Fatima Bhutto: living by the bullet

With her father, aunt, uncle and grandfather all murdered, Fatima Bhutto has written the story of the ill-starred dynasty whose name once epitomised Pakistan’s political turmoil. Interview by Janine di Giovanni.


When Fatima Bhutto was a little girl, she would sit with her father as he shaved in the morning and pretend to be him. Together, they would wash their faces, brush their teeth, then her father, the political activist Mir Murtaza Bhutto, would gently smooth his tiny daughter’s face with shaving cream. And she imitated his movements, stroke by stroke. What Fatima loves the most about that memory, she says now, was that her father never scolded her, never told her that this was something she should not do because she was a girl. 'Lathering up and shaving,’ she says, 'was just our little routine.’


When Fatima was 14, she cowered in the dressing-room of her parents’ bedroom in Karachi, her back against the locked door. She was shielding her six-year-old brother, Zulfikar, from a barrage of bullets outside her house. 'It’s just fireworks, Fati,’ said the quiet little boy. But Fatima, who was always wise beyond her years, knew otherwise – she understood something about violent deaths. Her family was plagued with them.


Her grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a former prime minister of Pakistan, was executed by General Zia-ul-Huq in 1979, and her beloved uncle Shahnawaz Bhutto was poisoned in the south of France in 1985. (That crime has still not been solved, though the family blames either Zia or the CIA.) At the time of Mir Murtaza’s death in September 1996, Fatima’s father was an outspoken opponent of the government – which happened to be run by his estranged sister, Benazir Bhutto. He had split from her party, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) founded by their father, and created a splinter group, the PPP-Shaheed Bhutto.


Fatima, now 28 and one of Pakistan’s most outspoken political commentators and social activists, had understood what it meant to live with a hostile government since 1993, when the family returned to Pakistan from exile and Mir was arrested at the airport, and charged with 90 crimes by his sister’s regime. He subsequently spent many months in prison. But the days leading up to his death were particularly tense. 'Since his birthday, September 18, tanks had been rolling up around our house,’ she says. 'And it just felt wrong that day.’


She remembers that her father was preoccupied on September 27. He had said he was going to a press conference. He did not eat lunch with the family as usual. A precocious teenager, Fatima had just received a contract for her first book of poetry, Whispers in the Desert, and she needed a parent to sign it. 'He said he would sign it in jail,’ she said. 'He expected to be arrested after the press conference. But not killed.’


After the gunshots outside the house stopped, Fatima’s stepmother, Ghinwa, who had raised her as a daughter since she was four, came for the children and the family hid in the drawing-room. Then Fatima called her Aunt Benazir. 'She did not take the call,’ she says. Instead, Asif Zardari, Benazir’s husband and the man who is now the president of Pakistan, took the call.


'Don’t you know?’ he said evenly. 'Your father’s been shot.’


Six other men died along with Mir Murtaza that day. The blood was quickly washed off the road, the glass swept up. (It was an eerie foreshadowing of Benazir’s own murder 11 years later, when the evidence was also instantly removed.) There was no independent forensic inquest. The injured were taken to clinics that were not equipped for emergency surgery, and Fatima believes her father would not have bled to death if he had been brought to a hospital.


More disturbingly, the police would not let the family leave the house until it was too late, citing as an excuse that it was dangerous because a robbery had taken place. Medical records indicate that her father was shot five times, and that the shot that killed him was fired at point-blank range. It haunts her that while he lay bleeding not far from the house, she was trapped inside by the police.


'When we got to the clinic, I saw his legs,’ she says. 'That’s all I saw.’


Significantly, it has never been determined who was responsible for the assassination, and some of the policemen accused were not properly brought to justice. 'They were imprisoned, but in luxury hospital suites, not proper prisons,’ Fatima says. 'And not for long either, given the gravity of the charges against them. They were never convicted.’


Zardari was arrested after Benazir’s government fell in November 1996, accused of corruption and Murtaza’s murder (of which he was cleared), and remained in jail until November 2004. 'Again, jail is a loose term for how he was kept,’ Fatima says.


