault for them lies perhaps not with Lieven alone. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was an overwhelming figure in Pakistan’s political landscape, and great myths, both laudatory and vengeful, have clustered around his name (Zulfikar was my grandfather). The first of Lieven’s foggy claims is that for some time after Bhutto’s execution in 1979, the PPP was headed by Gen. Tikka Khan, who led the army’s notorious campaign of violence in East Pakistan during the 1971 war of secession, and soon thereafter directed the bloody suppression of separatists in Baluchistan. Unfortunately, there is no denying that Tikka Khan belonged to the PPP, which should have sought his trial for war crimes rather than admit him to its ranks; nevertheless, it was during Benazir Bhutto’s leadership of the PPP in the mid-’80s, not during Zulfikar’s, that Tikka Khan held the position of secretary general.

When discussing the pre-1971 division of Pakistan into east and west wings separated by thousands of kilometers of hostile Indian territory, Lieven is too quick to excuse the army for its role in the impasse that broke the country. Pakistan was led by one military dictator, Gen. Ayub Khan, when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of the Awami League presented his six points for the secession of the east, and by another, Gen. Yahya Khan, when the country was divided. Lieven softens the military’s role in Pakistan’s breakup by blaming Bhutto, the winner of the elections in the west (Rahman swept the east), for the deadlock that led to the creation of Bangladesh. He does not note that the Hamoodur Rehman Commission’s report on the breakup of Pakistan, commissioned in 1971 and completed in 1974, has never been released in an uncensored form. Western historians tend to place the blame on Bhutto and Rehman without recognizing that when it comes to Bangladesh, the state’s role in the violence, both political and military, was ultimately and ferociously determined by the armed forces.

The third foggy claim is that Bhutto’s radical measures in the field of nationalization were not fully implemented. Lieven states that Bhutto’s “socialist finance minister Mubashir Hasan had wanted the nationalization of urban land, and the collectivization of agriculture—something that would have led to counter-revolution and bloody civil war across the country.” (More generally, Lieven calls Bhutto’s economic policy “disastrous.”) I put the claim to Hasan, a founding member of the PPP who lives in Lahore and remains active in politics. “The question of nationalizing urban land never passed through the mind of the party,” Hasan told me in an e-mail. Lieven misunderstands a “Punjab law, not a Pakistan law, which permitted acquisition of land in urban areas for the purpose of housing and also for the acquisition of slum land which could then be handed over in ownership to the occupants. The whole thing arose because there were 120 slums in Lahore with a population of over a million. Urban landlords owning the slums were exacting high rent under duress. They also owned large areas of Lahore lying vacant in the midst of very high population density. In both cases, compensation was paid, though the rate of compensation was less than market price.”

Post-Bhutto, Lieven leads the reader through a lineup of the usual suspects: the military; Benazir Bhutto, who became the head of her father’s PPP in 1984, presided over two governments and was assassinated in 2007; and Nawaz Sharif, twice prime minister and the leader of the Punjabi-based Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), or PML(N), the second-largest national party in the country. Nawaz Sharif and his younger brother Shahbaz own the Ittefaq group, one of Pakistan’s largest and most prominent business conglomerates, whose large industrial portfolio includes steel and textile mills. Lieven is circumspect in his accounts of them all. He is not seduced by the glamour and “like us”–ness of Benazir Bhutto, who was educated at Harvard and Oxford and spoke English with a cut-glass accent. Correctly, he criticizes Benazir for making vain concessions to Islamists in a desperate attempt to mollify Islamic parties, which at the time—in the mid-1990s (and, as Lieven notes, until 9/11)—were woefully unpopular. Bhutto set in motion the appeasement process with Islamist groups by granting the administration of the Malakand region the right to incorporate Sharia law into its justice process; she also recognized the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Lieven suggests that she was carrying on a family tradition. Her father, a secular politician, banned alcohol and gambling in Pakistan to appease Islamists.

When it comes to the ethnic Muhajir Muttahida Quami Mahaz (MQM) party, whose hypervigilant cadres, tireless press offices and technological expertise arguably have made it Pakistan’s best-organized party, Lieven is careful to contrast its well-groomed image of being Pakistan’s only so-called secular party with its violent and thuggish past. Based in Karachi, the party “built up a powerful armed wing” in the 1980s that targeted militants from other parties and “journalists and others who dared to criticize the MQM in public,” Lieven writes. “Torture chambers were established for the interrogation of captured enemies.” Nor does he mince his words when it comes to Pakistan’s current president, Benazir Bhutto’s merry widower, Asif Zardari, under whose leadership the PPP has enjoyed many new sobriquets, the Permanent Plunder Party being the best of them.

The PPP’s assertion that it is a party of the poor and powerless is contradicted not only by evidence of its orgiastic corruption over the past twenty years (John Burns of the New York Times wrote the seminal condemnation of the first couple’s venality in 1998) but also by the high-level federal ministers and politicians from its ranks whose hands have been dirtied in honor-killing cases. The cases Lieven describes are infamous in Pakistan but rarely discussed outside the country, which is perhaps understandable considering how deeply the United States and Britain are invested in maintaining the power and stability of the ruling party.

In a case from 2008, three teenage girls from Baluchistan were sentenced to death by a tribal jirga for trying to marry men of their own choosing. Two female relatives of the girls tried to intercede and were shot. The three girls were shot and buried while still alive. Sardar Israrullah Zehri, a local chieftain and senator with the PPP, sided with the girls’ killers: “These are centuries-old traditions, and I will continue to defend them.” As a reward for his candor, Zehri was appointed minister of posts. In another case, Abid Husain Jatoi, also a local chieftain, presided over a jirga that condemned to death a girl from the Jatoi tribe who had eloped with a boy from another tribe. For this verdict Jatoi was appointed provincial minister of fisheries and livestock. (The regional high court ended up interceding to protect the couple.) In a third case, the PPP’s federal education minister, Mir Hazar Khan Bijrani, was charged by the country’s Supreme Court for his role in settling a dispute between two families by ordering a marriage swap—the guilty family had to hand over five girls to the aggrieved family. The eldest of the girls was 6; the youngest was 2. None of these politicians, all of whom hold senior government posts, have been expelled from the PPP or reprimanded in any way.

Lieven criticizes the Sharif clan and its PML(N) for their Punjabi chauvinism, a criticism much made in Pakistan but less so in the West, where the main worry about the Sharifs is their affection for the Saudis. In March 2010, Shahbaz Sharif, the province’s chief minister and the brains behind the Sharif operations, publicly beseeched the Taliban not to attack Punjab. The rest of Pakistan was fair game, he offered, but because the PML(N) opposed many of General Musharraf’s policies (while remaining schtum on the “war on terror”), and could therefore be seen as “fighting for the same cause” as the Taliban, Punjab should be treated as an ally of the Taliban. (When Senator John Kerry came to Pakistan in February to lobby for the release of Raymond Davis, the CIA operative who shot two Pakistanis in the middle of Lahore, he met Shahbaz Sharif’s brother. Nawaz Sharif greeted his guest as “Senator Kerry Lugar,” confusing the senator with the bill passed in 2009 that directs billions of dollars in nonmilitary aid to Pakistan. Sharif did not call him “Senator Kerry Lugar Bill.” One should be thankful for small graces, I suppose.) The charge sheet that Lieven compiles on the Sharifs, who came to prominence under the mentorship of Pakistan’s fundamentalist dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq, who ruled from 1977 to 1988, resembles the one he pins on Benazir Bhutto: encouraging monumental graft, presiding over killings carried out by the state’s security agencies, packing courts and sacking judges who don’t toe the party line, and acquiescing to Islamist parties and their demands.

