Benazir Thought Pakistanis Owed Her A Blood Debt’

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s granddaughter, and Benazir Bhutto’s niece, writer Fatima Bhutto has an uneasy relationship with her political pedigree. Estranged from her aunt uptill her 2007 assassination, the 27-year-old keeps a distance from political involvement. Her new book, Songs of Blood and Sword, traces the Bhuttos’ history, returning to the day her father Murtaza was gunned down by Karachi police in 1996. From Karachi, in a phone interview with ANIRUDDHA SHANKAR, she speaks candidly on Benazir and Pakistan’s political prospects. Excerpts:

Q1. The tale of your father Murtaza Bhutto’s killing has been recounted so often in the press. In interview after interview and even now, in /Songs of Blood and Sword /you have returned to that fateful day. What effect has this had on you? How has this whole history shaped you -- are there aspects of your personality you can directly attribute to this?
I think that at a very young age, you come to realise that such incidents are far more common than once one thought. Whether it’s the killing of Amadou Diallo in New York, who was shot 19 times or Jean Charles de Menezes in London after 7/11, you come to realise that people in power can commit acts of terrible violence with little repercussion. I think that retelling his story and setting out to discover his life really opened my eyes.

SONG OF BLOOD AND SWARD Fatima Bhutto Penguin 480pp; Rs 699

Q2. When you were growing up, what did being a Bhutto mean to you?
Not very much, really. I grew up outside Pakistan in Damascus, Syria and being a Bhutto meant nothing to the people there. They could barely pronounce the name. (laughs) When I did come back to Karachi, I encountered a bit of curiosity from schoolmates but that’s about it. We were never made to feel like we were special or different children.

Family ties Fatima Bhutto's new book tracks the history of Pakistan's political first family Photo: GETTY IMAGES

Q3. The story of the Bhuttos is now quite complex, quite muddied. In the years after Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s execution, what went wrong with the family?
Good question. I think that once in power, people began to give into temptation, to compromise. With Benazir the political landscape became murky because it became about guilt, about the people owing her a debt because the state took her father’s life - they were told to elect someone because they owed them something, because there was a blood debt on them not because of their record or platform or manifesto.

Q4. You were close to Benazir to begin with. When you look back at her now, with adult eyes, how would you assess her strengths and weaknesses, both public and private?
I was close to her as a child and her niece, growing up. Then, she was out of power and very different, as a person... She was my aunt who would take me out for ice cream. She was brave and ambitious, of course. Those were really admirable qualities. She really changed when she came to power, however. She became more open to compromise (and not of the good kind). And then of course, there was the corruption. You got a very clear understanding that for her, power became the goal itself. The security establishment wielded a lot of power during her terms but it became very convenient and easy to blame the army for everything that you were not able to do. You are the head of the country. If you aren’t powerful enough, you shouldn’t be in power.

Q5. So in some senses, it’s a departure from the uncompromising stance of her father.
Certainly. What Zulfiqar Ali did for foreign policy, Benazir did the opposite. Zulfiqar pushed back the Army, Benazir did the exact opposite. He defended and safeguarded Pakistan’s sovereignty; she exposed it, laid it bare.Q6. So you would say she betrayed his legacy? Well, she certainly betrayed the bases on which the PPP was founded.

Q7. When she returned to Pakistan, she was hailed internationally as a standard-bearer for democracy. How did you react to this?
Benazir’s return was an engineered event created by the West. Musharraf was no longer palatable so he had to go and she was to be brought in. You must remember that in order to return, she compromised, again, on Pakistan’s sovereignty and security. She agreed to several anti-Pakistan steps such as permission for direct aerial bombing of tribal areas by the West. Certain newspapers like the New York Times and the Guardian trumpeted her return, but she compromised heavily on several areas. Not only did she do that, she agreed to return only if the corruption cases against her and her husband were dismissed.

Q8. What was the toughest part about writing this book? Is there anything you hesitated to put in? Anything you left out? And why?
I’m certainly not good at censoring myself, I prefer to talk about the difficult things. I think the toughest part was donning the role of a journalist or private investigator and setting out, discovering the facts behind my father’s murder, chasing names, talking to police officials who were there at the time... people would not say things to me, I was faced with stonewalling. At the same time, it was very fulfilling. And I learnt that there are many more brave people than frightened ones. So there was always a way around.

