Fatima Bhutto's father, aunt and uncle were all assassinated. She talks about what it was like to grow up in Pakistan's famous political dynasty, where violence was never very far away
- Susanna Rustin
- Saturday 17 April 2010
Fatima Bhutto: 'I'm hopeful that there will be justice.' Photograph: Graeme Robertson
In December 2007, at the moment Benazir Bhutto was murdered in the chaotic run-up to the Pakistani elections – in which she hoped to win a third term as prime minister – her niece Fatima was out campaigning. Fatima's first thought, when the news came through, was disbelief: they couldn't kill another Bhutto, they wouldn't dare. Then shock set in as she made the emotional connection with the murder of her father, Murtaza, a decade before. "I cried for the next five days," she writes in her new book, Songs of Blood and Sword. "By the time I had drained myself of tears, I had cried for everyone."
The tears were unexpected. Fatima was out campaigning for a rival party. She has for years been a ferocious critic of Benazir and her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, now president of Pakistan, and what she calls the "Bhutto cult", whereby party leadership is handed down through the family. But she has good memories of Benazir as well. As a child she was often told she was just like her aunt. "We liked all the same revolting sweets," she says.
The Bhuttos have dominated Pakistani politics for decades. But dynastic politics brought murderous rivalries. Benazir fell out with her brothers, one of whom was Fatima's father, after their father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founder of the Pakistan People's Party and the country's fourth president, was executed by General Zia's dictatorship in 1979.
While her brothers plotted to overthrow Zia from Kabul, and were accused of orchestrating a plane hijacking in 1981, Benazir pressed for political advantage and was twice elected prime minister – and twice removed on charges of corruption. The siblings became enemies, and when Murtaza was shot dead outside the family home in Karachi in 1996, Fatima, then 14, suspected her aunt of being involved.
Just after the shooting and still cowering indoors with her younger brother, Fatima phoned Benazir, then prime minister. She says Benazir refused to take the call. Instead it was Benazir's husband who gave her the news: "Oh, don't you know? Your father's been shot." It was one of the pivotal moments of her life.
Fatima's book, subtitled A Daughter's Memoir, is her tribute to her father. It traces his life story and political career, and sketches out a brief history of Pakistan through his eyes. She describes the book as an act of "preservation" – of his memory and of the historical record.
She treated the book as a piece of investigative research, tracking down enemies as well as friends of her family, and talking to police and medical examiners who were at the scene of her father's death. She says earnestly that while writing about people she loved may have affected her judgment, she tried to be objective. She was taken aback when one man who had been mistreated by her grandfather told her that he was no better than Hitler. And her overriding wish to believe the best of her father is evident throughout.
Her favourite interview was with his first lover, a Greek woman named Della Roufogalis. "She calls herself my Greek mother, which I think is quite sweet."
Clearly the two women hit it off, with Della's memories of forbidden love (she was married) chiming neatly with Fatima's romantic image of her father.
By contrast, Fatima's biological mother, Fowzia, from whom her father separated when she was just three, is a strange blank. Fatima's earliest memories, she says, are all of her father, "dressing me and cutting my hair". Her parents' marriage, which began during Murtaza's period of political exile in Afghanistan, broke down in the aftermath of yet another violent death in the family, when her uncle Shahnawaz Bhutto was poisoned in a still unsolved crime on holiday in the south of France.
Fatima tells a sad story of how, as a little girl after her parents' marriage ended, she "sometimes sidled up to women with long dark hair in railway stations and bookstores, thinking they were Fowzia". She had no contact with her mother as a child, but after Murtaza's death Fowzia sued for custody. Until then, Fatima says, "I was never opposed to a relationship with her, but the experiences I had with her as a young adult made me feel that this was not someone who wanted to have a relationship with me. She would give newspaper interviews, write open letters, when there was really no block to her saying these things to me directly."