The only public figure who impressed Lieven during the eight years he spent reporting and researching his book is the police surgeon of Baluchistan, a 58-year-old Pathan grandmother named Shamim Gul. Gul travels around Baluchistan at night without a police escort, exhuming rotting corpses from ditches and examining them in ad hoc morgues. In a province like Baluchistan, where extrajudicial killings are common, the dead are left unreported, their missing corpses warnings to the living. (It was Gul who discovered the bodies of the three girls sentenced to death by tribal jirga in 2008.) That Lieven does not focus more on Pakistanis like Gul, a citizen who manages to survive with a pronounced sense of dignity and justice, suggests that he is interested only in looking at Pakistan as a hard country.

When it comes to assessing the legacy of those lacking any sense of justice, Pakistan’s pantheon of dictators, Lieven weaves through the assortment deftly, though perhaps a little generously. He finds it striking “how mild” Pakistan’s dictators have been by historical standards. Lieven credits Gen. Ayub Khan with removing “the ‘Islamic’ label from the official name of the Republic of Pakistan.” However, he was not as steadfast a secular reformer as Lieven suggests. While he did omit “Islamic” from the name of the republic under the 1962 “Constitution,” to use the word very loosely, he had it begin in the name of Allah and affirm that “sovereignty over the entire Universe belongs to Almighty Allah.” It goes on to say that “Pakistan would be a democratic State based on Islamic principles of social justice,” and that “the principles of democracy…as enunciated by Islam, shall be fully observed in Pakistan.” Most bizarre, Lieven says that the Islamicization undertaken by Gen. Zia ul-Haq “proved generally superficial.” Yet it was under the Wahhabi-inspired dictator that the country’s bloody blasphemy laws were enacted, along with the Hudood ordinances, violent laws against women that treat adultery and premarital intercourse as crimes punishable by death. The ordinances were “revised” once, in 2006, with the passage of General Musharraf’s Women’s Protection Bill, which struck the clause stipulating that for rape to be considered a crime before a court of law, four good male Muslims must have witnessed the alleged act. The 2006 bill was an eye-wash of the draconian laws because it has been virtually impossible to implement in police stations across the country.

Lieven is impartial when discussing Musharraf, who painstakingly cultivated an image of himself as a “dictator-lite.” He points to Musharraf’s oddly munificent opening of the media through the granting of television licenses (by 2009 there were more than eighty privately run TV channels, twelve of which were devoted exclusively to the news, and only five of which were devoted to evangelical-style religious programming). He notes the political devolution Musharraf undertook by granting more power to local elected bodies, an arrangement the Zardari government was quick to dismantle. But Lieven makes little mention of how under Musharraf some 10,000 people were disappeared in Baluchistan, according to the estimates of human rights groups, and in the same manner that people were disappeared in Latin America during the dirty wars. Covetous of the province’s rich gas fields (copper mines are now its prized resource) and wary of its secessionist politics and fervently anti-military history, the Musharraf dictatorship struck at Baluchistan with brute force, its most daring act being the army’s alleged assassination of the renowned Baluch tribal leader Akbar Bugti in 2006. In the last eight months, the bullet-ridden and mutilated bodies of 150 missing Baluch activists have been found around the province. This too is perhaps a part of the legacy of what Musharraf touted as his program of “enlightened moderation.”

Though his study of Pakistan’s military despots is at times forgiving, Lieven shines an unsparing light on the workings of Pakistan’s military, one of the largest in the world. He analyzes the institution not simply as an army or as a gang of power brokers but as a corporation. Through its Fauji Foundation the army has a hand in many profitable enterprises, including cement, cereal, banking and real estate. Lieven collates astounding figures—for example, in the 1980s, at the height of the US adventure against the Soviets in Afghanistan, Pakistan allocated 60 percent of its federal budget to military spending—and transposes them onto historical complexities, easily explaining context that is otherwise murky. Those who wonder how the army and nefarious Inter-Services Intelligence became so powerful need to look only as far back as the 1980s and the first American escapade in Afghanistan. Unlike so many foreign pundits, Lieven does not appear confused by the military’s inability to fight its own people as required by the dictates of the US “war on terror.” “We are being ordered to launch a Pakistani civil war for the sake of America,” a Pakistani officer told Lieven in 2002. “Why on earth should we? Why should we commit suicide for you?” While it’s true that the United States has enthusiastically propped up every one of Pakistan’s four military dictators, Lieven points out that “US administrations have no preference for military government or indeed any kind of government in Pakistan as long as that government does what the US wants.” Lieven is possibly the first non-Pakistani I’ve read who connects these glaring dots.

Although parts of Lieven’s work are reminiscent of textbooks that offer instructive though dull education, those about the structures of the Pakistani state and the Taliban are cogent, clear and illuminating. From the outset, Lieven stresses that for all its problems, Pakistan is not on the verge of collapse. It is beleaguered by many problems, but “Islamist extremism in Pakistan presents little danger of overthrowing the state unless US pressure has already split and crippled that state.” The Taliban were not formed in a day, and some of the underlying causes of their emergence in Pakistan include corruption, political vacuums, incompetent politicians and capitulation to a war that most Pakistanis see as unjust and tailored to the national security prerogatives of the United States.

Before discussing the Taliban and broaching the matter of their increasing popularity, Lieven tackles the question of the inaccessibility of justice in Pakistan. He raised the subject with Imran Aslam, the president of Geo TV and an excellent guide to the country; Aslam is someone more pundits and hacks should seek out instead of the usual assortment of politicians with foreign passports well versed in singing for their supper (the Washington Post has a direct line to this crew). “Ask ordinary people here about democracy,” Aslam told Lieven, “and they can’t really explain it; but ask them about justice, and they understand it well, because unlike democracy issues of justice are a part of their daily lives. Also, a sense of justice comes from Islam—a third of the names of God have something to do with justice, fairness, harmony or balance. Issues of electoral democracy have no necessary relation to this, because in Pakistan electoral democracy has little to do with the will of ordinary workers.” As an example, Lieven reports that as of spring 2009, there were more than 100,000 cases pending before the 110 judges of the Karachi city courts alone. Theoretically, some courts are supposed to hear 100 cases a day.

The scarcity of civilian justice makes the Taliban an attractive and viable legal option. They police towns, enforcing their own harsh version of law and order and providing legal mediation that, though often brutal, is seen as quick and fair. Lieven quotes a farmer in the northern region of the country who proclaims, “Taleban justice is better than that of the Pakistani state. If you have any problem, you can go to the Taleban and they will solve it without you having to pay anything—not like the courts and police, who will take your money and do nothing.” Even if the state courts did rule on cases, the difference between their verdicts and those of the Taliban would in certain cases be slight. For the past three decades Pakistan has had federal laws on the books that would put to death a woman who commits adultery. So would the Taliban, but they would execute the law faster. The Taliban also run madrassas in regions where there are no government schools (there are thousands of such voids) and operate mobile medical vans during times of urgent need, such as the devastating 2010 floods. State hospitals lack the funds, equipment and capability to provide adequate medical care.

Lieven’s account of this newly indigenous Taliban is sturdy and insightful. He explores the history of the Taliban and the army, which supported and propped up the Afghan Taliban during their infancy. In a particularly strong section, he describes the revolt in the Swat Valley in 2007, when a local autonomous group of Islamists marching under the banner of the Taliban took control of the region. Lieven explains that the state initially turned a blind eye to the valley’s Islamist elements; it decided to oppose them only when advantage could be gained by condemning the very situation it had let fester for so long. He talks with those Pakistanis, mostly poor, who have benefited from Taliban rule and therefore support and perpetuate it; and he talks with the lower-middle-class traders, farmers and merchants caught in the middle of a failed establishment and the Taliban. He does not speak to nervy Lahori socialites or businessmen in Islamabad who live in bubbles that have kept them from encountering Islamists in the flesh, though they are eager to sound the alarm over political Islam’s imminent takeover.