Q9. When you look at the trajectory of the Bhuttos – sudden deaths, mysterious circumstances, betrayals, internecine struggle – how do you read the family? Does the family’s story tell the story of Pakistan in any way? The potential for great good and great corruption, perhaps. Do you think the feudal nature of the family has anything to do with it?
I think it tells the story of the violence of the country. The violence of Pakistan has affected the family and the family has been a part of it. That was the most obvious similarity to me. And certainly feudalism is a violent system. And in it’s most violent forms, it’s about entitlement. And when you have entitlement in politics that’s extraordinarily dangerous. In Pakistan, feudalism is one of the problems, certainly. But you also have these vast oligarchies – the civil bureaucracy, the military, the industrial cartels. We’ve got a lot of issues to be sorted out as a country as a country and I think, yes, that one of them is the notion that some are born greater than others.

Q10. On that note, how can this story be bent? In certain press reports, Rahul Gandhi has been mentioned as someone who’s trying to change the Gandhi legacy of nepotism and corruption, of the most self-abasing sycophancy?
We’ve got to let go of our reliance on dynasties. This notion that you only have three or four choices is very dangerous, that you have someone from this family or that family, or from the army or the constant bogeyman of the mullahs is very dangerous. You have to have not just a representative democracy but a participatory one – one where you can take part in even if you’re not from the right family. We have to have new faces.

Q11. On the point of dynasty, we’ve seen stalwarts of the PPP like Makhdoom Amin Fahim and Aitzaz Ahsan been sidelined in this new government. Do you see this as part of the wrong thing to do?
Now comes the part where I don’t censor myself (laughs). These are people who had their chances in the first two governments and threw them away. We’ve seen what Amin Fahim has done and the answer is nothing. I haven’t seen any positive contribution from Amin Fahim for example.

Q12. Would you say the same thing about Aitzaz Ahsan?
With him it’s different because he played a very central role in the restoration of Iftikhar Chaudhary [the current Chief Justice of Pakistan] but on the other hand, he’s defended Benazir and her husband on corruption charges.

Q13. This is really interesting because you’ve had such a clear position on these issues but, for example, at the investiture ceremony he was made Prime Minister in, your grandfather Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had in his pocket a document that would suspend Fundamental Rights and invest powers in him as Chief Martial Law Administrator.
Well, I was clear when I started this book that it was not going to be a hagiography of anybody. And my grandfather did attempt to and ultimately did succeed in enhancing his own powers. And the few points I’ve been most critical of him are on those changes and on Balochistan. And I think that some people who view politics very personally take that very badly. But I think there’s nothing disloyal in being critical, I think it’s important to be critical so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes. And we have this tendency in Pakistan to lionise public figures, to make them demigods. But they make mistakes, they’re human beings. We should vote them into power or refrain from doing so... but that doesn’t excuse violence against them.

Q14. Would this tendency to lionise or denounce people strongly be, in your opinion, a critical flaw of Pakistani polity?
People either love or hate Zulfiqar Ali. He is a very polarising figure. But I think that where there isn’t a space for discourse or public debate, we cut off our ability to talk about public figures, about certain things. For example, with the Kerry-Lugar bill, Richard Holbrooke said that if you’re against it, you’re an enemy of Pakistan. I’m sorry, that’s not the case. I think it’s an easy thing to do in politics in general, not something particular to Pakistan.

Q15. Would you have any telling anecdote about Benazir or your father that characterises them for you?
Just their political education, was incredibly different, for example. Whereas my father’s heroes growing up were people like [assassinated Congolese revolutionary and Prime Minister] Patrice Lumumba, Benazir Bhutto’s were people like Queen Elizabeth (laughs) -- very different people, very different historical trajectories.

