Fatima Bhutto, niece of slain former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, has alleged that Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari was involved in the killing of her father, Murtaza Bhutto, and that her aunt had a role to play in it.
"She presided over a state of lawlessness. My father was one of thousands killed under her second government so certainly she bears a moral responsibility," Fatima said in an interview to journalist Karan Thapar on the Devil's Advocate show on television channel CNN-IBN.
"And after his murder, my aunt played a strong role in the cover-up. We were forbidden from filing an FIR. All the witnesses were arrested. They had no access to their lawyers, their families. In fact, they were kept in jail till her government fell," she said.
Fatima is in India to promote her just-published memoir, "Songs of Blood and Sword" in which she has talked about her father's death and other events of those times in Pakistan.
Benazir Bhutto's father and Fatima's grandfather Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was executed in 1979 after he had been deposed by then army chief Gen Zia ul Haq.
Fatima's uncle and Benazir Bhutto's brother, Shahnawaz, 27, was found dead in Nice, France on July 18, 1985 in mysterious circumstances.
Murtaza, Benazir Bhutto's other brother, was killed on September 20, 1996. Benazir Bhutto herself was assassinated on December 27, 2007.
Fatima said she had tried calling up her aunt, who was the Prime Minister of Pakistan on the day her father was killed.
"Eventually I was connected to her husband, the current President [of Pakistan], Asif Ali Zardari who said I cannot speak to my aunt. When I insisted that it was important, he said she can't come to the phone, she is hysterical. I was fourteen years old and I had no idea what he was talking about. I said: look it's very urgent. At that point of time he, very calmly, and very coldly said to me: don't you know? Your father has been shot. At that point I dropped the phone," she said.
"To say that to a child who was so attached to her father was so unbearably cruel that I convinced myself immediately that it must not be serious. Otherwise why would he have said this to me?" she said.
In reply to another question, she said none of the seven men killed that night were taken to emergency hospital.
"They were all taken to different locations. They were all taken past the time when they could have been saved. My father was taken to a dispensary where the doctors had their outpatient facility. It was a place which had sign outside its front door saying -no emergency. It was very clear that that was not a hospital where doctors could be found to save anybody's life," she said.
She further alleged that the police just dropped his father at the hospital and left.
Fatima said former Pakistan President Farooq Leghari had come out recently and said that Mr Zardari had gone to him, when he was the President, and said that this man (Murtaza) had to be eliminated.
"He has given the interview in Urdu, in English and Saraiki, and he said on television that Asif Zardari has the blood of Murtaza Bhutto on his hands and god knows how many other people," he said.
Fatima said that Masood Sharif, at that time head of the Intelligence Bureau, was at the scene of the crime that night. Several years later, he was inducted into the central committee of Benazir Bhutto's party.
"Now, to induct a man who has been publicly accused of your brother's murder sends a certain signal," she said.
Fatima said her aunt remained committed to the police line about Murtaza's death. "And just before her own murder, she tried to insinuate on television that not only Murtaza had himself killed, that he had a suicidal wish, but that his own guards killed him. She said that he was shot from the back which certainly he was not, and that his body bore tales of his death, which it certainly does but it has nothing to do with the claims that Benazir was making," she said.
She alleged that, one year after Shahnawaz's "murder" in 1986, Benazir Bhutto had begun to negotiate with the military establishment in Pakistan to take power. "And she was preparing, one would assume, to be General Zia's Prime Minister, who was still alive at that time. The differences really started then. My father couldn't understand how she was willing to negotiate with the very establishment that had killed their father, that they believed had their brother killed, all for the sake of power. She was willing to accept the IMF dictate; she was willing to let the army control foreign policy," she said.
Asked why, after Gen Zia dead, Benazir Bhutto continued to stop Murtaza from returning to Pakistan, she said, "I think because the compromises remained. She was Prime Minister to Zia's number two, who assumed the office of President after Zia-ul-Haq was killed. One of the men she appointed as Governor of Sindh had signed her father's death warrant," she said, suggesting that she did not want another Bhutto to share the limelight, power and legacy.
Fatima described as a betrayal Benazir Bhutto's decision to deny her father the Larkana seat, which was given instead to "a Zardari crony, a Zia crony".
"Not only an ultimate betrayal but the very reluctance of Benazir to allow her brother who had been a member of the party since it had been founded, a single party ticket shows her fear and how threatened she felt," she said.
Fatima said he had spent years researching her father's death and she had no doubt in her mind about Benazir Bhutto's role. "In terms of her younger brother Shahnawaz's death, this is a possibility. According to Jacques Verges who represented the family, according to Shahnawaz's family, it is a possibility," she said.
She said Benazir Bhutto was a very complex person to her. "There was also a time when she was my favourite aunt. She was a very complex person but I think, in answer to your question, perhaps this is the nature of the beast. I think power is an overwhelming, transformative, and very often, a destructive force. And Benazir was not immune to its power," she said.
"It's very complicated. I can't think of her except as the two sides. I can't see her alone as one. While she was out of power, she was a woman who faced great suffering, who was incredibly vulnerable and brave. But, on the other hand, when she was in power, she inflicted much of the suffering that she endured on thousands of people," she said.
Asked if there was a bit of her that still loved Benazir Bhutto, she said, "Of course. There is a bit of me that remembers that young woman who use to read me bedtime stories and who I felt safe around. But there is still a part of me that is very frightened of her." She, however, said that she did not hate her.
Fatima said she was not in touch with the larger Bhutto family and that the door between her and her cousins had been shut a long time ago.
Asked if that meant Fatima Bhutto was a Bhutto on her own, she said, "It certainly has felt like that for the last fourteen years. We have been denied access to our grandmother repeatedly. After my father's death, it was like we lost his entire family. My aunt filed cases against my brother Zulfikar and I when we were children. When Zulfikar was nine, my aunt filed case against him. So, I think we lost them a long time ago."
Source :
http://netindian.in/news/2010/04/04/0006029/fatima-bhutto-alleges-zardari-involved-her-fathers-murder
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