Pakistan is a large subject, and an unforgivingly complicated one at that, yet Lieven manages to tackle some of its most obscure problems without losing his cool. Aside from a few stray moments—including an ill-advised confession of wishing he possessed the powers of Gen. Sir Charles Napier, the Raj commander in chief in India (Karachi remembers Sir Charles Napier in its red-light district, helpfully located on the street that bears his name)—he doesn’t treat Pakistanis like curios. Lieven has written a very measured book, no easy task when writing about such a hard country.

Source: http://www.thenation.com/article/161723/pakistan-v-pakistan-anatol-lieven?page=0,0

JOINING THE DOTS

2011-06-25T14:37:00.000+05:00

Faiza Butt fuses ancient art and modern mores

By Fatima Bhutto

Faiza Butt came of age during Pakistan’s most barbarous period of military dictatorship, when General Zia-ul-Haq’s hyper-fundamentalist junta deemed women, minorities and artists to be threats to the nation. But rather than bow to his newly imposed norms of “decency”, the Lahore National College of Arts and Slade-trained artist decided to make her living fighting back, through what dictators would consider decidedly indecent images. Butt trains her critical eye on subjects as diverse as the global capitalist economy, Afghan jihadis, Eminem, ex-mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani, homoerotically oiled-to-the-gills pehlwan wrestlers, despots, Guantánamo Bay innocents and John Travolta, to create intricate portraits full of depths and shadows using the purdukht style – the infinitesimal dots of Indian miniatures of centuries past. Now based in Britain, a place she sees as not so dissimilar to Saudi Arabia – “They’re both kingdoms” – Butt draws much of her inspiration and ire from the country of her birth. When, not long ago, it was reported that the new, indigenous branch of the Taliban was targeting Pakistani barbershops to scare men away from shaving off holy-looking facial hair, Butt connected the dots to create a portrait of two turbanned Talib, face to face and lip to lip. It was an attack on the cloned image of the self they were promoting, she explained. Was it a Talib kissing his reflection in the mirror, then, or two bearded men locked in a passionate snog? “It’s strange how Freud associated homosexuality with narcissism,” Butt reflects. “It’s questionable, I suppose.” Another pair of Talib, effeminately handsome with their kohl-lined eyes and burly physiques, hold hands in the middle of a framework of pistols, flags, hairdryers and the cosmos. Faiza Butt makes me proud to be Pakistani. There, I said it.

Source: http://www.tankmagazine.com/magazine/culture/joining-the-dots-2189

Father's Day POSTED BY CARL BROMLEY 6:28AM

2011-06-20T22:57:00.002+05:00

Part of what captivates about Fatima Bhutto's memoir Songs of Blood and Sword is her portrait of her father, Murtaza Bhutto. Murtaza was the oldest son of the President and formerPrime minister of Pakistan Zulfikar Ali Bhuttoand a formidable political activist in his own right, who, after the execution of his father by General Zia, led the resistance to the Zia's rule from abroad, first in Afghanistan, then in Syria. When he ultimately returned to Pakistan and became a member of parliament, he was a tough critic of the cronyism and corruption of his sister, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.Songs of Blood and Sword vividly captures the high politics of both the Bhutto family and the era but it is Fatima's quest to uncover the mystery of her father's life and death that is the heart of her book.

Reading Songs of Blood and Sword one realizes there was more to Murtaza than just a father; he was a best friend to her, a mischievous co-conspirator. One of the riches of this book are small but delightful vignettes where she recalls the diplomacies and negotiations between parent and child. There's one awfully poignant moment when a nine-year-old Fatima rages at him when he dumks her in a hotel swimming pool — this was a prank he seemed to delight in doing — and says that he can never do that to her, ever again. Under protest she relents and says he can only do it again when she is fourteen. She recounts:

Papa's laughter petered out and he surprised me by saying, somewhat softly, "But Fatushki, what if I'm not alive then?:
I burst into floods of tears. Here I was trying to reach a compromise, banning pool dunkings till the reasonable age of fourteen and there was Papa talking about his death. I bawled and bawled. He sat me down on his lap, soaking wet and ruining his silk suit, hugging me and rocking me back and forth. He didn't take it back. He didn't say he was just kidding. He just wiped my eyes.
In between my tears, I shouted at my father. "Fourteen isn't far. Of course you'll be alive. You have to live till I'm a hundred." I wiped my nose on his shoulder. Papa kissed me and continued to rock me. "I hope so" He said.

Murtaza was murdered when Fatima was fourteen, outside her home in Clifton, Karachi, on September 20, 1996, in what was euphemistically called a "police encounter" during his sister's premiership, a murder that Songs and Blood and Sword goes to compelling and convincing length to argue that her aunt Benazir and her Uncle Asif Ali Zardari (now president of Pakistan) were involved in.

On father's day, we publish an except from Songs of Blood and Sword where Fatima recounts the pain and ordeal of having to visit her father in prison, when he was jailed by Benazir. Fatima was eleven.

Visiting Papa in Prison
By Fatima Bhutto

We made the trip to Landhi jail to see Papa once a week. I remember it being midweek, Wednesday or Thursday. It took us forty-five minutes to get to Landhi from our school, which was near Karachi's Jinnah Airport. Our visits began at 4 pm sharp, if we were held up in traffic or for some reason delayed, the time started without us. We couldn't have a minute longer than the forty-five given to us once a week.

During the first few trips, I'd ask, beg, for a few more minutes with Papa. He wouldn't ask. He knew that his warden, Durrani, who was kind and accommodating, would lose his job if it was discovered that he was treating Murtaza Bhutto too well. So I would ask. Could we have one more minute please? The warden would bow his head, unable to grant my request, and shake his face from side to side without looking at me. It wasn't his fault, I knew that, but I had to ask. What damage would an additional sixty seconds do? I remembered, in those minutes, those head shaking minutes, Wadi's [Benazir's] descriptions in her book of how she was torn from her father, from Zulfikar, when he was spending his last days in Rawalpindi Jail. Why didn't she remember that? I used to stay up late at night thinking, why was she punishing us the way she had been punished herself?

It bore away at my heart to have only forty-five minutes a week with my father. Mummy assures me we only had forty minutes a week with Papa, I don't remember. Five minutes extra seems generous to me now, three hundred glorious seconds, so I add them on. We couldn't speak on the telephone there were no mobile phones around then, and even if there had been, Papa would not have been allowed to keep one. I had grown up with my father being my sole property until the age of seven, I couldn't handle not sharing my day with him, not having him nearby to listen to jokes or check my homework. It was too much for the eleven-year-old me to handle.

So I wrote Papa a letter on my adolescent stationery, the kind printed on day-glo paper and covered with unicorns and rainbows. "For Papa: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY" I wrote on the envelope. I spent two pages wailing and moaning. It wasn't fair that Mummy got to see him in court when I was at school, I whinged. I offered, quite creatively, to miss school on the days when Papa had court appearances or Sindh Assembly meetings, which always met in the mornings and during the week. He wrote back and marked his own plain white envelope: "To Papy from Papa". The top right hand corner had PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL underlined in all capitals and on the bottom left FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, also underlined.