Q16. You were born in Kabul, where your father helped found Al Zulfiqar. That organisation took up arms against the Pakistani state and was even involved in acts of violence against civilians including the hijacking of an airliner and the murder of a passenger. How do you view such a path of resistance in the light of contemporary events?
This was very important thing for me to write about in the book. In 2003, both my father and my uncle were posthumously and honourably acquitted of the hijacking charge. At the time the case was put against them, the same case slapped on Benazir – but the case against her has miraculously disappeared. There were some 90-odd cases of treason slapped on the brothers by the Zia regime and some stand till this day, we’re still fighting some of them. What I did was talk to people who were with my father and uncle at the time. They were both young men at the time, younger than I am now. Their fight was against the military regime that had deposed the civilian government and abrogated the constitution, not against civilians. What is infuriating about the hijacking is that not only does that charge hang over their heads for decades, in 2003, after they were honourably acquitted, the entire issue goes away. A plane was hijacked, why can’t we talk about it? Was it only an issue to form the basis for a legal charge against them? The answer seems to be yes. When I was younger, my father would say – I think it’s from Thomas Jefferson –“Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.” They had spent years outside Pakistan, writing letters, pamphlets, lobbying foreign governments, lobbying the expatriate community to save their father’s life and it came to nothing. And at the time, both of them — I think they were 23 and 19 years old — said, well, we’ve tried this tack, let’s try another one. And they tried it. It wasn’t successful. They didn’t unseat the dictatorship. But I think it was noble of them to try.

Q17. Do you think there’s any resonance with what’s going on in Balochistan right now? I’m talking of course of the 2006 killing of Nawab Akbar Bugti at the hands of the state while his grandson Brahamdagh has taken up arms against Pakistan?
Well, I think that anywhere where you have a state that takes away people’s economic and political rights, you’re going to have a resistance movement. I think it’s too early to give a verdict on the Balochistan movement, we have to wait and see how it progresses. But we have a strong history of resistance in this country.

Q18. You’ve written this book about your father and about your family. Your cousin Bakhtawar has tried to come to terms with her grief, I think, perhaps also by singing about her assassinated mother. Does that strike a chord in you? How do you get along with her and her siblings Asifa and Bilawal?
Well, I don’t have any relationship with them.

Q19. And none with their father [President Zardari] as well?
No, clearly not with their father.

Q20. Do you think he’s done anything right for Pakistan?
Well, I think he’s done a lot of things that are right for the Zardari family but not for Pakistan – he’s passed legislation that enforces censorship, he’s signed deals with the IMF that are anti-Pakistan. Take the Kerry-Lugar Bill. A good chunk of the money received from the Americans is going to the charity handout organisations and programmes set up in his wife’s name such as the Benazir Bhutto Income Support Programme. And given his record of corruption in the past, such events don’t instil much confidence …

Q21. What is your reading of the Pakistani judiciary ?
Well, I think it depends on any given day. The same judiciary that exonerated my father also exonerated all the policemen that killed him. This is also the same judiciary that at one point of time was looking into the cases of the disappeared persons but isn’t anymore. So I think we can’t have a free juidicary when you don’t have a free government. When you don’t have access to justice, to the courts, to law and order, you can’t then say that you have a free judicial system.

Q22. So would you support a flawed democracy over a return to rule by a strongman?
I think there’s no difference, really. We have a dictatorship in Pakistan, whether it’s civilian or military.

Q23. Do you really think it’s a civilian dictatorship?
Well, they’ve passed this electronic crimes law last summer which covers all electronic or digital communications — emails, SMSs, blogs, everything — which allows people to be convicted for a very wide range of offences that are very vaguely worded. And people have been arrested under it and could be jailed for up to four years for forwarding joke SMSs. Zardari isn’t a dictator but there’s a big difference between this current dispensation and a free democratic system.

Q24. On that point, in four years, your cousin Bilawal, who is currently Co-Chairman of the PPP, will be eligible to stand for election to Parliament. Do you think that if he does gain power, it will be a positive or negative development?
I think that’s a question for the other side to answer.

Q25. You’ve had a very clear stance against compromise with tyranny. If you were to gain political power, what changes would you bring about.
Aha (laughs) As a critic of this dynastic system, I wouldn’t accept political power. I would have to, in a sense, recuse myself. But I still think that there’s a lot one can do to push for change.

Q26. Do you see any similarities or resonances with Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi in India and their political life?
I think that once you’ve reached a certain level of participatory democracy, then it doesn’t matter what your last name is. But we’re still a good distance away from that stage.