After her father’s death, Fatima’s relationship with her famous aunt became estranged, although previously they had been close. Fatima claims that Benazir would often try to persuade her to come to family events and 'get the camera crews along so she could prove she had nothing to do with it.’ One bizarre detail of the event is that when Benazir rushed to the clinic where Mir Murtaza lay dying, she was not wearing any shoes – an act that Ghinwa and Fatima always saw as deeply suspicious, as though she were trying to prove she had been caught off guard.


Even though a judicial tribunal ruled the murder could not have happened without the approval of the highest level of government and that Benazir’s administration was 'probably complicit’, she and Zardari always denied involvement. 'The police pulled the trigger, but Benazir and Asif had the moral responsibility,’ Fatima says now, sitting on the terrace of the Karachi house, 70 Clifton, which is one of the most famous addresses in Pakistan. It was here that Benazir grew up, here that she married Asif Zardari in the lush garden in 1987, and outside these gates that Mir Murtaza was murdered. It is now the home of the last of the Bhuttos: Ghinwa (whom Fatima calls 'Mummy’); Fatima; her adored adopted six-year-old brother Mir Ali (pronounced 'Miralee’), and her brother Zulfikar, when he is back from England, where he is at school. Fatima’s cousin Sassi, the daughter of the murdered Shah Nawaz, also stays here when she comes from her home in America.


Fatima is tiny and beautiful, but largely unaware of her beauty. She wears skinny jeans that she buys in a street market, ballet slippers and T-shirts from the Sunday bazaar (Bob Marley, Lynyrd Skynyrd) or traditional Pakistani kurtas that friends make for her. She does not eat sugar and practises yoga daily. Her face is clear of make-up (unlike her aunt, who adored red lipstick and thick foundation). Also unlike Benazir, who liked to play up to the cameras, Fatima does not wear a veil, except, ironically, at funerals. She wears sleeveless dresses, not really the norm in conservative Pakistan. 'I wear them because I live in a hot country. It’s the Saudis who brought the burka to Pakistan. My grandmother always wore saris to state visits, and they were short-sleeved and elegant.’


Fourteen years have gone by since her father’s death. But every day of her life, Fatima lives with that murder in her head. She has to live with the fact that it is now Zardari who runs the country. She is a thorn in his side, but has no relationship with him. She sees him go to the White House on official visits. She sees him with Gordon Brown.


The bond between Fatima and her father was extraordinarily strong. When she talks about him, she still cries. But neither she nor Ghinwa – a tall, big-hearted woman who left her native Lebanon to follow Mir Murtaza to Pakistan – harbours anger. 'Anger eats you up, makes you ugly and ultimately kills you,’ says Ghinwa, who is a political activist and chairman of the PPP-Shaheed Bhutto party. 'And if it kills us, then those killers have done their job, not only killing those men, but killing their families as well.’


'I was angry for a long time afterwards, but at some point I realised that itself is an act of violence,’ Fatima says. 'It is better to seek justice.’


Her way of seeking justice was to write her father’s story. Songs of Blood and Sword is published next week. It’s a daughter’s memoir, but it is more than that. Through the history of the Bhutto family, rich feudal landlords of a warrior caste, she tells the story of the newly created state of Pakistan. It is a book about the power of love, but also about a search to avenge her father’s brutal murder.


She also did it to preserve his memory. 'I used to say, after he died, well, he’s been dead five years, but I had him for 14,’ she says. 'And this year it is 14 years since he died.’ She wipes her eyes. 'He’s been dead for as long as I had him.’


Fatima Bhutto was born on May 29, 1982, under curfew, in Kabul, Afghanistan, at the height of the war between the Soviet-led government and the US-backed Mujahideen. Her father was in exile from the Zia regime with his brother, Shahnawaz. Fatima’s mother was an Afghan, Fowzia (Shahnawaz married Fowzia’s sister, who was later accused of his murder). Fatima and the family have no contact with Fowzia or her sister, though they do see her daughter, Sassi.