"Dear Fatima (frustrated) Bhutto," he wrote, instantly making me laugh. My little darling, I read your letter and sympathize with your complaint. You have every right to see me and be with me as much as possible. And you know that nothing gives me greater pleasure than to see you, be next to you and to hold you in my arms. But, because I love you so much I want to make sure that you get your full education. You are a brilliant child and will one day become famous in your own right. But that won't be possible without a complete education. Grandpapa used to say that you can take everything away from a person homes, money, jewelry but you cannot take away what is in the mind. That is the safest treasure. If my court meets on Saturday then I would be more than happy if you came. When I am free from this jail where Wadi has put me then we will again be virtually inseparable. Until then, and forever, I love you and adore you more than you can imagine. Love Papa. P.S Papy, you know when you were much younger you already had a natural talent for poetry. I still have in Damascus one lovely (and funny) poem you wrote about Mummy about 2 or 3 years ago. And the poem you read me recently (during your last exclusive visit) was beautiful. Here is a small one on Wadi and Slippery Joe [Asif Zadari]:

Inky, Pinky, Ponky

Her husband is a donkey

Both loot the country

Her husband is a monkey

Inky, Pinky, Ponky"

From then on, buoyed by my father's letter and his efforts to make me laugh and look at the bright side of our strange life, I reconciled myself to counting the minutes until Papa was released from jail, but resolved to make the most of our miserly time together.

Soon, the jail visits became a normal part of our bizarre lives. We would always arrive full of jitters and sit in the empty cement room, which was unpainted and grim but at least cool in Karachi's repressive heat and open the tiffin boxes we'd packed with food to share with Papa. Mummy and Zulfi both ate earlier in the day, small meals so they'd have room for another later, but I'd starve in school so I could have lunch with Papa at 4 pm.

We sat on wooden chairs that would have seemed uncomfortable if we weren't so thrilled to be there and put the food and plates out on the rectangular table covered with a gingham plastic tablecloth, waiting anxiously to see Papa. Zulfi and I would stand at the window until we could make out Papa being escorted across the dusty prison yard at which point we'd bolt out of the room to run to him. The warden would always smile when he saw us and would pat Zulfi's head affectionately.

Zulfi would often sit on Papa's lap during our visits and would get his father's undivided attention whenever he spoke; he was going to be four years old and was already a chatty and clever young boy. Sometimes Papa would ask us to bring Kashmiri tea. He never drank tea or coffee, but he liked Kashmiri chai, a strange drink of coagulated pink tea, flavoured with spices and pistachios. I never cared for it much then, but I always had a cup. Now I can't drink it. It reminds me too much of those forty-five minutes.

Source: http://www.nationinstitute.org/blog/nationbooks/2239/father's_day/

An Hour With Fatima Bhutto

2011-06-08T07:56:00.000+05:00

Fatima Bhutto w/ Treasa Dunworth
Auckland Writers & Readers Festival | May 14

THE NAMES MARCH DOWN the book’s cover in bold white print: “Granddaughter to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, executed 1979. Niece to Shahnawaz Bhutto, murdered 1985. Daughter of Mir Murtaza Bhutto, assassinated 1996. Niece to Benazir Bhutto, assassinated 2007.”

But when Fatima Bhutto took the stage at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, casual in jeans and a loose white blouse, she seemed determined to resist that introduction. “It’s not on my business card, actually, who I’m related to,” she joked. “You could just say Writer.”

It’s a fitting contrast. Fatima’s memoir Songs of Blood and Sword is a political history of the Bhutto dynasty in Pakistan, but it is also an expression of grief and an act of political defiance. In promoting the book, she is attempting to tear down the myths and deceptions that have defined her family for the last four decades.

The book recounts the history of the Bhuttos’ rise to power, summarising the wars with India over Kashmir, the development of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme, the election of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as prime minister, the military coup by General Zia ul-Haq and the aftermath of Zulfikar’s execution.

Family documents and interviews with political colleagues shine new light on the power struggles between Zulfikar’s children after his death, as Murtaza and Shahnawaz plotted armed resistance against General Zia from Afghanistan and Benazir declared herself the political heir to the Bhutto legacy. Fatima doesn’t hesitate to accuse Benazir and her widower President Zardari of orchestrating Murtaza’s assassination, which she remembers in gut-wrenching detail in the opening and closing chapters.

At the same time, Fatima retraces her journey to gather up the scattered memories of her father’s life. The book chronicles the four years she spent studying old diaries and newspaper clippings, writing letters, collecting photographs, and travelling through Pakistan, Europe and America to speak with old friends and lovers. Writing Murtaza’s story allowed her to reconnect with the father she lost and discover the idealistic young man he once was.

“Bedtime stories were also about exile; they were also about dictatorships. I knew words like ‘junta’ in the first grade.”

At the festival, Fatima talked with Treasa Dunworth about her memories of Murtaza when they were living in Damascus. “He was a wonderful parent because it wasn’t just fun and games,” she said. “He also taught me about where I was and what had happened to Pakistan. Bedtime stories were also about exile; they were also about dictatorships. I knew words like ‘junta’ in the first grade, and I thought other children knew them but they didn’t.”

Growing up, her political awareness was heavily influenced by the populist ideals of her grandfather Zulfikar. “He was a part of the great promise for the country,” she said, acknowledging that he strayed from many of those ideals when he became prime minister. (Treasa suggested a parallel with President Obama, drawing a short laugh from Fatima.)

“The Bhuttos started politically as being very leftist and very socialist, about endogenous economic development and bilateral foreign relations, all these things that make young nations proud. And then somewhere along the line they went the other way and became sort of corporate and almost right-wing about where money went and how it was used, if in fact it was ever used.”

Her opinions of her family and of Pakistan have only been reinforced by her liberal education and the geopolitical events of the last decade. “I was in my second year of university in New York when 9/11 happened, and I was about to start work on my Master’s dissertation in London when 7/7 happened,” she remarked. “It’s amazing they let me through airports.”

Though she seems to rule out a career as a politician, Fatima is an outspoken critic of President Zardari and his exploitation of the Bhutto name. She explained that this one of the reasons she wrote such a revealing book. “We’re still living in their shadows in Pakistan; we still live based on how people think of them. The last elections that happened, I did a lot of door-to-door work. This woman said to me, ‘I’m voting for Benazir.’ And I said, ‘But she’s gone, she’s not here anymore.’ She said ‘Yes, you’re right, but I always voted for Bhutto.’ I said ‘Why?’ and she said ‘I don’t know. I just always did.’”

Fatima is also relentless in her censure of the United States for their interference in Pakistani politics since the Cold War, whether through defence agreements like SEATO and CENTO or developmental aid packages like the Kerry-Lugar Act of 2009, which provides $7.5 billion to Pakistan over five years.

“The list of conditions of what Pakistan has to do to get this money is humiliating to the extreme,” she said. “Richard Holbrooke, when he was still with us, used to come to Pakistan every three to six weeks just to check in on us and make sure we were doing what we were supposed to be doing. When the Kerry-Lugar bill started to become public, Pakistanis were very upset: ‘How can you impose these conditions on us to give us money? We don’t want it.’ He said, ‘Those who speak against this bill are against democracy.’ It sounded so… Bushian, if that can be a word.”

“Richard Holbrooke said, ‘Those who speak against this bill are against democracy.’ It sounded so… Bushian, if that can be a word.”

Less than two weeks after Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, the discussion seemed especially relevant. During the Q&A session, Fatima pointed out that the mainstream press were largely ignoring the fact that America is allowed to launch kill and capture operations on Pakistani soil whenever it likes. “Instead of talking about that,” she said, “we can’t turn around for stories of what Osama kept in his bedside table and what kind of videos he watched online and how many cricket balls were lost over the wall of his compound.”

It’s the latest in a long list of conflicting narratives that she grapples with in her political writing. There is the corrupt, paranoid government from the recent headlines of the War on Terror; and then there is Fatima’s Pakistan, a young nation fighting for true democracy. There is Benazir Bhutto the tragic icon, honoured and mourned as the first woman elected to lead a Muslim country; and then there is the power-hungry Benazir who colluded with Western powers and wore a hijab to curry favour with religious extremists.