Q27. You were moved by the earthquake in Kashmir to pen your second book. Have you returned to work there? How has rehabilitation proceeded there?
The earthquake was a great shock to Pakistanis and it was a time when people really came together to help the survivors. But it went through a period of compassion fatigue, just like I think is happening with Haiti. The book was a project of mine to keep people involved. And I hope and believe it was read that way. I haven’t actually gone back… one reason is that the town I was working in, Balakot, was actually moved in entirety to a new location and is now called something like Balakot No. 2. As a result it’s been very difficult to trace people. And the rehabilitation hasn’t proceeded well, really. I think it’s the same story: corruption and lack of transparency. Billions of dollars were raised in donor conferences and we have no idea where it’s gone. There are no publicly accessible records.

Q28. For several months it seemed that Karachi was escaping the violence that was wracking Pakistan. And then we saw a spate of violence – bombings, arson, clashes. Some commentators said Karachi was mounting a valiant defence against Talibanisation and yet it seemed to fall prey to a particularly violence that was quite characteristic of it. As someone who lives and works in Karachi, how has the violence affected you?
I think this Taliban thing is a big bogeyman. It’s an easy term to toss around but the idea that Karachi will fall to Talibanisation is ridiculous. Certainly there are parts of the country that have, but then again the responsibility falls on the current government – its failure to offer access to justice. I think these groups only come in because they offer alternative systems that at least give an indication of working. Karachi has a history of violence that has nothing to do with the Taliban but we’re less likely to talk about that because it doesn’t titillate. We can’t go to the IMF and say, ‘Oh give us some money because currently the police is executing people in [the Karachi slum of] Lyari.’ It’s like an ATM on the other hand: Just say ‘Taliban!’ and people will give you money.

Q29. You’re saying the idea of the Taliban has been callously deployed to obtain money.
Oh, certainly.

Q30. What hopes does this book carry for you?
Justice. The justice of memory. The justice of recorded archives and history.

Q31. Faith in a final retelling?
Yes and so much has been changed, so much erased by interested parties. In a situation where there’s censorship and a repressive state, I hope this book stands for justice. Justice and memory.

Source :

http://www.tehelka.com/story_main44.asp?filename=hub100410benazir_thought.asp

Fatima Bhutto questions efficacy of UN team probing Benazir's assassination

New Delhi, Apr 4 (ANI): Assassinated Pakistan's former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's niece Fatima Bhutto, has questioned the efficacy of United Nations team probing the assassination of her aunt on December 27, 2007.



"I think the issue with the UN report is this, - on what basis they are investigating. There was no autopsy done on Benazir's body, the UN team did not exhume her body, the scene of crime was washed up," said Fatima.

"So how are they investigating the death without anyone of these factors," she added.

Fatima also criticized the leadership of President Asif Ali Zardari.

"I think Pakistan is watching a President, who before he was President was fighting corruption cases in Switzerland, Spain, France, the UK, Pakistan and four murder cases has a very clear answer, - what kind of leadership they are going to get," said Fatima, after releasing her book 'Songs of Blood and Sword', a tale of one of Pakistan's most powerful family, in New Delhi.

Zardari was accused of plotting the murder of Fatima's father Murtaza Bhutto on Sep 20, 1996, but had been acquitted of the charge.

Fatima and her stepmother Ghinwa Bhutto have often hinted that they believe Benazir or her widower Asif Ali Zardari had a hand in the killing of her father Murtaza Bhutto.

Though Benazir made several warm references in her autobiography, 'Daughter of the East' to her niece, Fatima believes her aunt tried to split the Bhutto family.

Fatima, who already has two books to her credit, did her Master's degree at London's School of African and Oriental Studies. Instead of heading a debating society like her aunt at Oxford, she wrote her dissertation on the resistance movement to former president Zia-ul-Haq.

She published a book of poetry, 'Whispers of the Desert', at the age of 15, followed in 2006 by a collection of stories about the 2005 earthquake that killed 73,000 people in Pakistan. (ANI)

Fatima Bhutto alleges Zardari involved in her father's murder

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 Bhutto being interviewed by journalist Karan Thapar.

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

There's something about Fatima

NEW DELHI: Her book couldn't be published in Pakistan but in India, it's already caused some stir. It was only a matter of time before Fatima Bhutto, granddaughter of former Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, wrote her memoir. Songs of Blood and Sword, telling the story of the Pakistan's influential but blighted Bhutto family that has seen much violence and death was released here on Saturday.