On the day Fatima was born, as if a harbinger of the drama her life would later hold, Afghan-istan’s Najibullah government placed special troops around the hospital in anticipation of her birth. They were worried that the hospital might become a Mujahideen target.


Her father adored her from the beginning. 'Tall, like me,’ he wrote on the back of one photo taken when she was four weeks old. Her relationship with her biological mother, however, was strained. 'She always frightened me,’ Fatima writes in her book. Eventually, the family left for the Middle East, and when Fatima was three years old, Fowzia and her father split up. Fatima stayed with her father and rarely saw her mother, although there was a bitter custody battle after Mir Murtaza died.


'Maybe it is my fault,’ she writes in her book. 'Maybe my heart was too full and I never cleared it to make space for Fowzia.’ She was cared for by Mir Murtaza. The two were inseparable. He took her to her dance classes, swimming, to meetings. 'He cut my hair, dressed me, bathed me,’ she says. 'I was a tomboy.’ Every picture I see of the two together in the Bhutto compound shows a tiny, round-eyed little girl on her father’s lap.


She went to the American School in Karachi, and after her father’s death, Fatima continued to study, as if to make Mir Murtaza – a Harvard graduate – proud. She did Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia in New York, graduating top of her class – summa cum laude. Then she completed her MA at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Later, returning home to Pakistan after years away, she worked as a campaigning journalist, a human rights and women’s activist and a columnist. She wrote a book about the 2005 earthquake and its victims, which was hailed as sensitive and perceptive.


In December 2007, Benazir was assassinated. Fatima was in Larkana, the rather gloomy family estate in Sindh province, eight hours’ drive through dusty fields from Karachi, at the time. Although she was long estranged from Benazir, she was very shocked. 'It was like a terrible déjà vu; it’s almost as if every 10 years someone in our family is violently murdered. And the way the police cleaned up the blood from her murder scene as quickly as they cleaned up my father’s brought back terrible memories.’


These days, life in 70 Clifton passes slowly and languidly; the house is an oasis in Karachi, which is now violent and plagued with gangs, corruption, poverty, and a breeding ground for radical jihadists. Despite this, Fatima has many friends that she grew up with at the American School, and goes out to small restaurants and her yoga classes. She has guards, but they are more like family members – friends of the party – than armed militia. And she travels often to Europe, although she likes to keep her life as private as possible. Anything she does ends up in the press, so she keeps a low profile.


At home, life is quiet, with the sound of the mynah birds coming from the garden outside. It is a simple, family life with a lot of love in the household. Ghinwa, a committed vegan, cooks amazing dishes and bakes cakes. Mir Ali plays with his Spider-Man toys and delights the household. (Ghinwa adopted him when he was a month old as a way of attempting to heal the pain after Mir’s death.) Fatima writes and oversees various charities – one morning, we go to a home for abandoned girls for which she has been providing computers, donated by friends in London. Another time, we go to the Sunday market to buy cotton T-shirts, which she will take to women in prison to embroider and sell. She loves to write. 'It’s all I ever wanted to do,’ she says. When she was little she used to 'interview’ her father with a hand-held radio. She is passionately worried about the state of her country and its 162 million inhabitants, but says she will never go into politics. 'It’s not about birthright,’ she says.


She is single, and not worried about it. She wants children very much, and will probably adopt as well as having her own, as she sees the joy Mir Ali has brought to the family. She says she will marry for love, not for religion – and the stories that have appeared in the tabloid press about her and George Clooney are rubbish. She misses her brother Zulfi terribly when he is away at school. They speak every day, and she bosses him around like a big sister would. She says that she and Ghinwa jokingly refer to each other as 'an old married couple’ as they are so close. 'I still sit on her lap sometimes,’ she laughs.


We do yoga in the mornings in Zulfi’s old painting studio – Fatima is excited that she can now do the crow pose – and drink a lot of tea. She talks about her next project, a reportage history of Karachi, of its gangs, poverty and corruption. She can’t really go out by herself but nothing seems to frighten her, although she admits that she had panic attacks for a long time after her father’s death. She is also a chronic insomniac, like her father.