The tension between the different roles Fatima plays—family member, witness, activist, journalist, historian—is the most compelling thing about Songs of Blood and Sword. Her powerful storytelling can make her life seem like a cross between a legend and a political thriller, but she leaves no illusions about the violence that tore her family apart. It gives her a perspective that can be challenged but must be considered.

Source: http://lumiere.net.nz/index.php/an-hour-with-fatima-bhutto/

The Diary: Fatima Bhutto

2011-06-04T07:41:00.002+05:00

After an epic journey I reach Auckland airport – and find I have arrived ahead of my luggage. The carousel, which has a sign advising us to take care while “uplifting” our cases, seems to mock those of us who have nothing to uplift at all. Luggage-less, I go shopping for emergency clothing and find merino wool isn’t the only local fashion export. Possum fur and possum wool is just as popular. I examine possum socks, hats, and shawls and consider whether possum gloves would be an appropriate gift for my environmentally conscious brother, but decide against.

I have come to New Zealand to take part in the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival. Seven authors have been asked to talk unscripted for seven minutes on anything to do with “the alphabet”. I speak about illiteracy in Pakistan and an Afghan refugee school on the outskirts of Karachi. A friend and I have raised some money to buy second-hand computers for the children. Several people from the audience ask how they might get in touch with the school – unsurprising, as I found New Zealanders to be among the warmest people in the world.

Reunited with my luggage, the rest of my five days in Auckland are a pleasant whirlwind. My greatest accomplishment is honing a Kiwi accent. I pick it up enthusiastically and start to say “Yis” to everything. My other favourites include “idge” (edge) and “bid” (bed) and I’m convinced I could soon be mistaken for a local. By a foreigner, it goes without saying.

. . .

Travelling so soon after Osama bin Laden’s killing in Pakistan means that I am asked on an hourly basis – by airport officials, taxi drivers, and complete strangers – just what Pakistan knew about the world’s (formerly) most wanted man’s decision to choose our country for his retirement. As a Pakistani, they suggest, I must have known something, surely? No, I counter wearily, we were not all sent a memo. We are not all bin Laden aficionados. Some of us are more concerned with the unrecorded number of civilian deaths in Pakistan from unmanned US drone strikes than with the conspiracy-laden killing of one man.

Pakistan is at present pleading ignorance – the military acknowledged intelligence shortcomings regarding bin Laden and in a statement put out in the week after the killing reminded everyone that it was their unparalleled “cooperation” that has led to more al-Qaeda captures in Pakistan than any other country – which sounds like an incriminating thing to be bragging about. Meanwhile, apart from an article in the Washington Post (unsurprisingly, a paper which doesn’t have many subscribers in Pakistan), president Asif Ali Zardari has been quiet on the subject.

Writing in the US magazine The Nation, Jeremy Scahill mentioned a so-called “hot pursuit” agreement signed between Pakistan’s former president Pervez Musharraf and General Stanley McChrystal, American’s former commander in Afganistan, which allows US Special Operations Forces to conduct targeted assassinations and capture operations on Pakistani soil with the stipulation that Pakistan reserves the right to deny that they opened up their country to allow the Americans to do so. A sort of hear no evil, see no evil policy, if you will. This seems to me an issue worth focusing on, though unsurprisingly no one appears that keen. Though Pakistan has denied such an agreement exists it might make some sense of the government’s Mr Magoo-like response to bin Laden’s killing and also the fact that a month on, America – purportedly very angry that Obama was found holed up in Abbottabad – has yet to issue sanctions against Pakistan, freeze assets or cut aid (not even a dollar so far) and why President Obama and Hillary Clinton continue to issue reassuring statements about the “important” relationship between the two countries.

. . .

Enveloped by a cloud of jet lag, I press on to the Sydney Writers’ Festival, where the organisers have asked me to speak about “Pakistan: Nation on the verge of a Nervous Breakdown”. It is, I argue, a universal condition. Which country isn’t having a nervous breakdown? France, for example, deserves a special award for having a president who takes advice on Libya from Bernard-Henri Lévy.

It is a great honour to be asked to deliver an opening address but I really came to Sydney because the festival people told me AA Gill would be here, too. I’m the self-appointed number one fan of his travel writing. As well as Gill, I meet chef and writer Anthony Bourdain, Booker prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson, biographer Carolyn Burke, and Izzeldin Abuelaish, the Gazan doctor who lost three of his daughters in an Israeli attack in 2009 and now works to promote peace. The opportunity to meet such wonderful and interesting people reminds me, through the jet lag, why I love literary festivals.

. . .

At a panel about 9/11 – I am there as the Pakistani terror expert, obviously – the audience erupts with the resounding voices of “truthers”, those excitable types who believe that the war on terror, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and everything else that shapes politics today was cooked up with the help of fake film footage. A granny wearing a delightful salmon cardigan and neatly ironed pink trousers informs us that a “Hollywood director who is a close personal friend” of hers had been hired to direct Osama bin Laden’s videos, while a gentleman wearing tracksuit bottoms – who becomes something of a cult figure during the festival by disrupting almost every talk – films himself on his camera phone while screaming “9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB!” It takes a petite festival volunteer five minutes to wrest a microphone from him.

The highlight of the trip (aside from AA Gill, of course) is a panel I am on with Ingrid Betancourt, the former Colombian presidential candidate who spent six years as a hostage of the guerrilla organisation Farc – and the writer Aminatta Forna, whose politician father was executed in Sierra Leone. These are two incredible women whose countries mirror mine in the sadness of their modern histories, and whose experiences are profoundly inspiring.

r my environmentally conscious brother, but decide against.

Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e615e3ea-8d52-11e0-bf23-00144feab49a.html#axzz1OFGV5Ci7

Globetrotter: Fatima Bhutto

2011-05-22T19:27:00.002+05:00

Writer, journalist, activist, indeed there is more to Fatima Bhutto than just a famous surname. We pulled out some notes from her travel diary.

1. Last holiday
I spent two weeks in Brazil last September. I began with Rio de Janeiro and did all the thrilling touristy things.

2. A book or film that gave you a new insight to a city
Two in fact. Bad Times in Buenos Aires, a book by Miranda France, is of course about the vibrant Argentine capital. An Iranian film, The Lizard, is a hilarious portrayal of the privileges the clergy enjoy in Iran.

3. A destination you did on a shoestring budget
Cuba. I went as a journalist ahead of the 50th anniversary of the Revolution. Once I was through with work, two of my best friends joined me and we travelled from Havana to Trinidad and then to Santa Clara for a bit of a Che Guevara pilgrimage.

4. Most extravagant holiday
Oddly, it wasn't exactly a holiday but attending the Ubud Literary Festival in Bali was heavenly.'

5. A souvenir you've just picked up
I don't pick up souvenirs as such, but everywhere I go, I send a postcard to my brother Zulfi.

6. Three things you carry to make travel comfortable
A travel pillow; my notebook; a scarf--I'm always cold!

7. A destination that pleasantly surprised you
Stockholm. I thought it would be mind-numbingly boring, but it turned out to be quite radical.

8. Most overrated city/sight/experience
Marrakech. Everything in the city, from its food markets to its donkey carts, is too touristy for my liking.

Fatima's travel wishlist:
Argentina: Colourful, energetic... This country has very positive vibes.
Colombia: I guess I have to attribute it to a South American fixation.
South Africa: It is one of the places left over from my original wishlist.

