Fatima Bhutto, 25-year-old niece of assassinated Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and newspaper columnist, at the family home in Karachi, in November 2007
Each day, a small queue of mourners forms at the grave of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. There, in his ancestral village on the outskirts of Larkana, they ascend the steps and kneel with their heads slightly bowed. Some lean over to kiss the silk cloth that shrouds the marble-encased remains of Pakistan's most explosive leader. Others raise their cupped hands in prayer, or stand at a slight distance, silently sprinkling fistfuls of rose petals from between the surrounding pillars.
Such displays of reverence are more usually found at shrines consecrated to rural Sindh's fabled Sufi saints. But for many of the province's political faithful, a visit to the vast Mughal-imitation structure, topped with three domes, is equally sacred.
Born to one of Sindh's wealthiest landowning families, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto emerged as Pakistan's first democratically elected leader. His fiery speeches, often laced with taunts against the generals and the rich, won him prestige among the poor. In 1977, he was toppled in a military coup, and hanged on trumped-up murder charges two years later.
At a distance to Zulfikar's elevated body lie those of his two sons. In 1985, Shahnawaz was poisoned while on holiday in Cannes. In 1996, policemen gunned down Murtaza outside his home. And now, lying beside her father are the bones of his political heir, the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, whose assassination in December 2007 convulsed the country.
The dates are ordered in chilling sequence on the cover of Fatima Bhutto's elegiac new memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword. "It was really after my aunt was killed," Fatima, Murtaza's daughter, recently told an interviewer, "when suddenly the numbers just lined up in a column, and it seemed to be every decade". She is mournful of her aunt's death, but is unsparing in her criticisms of her. Perhaps not surprisingly, the book has triggered a storm of controversy in Pakistan. The columnist Nadeem F Paracha, for one, has accused the author of "naivety", and declared her book to be "frequently punctuated with half-truths".
For all their differences, Fatima shared much with her aunt: the effortless confidence, similarly striking features, an education in America followed by Britain, and a powerful devotion to a father who was violently taken away from his young daughter. But these, she told me in the weeks before her aunt's final return to Pakistan, "were superficial things". Sitting under a painting of her grandfather Zulfikar addressing a political rally at the height of his power, she said that Benazir bore "moral responsibility" for her father's death.
The case against Benazir and her widower, now President Asif Ali Zardari, could scarcely be more gripping. And the story is wrought with a warm, nakedly wounded heart and a hard, unyielding sense of injustice.
The idea for the book was born mere moments before the tragedy that irreparably shook her life. Murtaza, her father, had been sitting at home, recalling the days when he and his brother battled the regime of General Zia-ul-Haq, the West's favourite dictator, who overthrew, imprisoned and hanged Zulfikar.
Unlike his more pragmatic sister, Benazir, who favoured a political route through a return to constitutional democracy, Murtaza and his brother had established Al-Zulfikar, an underground guerrilla outfit. Based first in Kabul, where Fatima was born 28 years ago, and later Syria, al-Zulfikar (The Sword) was accused of orchestrating a series of shootings, bombings, and the 1981 hijacking of a Pakistan International Airlines plane.
Aged 14, a precocious Fatima asked her father if he regretted a life that led him down such a path. "No," he said. "I fought the government that killed my father and brother and I'm proud of that. What we failed in, we failed in, but we didn't take the coup lying down. We resisted. I'd do it all over again." Fatima said he should record his life in a book. "No, I can't. You'll do it for me. You can write a book on my life." She hastened for a pen and paper. "Not now," Murtaza told his daughter. "You can write it after I'm dead."
Two days later, Murtaza was gunned down outside his home – shot down by Benazir's own police officers. The scene was hosed down within minutes, an event that repeated itself after Benazir's death.
While apportioning blame, Fatima refuses to entertain other explanations. But within six weeks of her father's murder, Benazir's government was sacked. Her husband, Zardari, was behind bars, accused of the murder, though never convicted. And after a new election, her PPP was reduced to just over a dozen seats. Her opponent secured an unprecedented two-thirds majority. In 1999, she fled into exile. If there was a beneficiary of Murtaza's murder, it wasn't Benazir.
Benazir was never comfortable talking about her brother's murder. She once stormed out of a television interview, after declaring, "It was my brother who was murdered, not your brother." In her own memoir, Benazir refers adoringly to Murtaza as her "baby brother," who was "so handsome, his dark eyes flashing one minute, gentling the next".
She saw her brother's murder as a "conspiracy" hatched by the family's legions of enemies, the purpose of which was to "kill a Bhutto to catch a Bhutto". In his 1996 obituary of Murtaza, Tariq Ali suggested that Pakistan's intelligence agencies might have been involved. "It is hardly a secret that there are forces in Pakistan that would like nothing better than to wipe out the entire clan," he wrote, in words that Benazir's supporters will regard as prescient.
And there are indeed gaps in Fatima's book. Notably, there is no mention of the former Scotland Yard team that investigated Murtaza's murder. Enlisted by Benazir's government, a British team found there was at least another shooter on the other side of the road to the police. Before being paid off and kicked out of the country by the interim government, they drew comparisons with the "grass knoll syndrome" of the John F Kennedy assassination.
Citing a tribunal report, Fatima concludes that Murtaza's murder could not have taken place without approval from "the highest" authority. But in Pakistan, that has never meant the Prime Minister's office.
Unsurprisingly, Fatima inherited her father's dislike of Benazir and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari. She repeats familiar but still unproven charges of corruption that triggered the collapse of Benazir's two stints in government. The Pakistan People's Party's many failures are well attested, even by ministers these days. But Fatima's animus is such that inaccurate or inconsistent lines of attack tempt her.
Early in the book, she insists that the PPP's political opponents "have left the country," after presumably being hounded there. It is difficult to identify whom she means. Only former dictator Pervez Musharraf is in exile. And whereas Benazir is criticised for donning a headscarf, her father's decision to wear "a small and golden" replica of Imam Ali's two-pronged sword, his rival party's symbol, is warmly remembered. To Fatima, a self-styled progressive who somehow maintains fealty to patriarchal traditions, her aunt was never a Bhutto: she was Mrs Zardari.
And yet the parallels between the two strands of the family persist. After Murtaza's death, his widow and Fatima's stepmother Ghinwa assumed control, just as Zardari became the new co-chairman of the larger PPP. Both are acting as regents until their children come of age.
The battle over Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's legacy is clearly not over. Benazir's son and heir Bilawal is poised to return to Pakistan after completing his studies at Oxford. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Jnr, Fatima's younger brother, has also gone abroad to complete his studies, as his family was fearful of his status as the sole surviving paternal male heir.
And what of Fatima? She has so far shrugged off suggestions that she may enter politics, decrying her family's dynastic authority. "Not only have I seen power being ugly," she says, "but I have also seen it doing nothing... Dynasty seems to me a very profound way of stagnation." And yet for all the brickbats it has brought her way, her book demonstrates one fact above all others: she is not prepared to let her father's legacy die.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bhuttos-daughter-writes-new-page-in-family-history-1945239.html
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