Today, Fatima doesn't know where Fowzia lives and the woman she calls "Mummy" is Ghinwa, the Lebanese stepmother she acquired when her father remarried. Her book's dedication could hardly be more pointed. "For my mother Ghinwa," it reads, "for giving me life".
Fatima was born in Kabul on 29 May 1982. She went to school in Syria, and made her first visit to Pakistan aged seven. She went to universities in New York and London and talks in an American-inflected English, only putting on a Pakistani accent when she laughingly reports the widespread misconception that "in the west people make their children pay rent and throw them out as soon as they're 16".
In Pakistan, she explains, the only way to leave the family home is to get married – and even then you might just move next door. She shares the Bhutto family home in Karachi with her stepmother Ghinwa, her adopted six-year-old brother Mir Ali, and her 19-year-old half-brother Zulfikar. She has brought them with her to London. "We move in a little pack … we're a little travelling band. We always want to be together as much as we can manage."
Like her father and her aunt, Fatima is a chronic insomniac and jokes that jet lag comes as a relief. But despite the tiredness, she looks beautiful, small and elegant and wearing what look like uncomfortably high heels. She is pleasant company, talkative and easygoing. I wonder at her composure, given the content of our conversation, but when I ask if she feels angry, she says not. "Anger is a form of violence and is destructive if you carry it round with you," she says. Her mother, Ghinwa, who grew up in wartime Lebanon, brought up her children to be patient and "to know that these things don't happen overnight. I'm still hopeful that in the end there will be justice."
Those responsible for killing Fatima's father, uncle and aunt have never been brought to justice, and theories abound as to who was responsible in each case. The family blamed Zia, and possibly the CIA, for Shahnawaz's poisoning. An al-Qaida-linked group claimed responsibility for Benazir's assassination, while Benazir herself feared elements in General Pervez Musharraf's government were out to get her.
Benazir's widower, Zardari, was formally acquitted of any involvement in the murder of Fatima's father in the run-up to his bid for the presidency two years ago. But Fatima was appalled when he chose to be sworn in on the anniversary of the killing.
Is she nervous about her book coming out and broadcasting her views about Zardari? "The one thing they don't like is when you talk about them to their benefactors," she says coolly. "You can say what you like about the president in Pakistan, they'll make sure that a) no one hears it, and b) what difference does it make? But they don't want people who they come to for their money and their international support in the US and UK reading these things about them."
Fatima says her own politics are left-leaning, "but I differ from my father and my grandfather in that I'm completely anti-nuclear". But she has sworn off politics herself and insists her brothers will make the same choice: "There was never this idea of duty with a capital D or responsibility with a capital R. We were never told we had to be any of these things, we were always told we could be what liked." She is already planning her next book, about Karachi, while Mir Ali "desperately wants to be a magician", and Zulfikar plans to study environmental sciences at a British university.
She regrets that her grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto never gave his sons the same freedom, instead ordering them in a letter to avenge his death: "I wish they had been allowed to live their own lives. Their father decided their fate."
But this doesn't mean Fatima has been shielded from Pakistan's violent reality. As a child, she would hear conversations about journalists being flogged and students who disappeared, so she knew life could be dangerous. She was in Nice, along with the rest of the family, when her uncle was murdered. She and her cousin Sassi, who found the body, were only three.
"That doesn't leave anybody – you never get over that," she says. "It is horrible, but my father and mother both came from these backgrounds where there was this violence, where you didn't know what was going to happen tomorrow. They were amazingly loving parents and they were able to say, 'Yes, this happened but we're going to keep living, we're going to move past it and get stronger.' In Karachi, in the months after my father was killed, I remember wanting to go out with my friends and my mother saying: 'Sure, go out'. They tried to live normally – to not be paranoid – because otherwise you may as well be dead too."
Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter's Memoir, by Fatima Bhutto, is published by Jonathan Cape, £20. To order a copy for £18.99, including free UK mainland p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846
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