Source: http://in.news.yahoo.com/globetrotter--fatima-bhutto.html

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Fatima Bhutto Written by: Fancy Goods

2011-05-20T20:58:00.001+05:00

Last year we spoke to Fatima Bhutto, author ofSongs of Blood and Sword (Vintage), for our ‘on tour’ interview. Bhutto was due to appear at the Byron Bay Writers Festival, but was forced to pull out in the last minute. Happily, she has finally arrived in Australia, this time as a guest of theSydney Writers’ Festival.

Who is the ideal reader for your book?
Anyone curious about Pakistan. Or the devastating effects of power.

What do you think of the Australian cover?
I’m thrilled—can’t wait to finally come and see the Australian print of the book in person as opposed to tiny email attachments …

What’s the best thing about book tours?
Best thing?

And the worst thing?
You’re away from writing, you have to speak to journalists all day long, there’s no time to read, I could go on …

What are you reading right now?
Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas (Serpent’s Tail) and The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna (Bloomsbury).

What book do you wish you could have written?
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss (Penguin). It’s such a beautiful, tender novel. It’s in my top five.

What book would you want with you on a desert island?
Can I not have a shelf? Something to keep the gloom away by David Sedaris. Fitzgerald for warmth. Alain de Botton to keep my questions alive.

Typewriter or computer?
Computer, no doubt.

Hardback, paperback or digital?
Hardback. Never, ever digital.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you be?
I wouldn’t.

If I were a literary character I’d be …
My favourite character of all time is Atticus Finch. I wish I could be him.

Source: http://www.fancygoods.com.au/fancy-goods/2011/05/20/author-interview-fatima-bhutto/

Fatima Bhutto on murder, assassination and her family 'cult'

2011-05-12T18:41:00.000+05:00

The history of Pakistan's powerful Bhutto family is written in blood, with murder, assassination and mysterious death commonplace. A young member of this cursed clan, Fatima, born to privilege but now in constant peril, tells the shocking inside story to William Langley.

Fatima Bhutto is chic, petite and beautiful, but the story she tells is awash with blood and treachery. Born into one of the world's great political dynasties, she relates its fortunes with an insider's candour, but it would take a Shakespeare, a Homer or a Cecil B. DeMille to do the job properly.

An outline of the plot might run like this... In ancient times, a warrior tribe settles in a remote area of what is now southern Pakistan. One family eventually becomes pre-eminent, its fortunes built on an ability to out-scheme its rivals, and in time the whole country falls into its hands. Then things start to go wrong.

The revered patriarch bequeaths power to his beautiful, autocratic daughter, but her rule is tainted by corruption and excess. Her younger brother dies in mysterious circumstances; her older brother rebels against her and is murdered. Her favourite niece accuses the new ruler of plotting against her own kin. The matriarch is driven into exile, where she seethes and conspires, and finally returns, only to be assassinated.

Fatima, the 28-year-old inheritor of these chronicles of mayhem, is sitting in a London theatre cafe — a glossy, engaging presence with movie-star looks and a mind that wastes no time on sentiment. The Bhuttos have dominated Pakistan's politics for decades and, even as a little girl, Fatima basked in the glow of specialness, doted on by her relatives and raised with an exalted sense of destiny. Today, though, far from home, she seems scared and lost — disillusioned with what her family has wrought and threatened in her home country for having breached the Bhuttos' hallowed code of silence.

She describes the family as "a cult" and argues that its insatiable hunger for power has corroded its collective soul. "There's this idea," she says, "that if you are a Bhutto, the people owe you a blood debt and you are entitled not just to be in charge, but to have this kind of other-worldly standing, and the whole thing badly needs demystifying."

Fatima's sense that her privileged birthright might be something other than an advantage began when, aged 14 and cowering with her younger brother in an upstairs room of the family home in Karachi, she heard her father being mowed down in a hail of bullets. Only later, still raw with grief, did she come to the conclusion that her aunt, Benazir, had ordered his death. "My papa was a wonderful man," she says. "When that happens to you, it changes everything."

Mir Murtaza Bhutto, the charismatic, 42-year-old elder son of family patriarch Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had recently returned to Pakistan after several years of self-imposed exile. He had voiced stinging criticisms of Benazir, then in her second term as prime minister, and the tensions between them were steadily worsening.

On September 20, 1996, an armed police unit arrived at Murtaza's house, apparently with orders to arrest him on charges of subversion. Up in her room, Fatima heard the sirens, the car doors slamming, the shouting and, finally, a long burst of gunfire. "My little brother said, 'Why are they letting off fireworks?'," she recalls, "but I knew it was more than that."

The police would not let anyone leave the house. Desperate for information, Fatima telephoned Benazir's private office. The teenager and her powerful aunt had always been close. "We were each other's favourites," she says. "When I was little, we used to laugh and eat disgustingly sticky sweets together. She was always kind to me." Surely, Benazir would help.

Instead, the call was taken by Benazir's husband, Asif Zardari — now the president of Pakistan — who informed Fatima that Benazir was unavailable. "But why?," she persisted. "It's her niece. I have to speak to her."

"Oh, don't you know?" replied Asif, coolly. "Your papa's been shot."

Fatima's belief that Benazir was behind her father's murder has only strengthened with the years and it lies at the core of her controversial new book, Songs Of Blood And Sword. To many people around the world, Benazir was an authentic heroine — a champion of democracy, free expression and women's rights in a corner of the world heavily identified with bearded men waving Korans and setting fire to American flags.

"I completely understand why she was so admired," says Fatima. "In Pakistan, too, when she became prime minister, it was as though she was carrying all our hopes and dreams, and there was this virtual adoration of her and a longing for her to do well. But the truth is that power changed Benazir and once she had it, she became a very different person.

"The West didn't notice the change so much. It carried on seeing a political pin-up. Here was a woman running an Islamic country, she was beautiful, she spoke very good English, she said all the right things and it all made her extremely acceptable.

"But what we saw in Pakistan was corruption, abuse of power and absolutely nothing being done to improve the country. And this woman, who was supposed to be a figurehead of women's rights, who spoke out for full democracy, was one of just three world leaders to recognise the Taliban. So that was the Benazir we had to live with."

However intoxicated Benazir had become with power, could she really have ordered the execution of her own brother? Fatima wishes she could believe otherwise, yet such horrors, she says, are the poisonous legacy of the Bhutto cult.

"It's terribly painful for me to think of her this way," says Fatima, who is coming to Australia in May for the Sydney Writers' Festival. "I loved her when I was young. I wanted nothing more than to be around her and it was partly because she was an incredibly vulnerable woman who was extraordinarily brave, and even as a child, you felt that you wanted to protect her and that she needed you to be there.

"So I watched her change from someone who suffered into someone who caused suffering, from someone who knocked down walls into someone who built them and from someone who fought against oppression into someone who would tolerate absolutely no criticism, and that was the nature of the beast."

In 1996, Benazir was driven from office and spent much of the next decade living abroad, mostly in London and Dubai, in a state of luxurious frustration. In 2007, aged 54, she returned to Pakistan, intent on regaining power. On the night of December 27, as she left an election rally in Rawalpindi attended by hundreds of thousands of supporters, a suicide attacker first opened fire on her, hitting her in the neck, then detonated a bomb. She was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital.

Fatima's huge, chocolatey eyes moisten as she recalls her aunt's all-too-foreseeable death. Although estranged, the two women were irrevocably bound together by the Bhutto bloodlines and a shared sense of fate. "I cried for the next five days," writes Fatima in her book. "By the time I had drained myself of tears, I had cried for everyone."