At the open-air venue of a five-star hotel, Fatima Bhutto chatted with William Dalrymple, read extracts and talked of life with her father and even with her aunt, Benazir before she became prime minister. Suspected to have been behind the killing of her father Murtaza Bhutto, current Pakistan president, Asif Ali Zardari emerged a villain, of course. She recalled how "cruelly" Zardari had broken the news of Murtaza's killing to 14 year-old Fatima on September 20, 1996 and later, delivered his first address on the 12th death anniversary.

It's not just the politics or the story of her family, there's something about Fatima Bhutto herself. She has studied at Columbia University and University of London. The 27 year-old journalist-columnist appeared in a green sari -- bindi and all -- sipped white wine as she spoke of violence and betrayal. Members of the audience complimented her -- "you're looking beautiful" -- bought copies of the books and lined up to get it signed. Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar was also present at the gathering.

Asked to draw a family tree and indicate which diseases particular family member suffered from for biology-class, high-school student Fatima was flummoxed. A good part of her family was claimed by political violence, not any disease. But the death at the centre of her memoir is that of her father Murtaza.

Fatima's parents split when she was still an infant and Murtaza raised her. They lived in Damascus and Syria, and Murtaza did his best. She recalls her father chopping her hair in a fashion that made her "look like Mowgli." She thought herself as Mowgli till she figured he was a boy. Her father remarrying and her stepmother Ghinwa Bhutto, a Syrian-Lebanese and former ballet dancer, brought some semblance of order in her life. If she had fond memories of moments with her father, unlikely though it may seem now, she says she's had a few of those with her aunt, Benazir as well. As the first Bhutto child of her generation, she was taken for icecream, read stories by her aunt. She's been told she is like her aunt several times. But what she once considered a "compliment" now sounds like an "admonishment."

Fatima still feels cornered. She had a column in a paper in which she wrote on politics. After Zardari became president, she says, she was encouraged to write on travel and food. She however maintains columns in several other dailies and websites. Her writing includes a volume of poetry, Whispers of the Desert.

Her father was no angel either, he too had cases against him, reminds Dalrymple. "He was not male Aung San Suu Kyi," she said, but political propaganda rendered Benazir in angelic tones and painted the brothers as the monsters. That was "part of the mythology built around him," she says.


Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Theres-something-about-Fatima/articleshow/5760106.cms

Benazir agreed to be PM under Zia: Fatima

This week sees the launch of Fatima Bhutto's book Songs of Blood and Sword, which seems to reveal the inside story of the assassination of Murtaza Bhutto, the deep divisions between the Bhutto family and raises serious questions about former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. In Devil's Advocate, Karan Thapar spoke to Murtaza Bhutto's daughter and Benazir Bhutto's niece Fatima Bhutto.

Karan Thapar: Fatima Bhutto, let's start with your father's assassination on 20th of September 1996. After the shooting had stopped and as the hours ticked by and he failed to come home, you rang your aunt Benazir Bhutto who was the Prime Minister of Pakistan at that time. What followed was a harrowing and chilling conversation. Let's start by asking you to give details of that conversation.

Fatima Bhutto: Well, after some time had passed and my father didn't return home, and this whole being before cell phones and text messaging, you know there had been a big buildup around our house. We had been surrounded by tanks, by policemen. We had enough and I thought I am going to call my aunt because perhaps they have arrested my father, perhaps they have done something, I am going to call and ask what's happened. I called and it was quite clear that her ADC, her operator was already aware at that point of time what happened. He kept asking me if we were okay, if my family was alright, and I had no idea what he was referring to. 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.

Karan Thapar: And it was in this callous unfeeling way that your uncle broke the news of your father's killing?

Fatima Bhutto: Yes, and of course 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?

Karan Thapar: What you then discovered that after the shooting, instead of taking your father to an emergency hospital, the police took him to a dispensary. Do you suspect that it was to ensure that he didn't survive?

Fatima Bhutto: Well absolutely. And the tribunal that had no power to impose sentence or enact any legal punishment said that it was done on purpose. None of the seven men killed that night were taken to emergency hospital. They were all taken to different locations. They were all taken pass 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.

Karan Thapar: So a man who was dying, who needed immediate attention was taken to a dispensary which actually said - no emergencies?

Fatima Bhutto: Not just that but the police dropped my father at the hospital and left.

