Profile - Fatima Bhutto: Fatima's Feuding, Feudal Family

They can be found from Pakistan to the Philippines and in many countries between. Their names are closely associated with the political fortunes of their nations and often with violent conflict: among them Aquino, Gandhi and, of course, Bhutto. The newest name in that particular political dynasty has been offering her thoughts on the phenomenon to Farzana Shaikh.

Fatima Bhutto is on record as saying she does not believe in 'birthright politics.' Yet many doubt she will resist the lure of a political career that can be expected to rest squarely on her membership of Pakistan's most celebrated, if tarnished, political dynasty - the Bhuttos. As the proud bearer of the family name, Fatima has found it hard to build on her reputation as an implacable foe of the very system that guarantees her the kind of public attention of which others of lesser birth can only dream.

The publication of her new book, Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter's Memoir, in which she tells the story of Pakistan through the prism of her feuding and feudal family, provided just the opportunity for me to put to her this central conundrum.

I asked Fatima how she felt about using and jealously guarding the Bhutto name while denouncing those like her aunt, Benazir Bhutto, who had sought to do likewise - but whom she accuses of creating a 'saprophytic culture' based on 'bloodlines, genetics [and] a who's who of dynastic politics.' Could she, I wondered, have it both ways?

ORDINARY
'I had an ordinary childhood,' she told me, 'in which the issue of dynastic rights hardly figured.' Born in Kabul in 1982 and educated in exile in Damascus until she finally settled with her family in Pakistan in 1993 allowed her, she believes, 'the freedom to escape the pressures of growing up in Pakistan, where family name determines who you are.'

In Damascus, by contrast, 'few knew or even cared about my background; most of my school friends couldn't even pronounce my [family] name.' Nor she insists, was there any expectation on the part of her father, Murtaza Bhutto, who was gunned down in Karachi in 1996, that Fatima would 'carry on the family name.'

But this version of her childhood as 'ordinary' is unlikely to wash with those persuaded that the Bhuttos were no ordinary family. Owners of unimaginable wealth - it is said that the size of Bhutto land-holdings in Sind even defeated census officials of the Raj - influential counsellors to Indian princes, and the privileged recipients of knighthoods for services rendered to the British empire in India - the Bhuttos took their entitlement to power for granted. The glittering careers of Fatima's grandfather, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, and his arguably more famous daughter, Benazir, were judged merely to endorse this culture of entitlement.

The Bhutto's meteoric rise did not go unnoticed outside Pakistan. There were friends in high places, especially in the Arab world. Former Palestine Liberation Organisation Chairman Yasser Arafat, Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and then-Syrian Presiden tHafez al-Assad were all close to the family and generously hosted Fatima's father during his sixteen year exile. Their patronage ensured that the fortunes and fate of the Bhuttos was common knowledge. 'The whole Arab world,' Fatima's step-mother Lebanese by descent - told her, 'was nauseated' by the decision of Pakistan's military ruler, General Zia ul Haq, to hang Fatima's grandfather, Zulfiqar, in 1979.

That Fatima was expected by her father to tell the story of how this extraordinary family fell from grace and was corrupted by greed is also in no doubt. In the book she freely admits that she agreed to honour a promise to her father to 'tell his story' one day. But timing was of the essence or else, as she told an audience at the launch of her book in Karachi, the story could be 'hijacked' by those she calls 'murderers and thieves' acting at the behest of Pakistan's President, Asif Ali Zardari - Benazir's widower - whom she accuses of orchestrating her father's assassination.

Fatima insists, however, that these blood feuds, especially those that famously divided Murtaza from his elder sister, Benazir, had nothing to do with dynastic rights. When I asked her whether she might have felt differently about dynasties if Murtaza, the eldest son, had been allowed to assume his father's mantle, she appeared to bristle. 'I am not arguing,' she told me, 'that my father had an inherent right over his sister to claim the Bhutto legacy - no one has the right to claim a legacy, which is a dirty word, anyway.'

Their differences, she insists, were 'political.' The idea that Murtaza was driven by personal rivalry - he followed his sister To Harvard and Oxford - or that he might have been motivated by personal resentment against his sister, who is widely believed to have been her father's favourite, is sharply dismissed by Fatima as 'a myth fabricated by Benazir.'

Her grandfather, she wanted me to understand, 'was a progressive man, who treated all his children equally,' adding 'in fact, his favourite was Sanam [Benazir's younger sister, the third of the four Bhutto children].' At the same time, she was at pains to demonstrate that, if anything, Zulfiqar intended his political mission to be continued by his sons: she told me: 'he had set aside two constituencies for his sons rather than his daughter in which to be elected.'

JUSTICE DENIED
When I asked how she felt as a self-proclaimed feminist about the dynastic 'politics of patriarchy' and whether she suffered from any tension involved in reconciling her outrage over her father's loss of his 'birthright' with her personal commitment to a world free of a culture of entitlement on grounds of descent and gender, she remained calm. 'There is no tension,' she assured me. 'My outrage has nothing to do with denied birthrights; it is to do with the denial of justice, with the fact of my father's extra-judicial murder.'

For her part Fatima has tried hard to carve a non-dynastic niche for herself. Breaking with family tradition, she headed to study not at Harvard or Oxford, but Columbia University and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. She has also broken ranks by opting, so far, for a literary rather than a political career, and denied she has any political ambitions. As if to underscore the point, she told me that she would have no hesitation in surrendering her family name if she were to marry.

Will she stick to this course? It is too early to say.


Source: http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/publications/twt/archive/view/-/id/2026/