Whatever Benazir's other failings, no one could accuse her of lacking courage. She had been repeatedly warned that Pakistan's violent jihadis — adherents of a bleak mediaeval theology who despised her both as a woman and a politician — were out to kill her. She took no notice. "I am not afraid of dying," she said shortly after arriving back in Pakistan. "When it comes, it comes. It doesn't scare me. They can kill me, but they can't kill democracy."

Her death was one more milestone in the Bhuttos' tragic history. Fatima's grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a former prime minister, was hanged by a military junta in 1979 and her uncle, Shahnawaz, was found dead, apparently poisoned, at his home on the French Riviera in 1985. "Benazir had a saying," muses Fatima. " 'Kill a Bhutto, get a Bhutto', and it is a kind of truth."

Today, Fatima feels her own position threatened. Her book is a runaway best-seller, which has not only made her enemies, but also established her — unwillingly — in Pakistan as a symbol of opposition to the government. She worries for her safety, but says she'll never leave the country. "I don't intend to run for anything [politically]," she says. "I just don't believe in birthright politics. How can you honestly argue for democracy when you are trading on your name?

"During the last election, I went out on the streets, trying to get women, particularly, to vote. And I met quite a lot of them who would say, 'Well, we're going to vote for Benazir'. And I would say, 'But you can't, she's dead', and they'd look a little hurt and say, 'Well, we want to anyway'.

"That's what the Bhuttos have created. People don't vote for ideas. They vote for ghosts."

Source: http://aww.ninemsn.com.au/news/newsstories/8247205/fatima-bhutto-on-murder-assassination-and-her-family-cult?

Pakistan Is Playing Dumb

2011-05-10T18:20:00.002+05:00

The Islamabad establishment has been feigning ignorance for years. Fatima Bhutto on the price ordinary Pakistanis pay as their leaders allow the country to fall apart.

For twenty four hours after Osama bin Laden was (or was he?) shot dead with two bullets to the face by Navy SEALs from the Joint Special Operations Command—“sort of like Murder Incorporated,” a former colonel explained to author Jeremy Scahill—no one heard a peep out of Pakistan’s president. Normally ensconced so securely within the president’s house in Islamabad, venturing out only for foreign junkets and dealing with domestic bothers from behind his fortified walls, President Asif Ali Zardari had met the news that the world’s most wanted man was killed two hours away from his nation’s capital with catatonic silence.

Instead of a televised address to the nation or a press release, he did what all hapless leaders do when in trouble—Zardari wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post. Claiming that his government had no role in the killing, he waxed lyrical about his personal travails. He applauded Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, seconded President Obama’s morally ambiguous speech, and resurrected nothing short of a stump speech for why his government should please be left in power because they really are very democratic even though Zardari himself was never elected to office.

It is not surprising that Pakistan’s president would insist he had no idea bin Laden was living comfortably in one of the country’s most famous garrison towns—the Pakistani establishment has been feigning ignorance for years.

It takes a certain aplomb to insist that you didn’t know Public Enemy No. 1 was living in your country—and in a leafy city, not in a South Waziristani cave; that American helicopters entered your airspace, perhaps using one of your air bases at Tarbela Ghazi; and that the Americans had been planning to take out said Public Enemy No. 1 for the past nine months. The modus operandi of recent years has been to look the other way while keeping their purse at the open.

This is not unique to Zardari—when asked on local television about this business of Osama really having chosen Pakistan as his home away from home, former President General Pervez Musharraf responded vaguely that it wasn’t sensible for people to have harped on and on without the facts all those years ago. When asked, he always went with the same safe answer: I don’t know. For this sort of clarity and “cooperation,” Pakistan has taken just about $1 billion in American aid a year since 2001. But the money doesn’t only keep Zardari or Musharraf and their flunkies in power, it comes with a very serious price for Pakistanis.

If everyone was so clever and the U.S. had been privy to bin Laden's not-so-secret location (Pakistan claims to be, as ever, the last to find out) since August 2010, how does one explain the ferocious drone campaign that took place from September to December of that year? In the span of 102 days, an unprecedented 52 drone strikes were launched against Pakistan, none targeting Abbottabad or its environs. President Obama ratcheted up the drone war almost immediately upon entering the White House—ordering his first strike against Pakistan 72 hours after assuming the presidency. Some 2,000 Pakistanis (largely civilians) have been killed, none of whom happened to be bin Laden or any of his dastardly lieutenants like Mullah Omar or Ayman al Zawahri, and yet the U.S. defense budget has called for a 75 percent increase in funds to continue and enhance drone operations. This is a frightening development.

Pakistan’s trials don’t start and end with Osama bin Laden. On May 2, the commercial capital city of Karachi was on fire. Dozens of vehicles were torched and gunfire broke out in the busy Malir neighborhood—across the city, people were told to stay at home. The violence had nothing to do with bin Laden, but with the murder of a former member of parliament.

The country is gripped by bloodletting—Baloch dissidents have disappeared in the thousands, a sinister byproduct of our government’s engagement in the war on terror. The price of basic foodstuffs skyrockets as government industrialists and feudal landowners hoard basics like sugar and set the price of wheat far above international prices, all the while presiding over sectarian and ethnic violence not seen since the mid-1990s.

Maybe it’s not peculiar that the government claims to have known nothing about bin Laden's killing. They never seem to have any idea what’s happening in their country at all.

Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-05/fatima-bhutto-pakistan-is-playing-dumb-in-bin-laden-death/?fb_ref=article&fb_source=home_oneline#

The prodigal daughter

2011-04-18T10:04:00.001+05:00

She was 14 years old when her father, Mir Murtaza Bhutto was shot dead right outside his home in Karachi, Pakistan, in a political conspiracy that was termed as an encounter. Scared, she had turned to her aunt, Benazir, the then Prime Minister of the country, only to receive cold comfort. It is no surprise then that 28-year-old Fatima Bhutto, who fought for 10 years to bring forth her father's story, should want to shun the history that has bloodied her lineage; a history very similar to the country that she calls home.

Staying clear of her country's complicated politics, she has now carved an identity for herself. One that goes beyond power politics. Famously quipping that the comparisons between her aunt and her were largely cosmetic and going on to add, "In terms of political ideology, what we read, how we think, we are very different. I don't think that I'm anything like her."

Quite true, considering the fact that she is openly vocal about her dislike of the political and military elite that has ruled Pakistan for over six decades. In the 2007-2008 elections she chose to campaign door to door, educating women about their voting rights, visiting almost 300 homes a day, working from morning till at least 10 at night.

She says that it was the most 'oddly' liberating experience for her. "I was there mainly to drive home the point that they had to vote. That if they didn't, someone else would cast a vote in their name and that they had a responsibility to ensure that rigging didn't happen on their names." It was also during this time that she was exposed to the incredible dispossession that women, more than almost anyone else, face in Pakistan.

During one such election campaign at the time, news broke of Benazir's assassination, Fatima went home and wrote a column for The News, a bittersweet farewell that started with the words, "My aunt and I had a complicated relationship. That is the sad truth," and ended with the hope that "In death, perhaps there is a moment to call for calm. To say enoughâ€¦We cannot, and will not, take this madness any more."

A sentiment that comes across in almost all of her prose. An outcry against the existing system and an urgency for change. Insisting on the fact that there are more than three choices that Pakistan has- more than the PPP (Pakistan's Peoples Party), the PML (Pakistan Muslim League) and the army-she says hers is the voice of a new generation of Pakistanis.

"It's a voice that is not just secular, but moderate, anti-the war on ter ror and has yet to live through a period where Pakistan is in control over its sovereignty and its foreign policy." She fears that if the next generation is not given a chance to take part in the country, "then we are closing a door to them, a door that they will eventually abandon. They will leave and go to other countries," she says. It is perhaps this need for a new order that is keeping this young Bhutto away from formally being part of the public system.