Karan Thapar: They didn't even register him at the dispensary?

Fatima Bhutto: No.

Karan Thapar: So they just disposed off him as if it was an unknown body?

Fatima Bhutto: As if it was an unknown body...yes.

Karan Thapar: Much later, for the purposes of this book, you interviewed Farooq Lehgari, who at the time of assassination of your father, was the President of Pakistan, and he actually told you that he had proof that Asif Zardari wanted to eliminate your father.

Fatima Bhutto: I didn't interview Lehgari. He was interviewed by various channels of Pakistan. Only recently, in the past three months, he came out and said that Asif Zardari, the current President, went to him, when he was the sitting President and said that this man has to be eliminated.

Karan Thapar: Actually and in so many words?

Fatima Bhutto: 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.

Karan Thapar: Do you believe that Asif Zardari is involved in the killing of your father?

Fatima Bhutto: Yes.

Karan Thapar: Do you believe that Benazir Bhutto has a role to play?

Fatima Bhutto: Yes. Unfortunately.

Karan Thapar: I am going to ask you to repeat that you actually believe that your bua (aunt), your father's elder sister is responsible in some way for the murder of your father.

Fatima Bhutto: 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. 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.

Karan Thapar: So, both before and then immediately after what happened, and then in the cover-up--in all three stages you believe there are serious question marks about her behaviour.

Fatima Bhutto: Certainly. Masood Sharif was, at that time, head of the Intelligence Bureau and reported to the office of the Prime Minister, was at the scene of the crime that night was several years later inducted into the central committee of Benazir's party. Now, to induct a man who has been publicly accused of your brother's murder sends a certain signal.

Karan Thapar: Years later, right at the end of your book, you quote something that she said just before Benazir died. She actually said that your father was responsible for his own death.

Fatima Bhutto: Yes. She remained committed to the police line. 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.

Karan Thapar: Your book also sketches out, the growing difference leading to the rift between your father Murtaza and his sister Benazir. Although the problems perhaps began earlier, they began to crystallize after the death of General Zia in 1988. When your father wanted to return to Pakistan, your grand mother Nusrat Bhutto was in favour of it but Benazir was bitterly opposed. Why was she opposed to her brother's return?

Fatima Bhutto: One year after their brother Shahnawaz's murder in 1986, Benazir 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.

Karan Thapar: But then, when Zia died that that chapter was, in a sense, over, why then did she stop your father from returning.

Fatima Bhutto: 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.

Karan Thapar: Do you also suspect that she saw your father as a political challenge? She didn't want to share power with him. She wanted to be Bhutto's heir. She didn't want the Bhutto's son to come back and enjoy the limelight, the power or the legacy with her.

Fatima Bhutto: Certainly. I think she didn't want another Bhutto to say why these compromises have been made on the blood of our father.

Karan Thapar: So neither did she wanted to share power nor did she want her brother to question what she was doing?

Fatima Bhutto: Yes.

Karan Thapar: Five years later in 1993 when he decided that he would return and contest elections--and these were the elections that were going to bring Benazir back to power for the second time as Prime Minister, he asked her for a seat, and she refused.

Fatima Bhutto: Yes. She refused him a seat. In fact, the seat he wanted a seat in Larkana that his father had run from, that my grandmother had run from. Benazir then gave a new entry into the party to a man who had publicly welcomed General Zia-ul-Haq in Larkana and presented him with an Azak on his first visit to the city.

Karan Thapar: So the family seat at Larkana was denied to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's son and heir and given in fact to someone quite different, someone you described in your book as Zardari crony.

Fatima Bhutto: A Zardari crony and a Zia crony as it would seem.

Karan Thapar: So in family's eyes it is the ultimate betrayal?

Fatima Bhutto: 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.

Karan Thapar: And deeply hurtful.

Fatima Bhutto: Deeply hurtful. All that he wanted was a ticket. He should have been allowed a chance to contest.

Karan Thapar: Your father did return in 1993. At the airport itself he was arrested and jailed for the rest eight months. You were eleven at that time and in your book you recount how you set a sort of challenge to your aunt. You said to her: if you are being honest and have nothing to do with his bad treatment, come and see him with us in jail tomorrow. What response did you get?