One night we have dinner at home at the round table overlooking the gardens with her dear friend Sabeen Jatoi. Sabeen is six years older than Fatima. Her father, Ashiq, was also killed that night by the police – he was a political activist along with Mir – and the two women have a very strong bond.


'I remember my brother was late getting to school in England that year,’ Sabeen says. 'What could he say? Excuse me for being late, my father was just gunned down by police.’ She puts down her fork. 'That does not exactly help to make friends.’


Jatoi is a lawyer, and as passionate and committed to finding out the truth as Fatima. We talk for a long time about anger, about how it perpetuates vengeance. 'Eventually I just had to let it go,’ Jatoi says. 'Which does not mean you forget.’


Fatima goes back to the night of the murders. While waiting in the hospital to give blood to her father, she bumped into Sabeen. 'Papa needs blood, Papa needs blood,’ she kept repeating. Sabeen was looking for her own father. Later, at the 40-day ritual condolences, Sabeen came up to Fatima and embraced her. 'We don’t blame you,’ she said.


'All I remember after it was a lot of love,’ Fatima says. 'People kept coming to the house to comfort us, to console. I felt surrounded by so much love.’


Songs of Blood and Sword is powerful. Fatima wrote it as a journalist would, using her investigative training. In some ways, she had to put her love aside and be objective. Does she think her father was immune from the corruption that plagued the Bhuttos? What did she find out about him along the way?


'That he did not like Woody Allen movies,’ she says. 'I never knew he did not like Woody Allen movies.’ Then, growing more serious, she says how painful it was to delve into the process of recording a father’s life and death. 'I did not want to write a hagiography,’ she says. She knows her father was flawed. So she began a voyage around the world that took her from Greece – where she found one his first loves, a woman named Della, who helped her unravel pieces of her father through letters, memories and friends, to Texas, to Harvard, to visits to the Karachi police and medical examiners who tended her father when he was dying.


She saw lawyers in France who worked on the case of her uncle Shahnawaz. She trawled through documents from the infamous 1981 Pakistan International Airways hijacking, and concludes in the book that while her father was involved in the negotiations of the hostages, he was not involved in the hijacking. (He was posthumously acquitted of this charge in 2003.) 'Look, he and my uncle were young and passionate and trying to overthrow a military dictatorship. But they did not take lives.’


While writing, she locked herself away in the family home in Sindhi, a long way from internet and mobile phone networks. She also spent time in an apartment in France, talking to no one but herself for three weeks. 'I got paranoid while I was writing,’ she says. 'I did not want people in Karachi to know what I was doing. I just wanted to get this book out. I wanted to document it, have it on record, have an archive.’ (Penguin India has bought the Pakistan rights. It will be published in India and distributed in Pakistan.)


She is serious and 'sober’, as one of the Pakistani papers calls her, a bluestocking, an old-fashioned intellectual. At times girlish – she gives great beauty advice about how to apply eyeliner and use mustard oil to condition hair. She always wears a small bronze sword around her neck. It belonged to her father, and it reminds her, always, of her birthright. Not as a political dynasty, but as a fighter, as someone seeking truth.


As if by chance, lying in my bed at 70 Clifton – in the rooms once used by her father and her uncle Shahnawaz, surrounded by their books and briefcases and family photos – I see that in the notebook I have used to take notes on Fatima, I also have notes from an interview I did with a famous French psychiatrist, Boris Cyrulnik. Cyrulnik is renowned for his work on trauma and resilience, and victims of violence. It is his belief that despite horrific incidents that happen to individuals, they can go on to achieve extraordinary things.


I had asked Cyrulnik how people heal from trauma, how they forget. 'They never forget,’ he said. 'The wound remains. But they begin to build great strength from that, they have the capacity to create, to live, to go on and do great things.’


I think of the 14-year-old Fatima hiding in a dressing-room, protecting her little brother from the killers of her father. I think how traumatic her life has been, then I think of what she has done – and what she will do. And I can think of no one better to carry the word 'resilient’.


Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/7528599/Fatima-Bhutto-living-by-the-bullet.html