Having done her bachelors in Middle Eastern studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, USA, and an MA in South Asian Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, politics has always been a key area of interest, but it is writing that she is truly passionate about.

Her first book was a collection of poems, titled Whispers of the Desert, written at the precocious age of 15. But it was only when she wrote her second book 8:50 a.m. 8 October, a collection of stories about the 2005 earthquake that killed 73,000 people in Kashmir and North West Frontier Province, did she finally enter the writer-activist mode.

The shift from poetry to non-fiction is quite drastic, but she insists that poetry started as a school project. "There is a lot of fear and violence in those poems and I think this has carried through to what I write currently. This awareness of fear, thus the shift to prose or non-fiction wasn't much of a transit for me," she says.

Fear is a feeling that she is familiar with. It is perhaps what she felt when her father did not return home in 1996 to continue the basketball game he had challenged her to. It is the feeling of being abandoned by family. Of being told at school that there is a woman outside claiming to be your mother, while you lock yourself in the nurse's room trying to avoid the media and wondering how can you trust a stranger when the only mother you know is waiting for you at home-the woman who brought her up like her own. The woman was Ghinwa Bhutto, her father's second wife, whom he married while in exile in Syria.

Her latest book, Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter's Memoir, is a tribute to her father and tells the story of the Bhutto family, and her father's life and death. It's set in the context of the whole canvas of Pakistan's history from Partition in 1947 onward. Her book begins with its central event, her father's "encounter" outside the iconic Bhutto mansion, 70 Clifton in Karachi, where Fatima and her family still reside.

The story revolves around 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.

She says her reasons for writing this book were more than personal. "Our history in Pakistan is written either by foreigners or by the establishment. There really isn't another layer, another transcript," she says, continuing, "What I hoped to do with this book was to write about that hidden transcript, the way people live, the way violence affects people, written by someone who watched it rather than by someone who perpetrated it," she says.

It is inherent patriotism that pushes her. "I talk and write about very serious issues that plague our country or the larger region-it's always been my choice to do so. I don't do it because I am someone's daughter. At some point, however, people suddenly realised that, I was a Bhutto and it meant something at that point," she says.

But the love for her country is something that she attributes to her father. "Even while we were living in exile in Syria, my father would constantly have Bollywood movies on and even though he did not particularly like them, they just gave a sense of being home. Sindhi music was another strong influence," she says.

She admits that she could not understand her father's choking emotion for Pakistan initially. "We were in a limbo, we believed and inhabited a middle place. I didn't know for a long time, what he meant when his eyes would tear up, when he would talk about Karachi, his home. But when I went to Pakistan at the age of seven, the missing- him choking up-all made sense. I feel it now, especially since the book came about, I spend so much time travelling," she says with a smile and adds that her next book is all about Karachi.

Short on time because Rahul Gandhi has asked for an appointment, she is in a rush and while she is on her way out, Aitzaz Ahsan, former President of the Supreme Court Bar Association of Pakistan, walks in, looks her in the eye and says, "Who you have here is the very best of our country, our future." Only time will tell if people's expectations will finally win her over, enough to cross over to the other side. Till then, she is happy to write about, rather than inherit, her political dynasty.

With inputs from Olina Banerji.

Source:http://www.indiatoday.intoday.in/site/story/the-prodigal-daughter/1/134566.html

HuffPost Review: The Imperialists Are Still Alive!

2011-04-14T01:52:00.000+05:00

The news of Faisal's rendition, a Saudi national disappeared off an airplane, are first heard in a ballroom bathroom. His fiancée sobs in a stall, "We were supposed to get married in Beirut. Oscar de la Renta made my dress." Her friend commiserates with her loss -- "Oscar makes beautiful dresses."

The Imperialists Are Still Alive!, Bosnian-Palestinian-Jordanian-Lebanese-British (try getting that through an airport) director and writer Zeina Durra's feature-length directorial debut, is a political comedy on identity, the Middle East, occupation and violence, and will be opening in New York on April 15. The film opens with Asya, a conceptual artist with an axis-of-evil pedigree similar to the director, posing nude for a self-portrait, wrapped only in a Palestinian keffiyeh and holding a cigarette. How she will manage to smoke with her face shrouded by fabric is a dilemma. As is the question of whether, as a Palestinian liberation fighter, she would have had the time or the inclination to have a bikini wax or not. When Asya's brother gets caught in Beirut while the Israelis bomb it to smithereens -- as happened as far back as 2006 -- and her cousin is rendered by CIA spooks, Asya finds herself caught between the petty glamorous world of the New York art scene and the very shadowy world where conspiracy theories are only the start of the story. There's a lot of truth in conspiracy theories, Asya says, lying in bed with her Mexican boyfriend who she's just had a bout of post-coital anxiety over (Are you CIA? No, he replies. Asya thinks for a second. Mossad?); it's the really crazy theories that destroy the real ones.

Durra weaves through her protagonist's schizophrenic life deftly and with a sense of humor that I had thought trademarked by Elia Suleiman among Arab filmmakers until I met Durrah -- absurd and darkly funny. Sitting in a limousine with an Old Dowager aunt to discuss the missing Faisal, Asya is placed between a serious looking civil-rights consultant, a poodle and a Filipino maid. "Habibti," her aunt warns her, "Remove the battery from your mobile, they can hear you while it's still in. Remember that. Linda, did you bring the petite four? Please offer them to our guests." Remarkably, for a multi-culti work -- there are Chinese, Arabs, Latin Americans, all subalterns -- no one is a caricature of themselves or their ethnicities. Perhaps a subtlety only a Bosnian-Palestinian-Jordanian-Lebanese-British filmmaker can pull off. No one approves of the Mexican boyfriend, though.

There's no question that the film is an indie treasure, stylistically shot on super 16mm film in 23 days. The Imperialists Are Still Alive! avoids the pitfalls of taking itself too seriously in that particular alternative, self-congratulatory way, instead making fun of those that do. Asya attends an environmental dance theater staged by modern artists from Chiapas where men leap about the stage covered in leaves -- "I am a tree," they bellow, "A NAKED TREE!"

The question underpinning The Imperialists Are Still Alive! isn't about Islam, terror or even conflict -- it's about resistance. And resistance can take the shape of many narratives -- the personal, the political, the artistic. In the backdrop of the Arab Spring, nowhere near the horizon when Durra wrote and shot this film, can a work of cinema like this one lend itself to the catalogue of insurgent ideas? Why not? If cinema is valuable to society as well as entertaining, then there are moments of lucidity that we carry forth from this film. There's the practicality of espionage: If they are watching us, does that mean that they watch our friends, our family, our communities (the storming of the notorious Amn Dawla State Security offices in Egypt would answer yes, rooms full of tapes and documents and files of yes answers)? There's the ennui of survival and displacement -- what do those who belong do when they find themselves outside the momentum of change? What role does an exile play?

One might look to Libya for answers where ad hoc newsrooms have been set up by Libyan exiles in America and Britain to relay the news of what is happening on the ground in Benghazi or Misurata to the rest of non-Libyan public. There are the suspicions they plant in all of us (who are they? They're usually the same in all our imaginations) that perpetuate inaction, indecision, doubt. There is the more practical side to having our faces obscured by cloth -- not oppression, but protection. Explaining her nude keffiyeh portrait to a group of movers, Asya explains that invisibility is necessitated, not by fundamentalism, but rather when you don't want the police or military to identify you. Like Subcomandante Marcos one of the men asks. Yes, exactly like that.

The Diary: Fatima Bhutto

2011-03-26T12:36:00.000+05:00

The diary post can be read at:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/69f2a05c-5664-11e0-84e9-00144feab49a.html#axzz1HelcRVJA

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