Fatima Bhutto: When he was jailed, I asked my aunt, who at that time had protested her innocence to come and visit him, and she told me that she would arrange something. And as the hours ticked by and it was clear that she was not getting back to me, I began to call her as I genuinely believed that she could be behind all this. And she said: I am sorry, I can't come and visit Mir with you in jail because I haven't been able to get permission from the jail superintendent.

Karan Thapar: The Prime Minister couldn't get permission from the jail superintendent to visit her brother?

Fatima Bhutto: That's what I said. I said: you are the Prime Minister. She said well I can't get it so I can't come. It was clear then that she did not want to see her brother.

Karan Thapar: During that period when your father was in jails, specifically on the 5th of January 1994 which happens to be your grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's birth anniversary, Benazir actually stopped her mother, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's widow from going to his grave because she felt that her mother was siding with her brother Murtaza and not her.

Fatima Bhutto: And that my father Murtaza's supporters would be accompanying my grandmother; that it would be a show of strength for her brother who had never visited his father's grave at that point. And again, we saw that our house at Larkana, the house was surrounded by police. People were locked; people were prevented from leaving the house. And eventually the police fired on the house. We still have the bullet marks on the gate.

Karan Thapar: In fact, you write that the bullets just missed your grandmother Nusrat Bhutto.

Fatima Bhutto: A man stood in front of her. He was shot and he died later on that day.

Karan Thapar: Later your grandmother rang Benazir and asked why that had happened. And she was actually told that the Indian RAW agents had infiltrated the family home Al-Murtaza.

Fatima Bhutto: Yes

Karan Thapar: Did you believe?

Fatima Bhutto: I don't think anybody believed that. There was an incredible show of state police and security forces in Larkana. We had to prevent my family and my father's supporters from having their presence known. So, when there are thousands of policemen crawling all over Larkana, how did RAW agents manage to slip through this dragnet, as my father called it, of federal security office. It was ludicrous.

Karan Thapar: You book also tells an account of the mysterious and so far unexplained death of you younger uncle Shahnawaz. Benazir's younger brother in Nice in 1985. Years later you interviewed the renowned French lawyer Jacques Verges, who was retained by the family in 1985, and he sort of suggested you that Benazir had a role complicit to Shahnawaz's death. Did you believe?

Fatima Bhutto: Well it was shocking to hear and certainly not just Jacques Verges, but Shahnawaz's daughter Sassi raised some questions that were very disturbing. It was a year after Shahnawaz's murder that Benazir began to negotiate with the military. The same military she believed was responsible for Shahnawaz's murder. She was reluctant to let Jacques Verges take the case as forward as he liked. He wanted to bring in to question Pakistani security agencies; the CIA, and their possible role in the murder. And Benazir forbade it.

Karan Thapar: In fact, you quote Jacques verges in your book. He says: in her mind, with her two brothers, what her two brothers were doing wasn't helping her. Among the two brothers, the strongest brother was Mir. Perhaps it was necessary to get Shah out of the way because he was the weaker one.

Fatima Bhutto: Yes.

Karan Thapar: She got Shah out of the way?

Fatima Bhutto: Again this is what's the disturbing questions that he raised in that meeting. Shahnawaz and Murtaza were both very opposed to American influence in Pakistan. They were bitterly opposed to the American influence in Pakistan's politics. And at that point of time, Benazir was seeking, as Jacques Verges supposed, an entry into the establishment.

Karan Thapar: So she needed to get opposition out of her way. In fact, opposition was her brother, but she had to get him out of the way.

Fatima Bhutto: It's a possibility.

Karan Thapar: Your aunt had a role to play in the death of both her brothers and maybe she was even complicit. Can you really, as a niece accept that she is responsible in some way for the death of both of them?

Fatima Bhutto: In terms of my father's murder, I spent years researching this issue. I spoke to witnesses, police, survivours. In that there is no doubt in my mind. 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.

Karan Thapar: And neither of them would say this lightly?

Fatima Bhutto: What all sides say is that there were certain questions that have never been answered. And while Benazir was alive, she refused to engage in those questions. Why?

Karan Thapar: The portrait that emerges of Benazir from your book, of not just of a calculating, cold, unfeeling woman, but to be honest, a person who is capable of great brutality and maybe if I can support it, even a person of great evil. Do you really need to paint such a terrible portrait.

Fatima Bhutto: I think Benazir was a very complex person to me. 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.

Karan Thapar: Something that emerges is that the closer Benazir came to power, the more she became cruel and ambitious, and more distant she became from her family and her brothers. Did power corrupt and rule her?

Fatima Bhutto: It certainly seems that way. My memories of her as a woman struggling against power are incredibly different from the woman she was when she was in power.

Karan Thapar: She was your devoted aunt when you were a child. Today when you look back at the Benazir Bhutto you discovered through your research, the Benazir Bhutto you know of who failed to help when your father was dying. How do you think of her today?

Fatima Bhutto: 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.

Karan Thapar: Without realising that this was paradoxical and ironic?

Fatima Bhutto: Certainly she did not comment on its paradoxical nature.

Karan Thapar: Is there a bit of you that still loves her today?

Fatima Bhutto: 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.

Karan Thapar: Is there a part of you that now hates her?

Fatima Bhutto: I think hate and anger are incredibly violent emotions and if you allow them to take over, they destroy you too. And I don't want to give them the powers to do that. No, I don't hate her.

Karan Thapar: The Bhutto family is a large family. You have many cousins, aunts. They would all have read this book. How do they respond to the portrait that you have painted of Benazir?

Fatima Bhutto: Unfortunately, it's not that larger family anymore. I am not in touch with them. One would have to ask them to know.

Karan Thapar: Do you have any idea how Sanam's children or Benazir's children, your own first cousins would respond?

Fatima Bhutto: No. And to be very honest, they have experienced a very different side of her. I think they benefitted greatly when she was in power.

Karan Thapar: Do you think, in a way, by writing this book you have shared with the world, the agony and pain that you have gone through. But as a result of it, you have shut the door between you and your cousins.

Fatima Bhutto: That door was shut a long time ago.

Karan Thapar: Do you regret that?

Fatima Bhutto: No.

Karan Thapar: So does that mean that Fatima Bhutto is a Bhutto on her own?

Fatima Bhutto: 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.

Karan Thapar: So it's Fatima on her own?

Fatima Bhutto: Yes.

Karan Thapar: Fatima Bhutto, a pleasure talking to you.

Fatima Bhutto: Thank you for having me.

Source : http://ibnlive.in.com/news/benazir-agreed-to-be-pm-under-zia-fatima/112640-37.html

Zardari tried to bribe my father: Fatima Bhutto

Asif Ali Zardari attempted to bribe his brother-in-law Murtaza Bhutto to swing a deal in the Middle East at a time when his estranged sister Benazir Bhutto was Pakistan's prime minister but was roundly rebuffed, Murtaza's daughter Fatima Bhutto writes in her just released memoir, "Songs of Blood and Sword".

Zardari was accused of plotting Murtaza's murder but had been acquitted of the charge.

The book, published by Penguin, comes at a time when Zardari is set to be deprived of his sweeping powers through a constitution amendment being tabled in parliament on Friday to transfer to the prime minister major powers like the appointment of armed forces chiefs and reduce the president to a titular head of state.

"During a state trip to Syria during Benazir's first government and while we were still in exile there, Zardari had gone so far as to ask Papa to facilitate a deal he was considering in the Middle East, offering him a cut of the profits," Fatima writes.

"Papa was sickened; he never liked his sister's husband. His corruption and the stories of his excess reached Papa's ears often and it hurt him that such a man would use Zulfikar's (Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Fatima's grandfather and Paksitan's former president) name and memory to bilk investors the globe over of millions. He was further annoyed that Zardari, hapless when it came to any understanding of what Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's legacy meant, would be so crooked as to assume that the son of a martyr, who had been struggling in exile for over a decade at that point and who had never compromised on his beliefs, would jump at the sound of a cut in a Zardari deal.

"We don't do that, Zardari,' Papa said furiously," Fatima writes.

Murtaza was killed on Sep 20, 1996, when Fatima was 14, in a police gun battle near his Karachi residence. On Dec 3, 2009, a Karachi court acquitted 20 policemen charged with the killing.

After Benazir's government was dismissed in 1996, Zardari was detained for having a part in Murtaza's assassination. However, no charges were ever proved for want of evidence as the scene of Murtaza's assassination was wiped clean before police investigators could arrive.

On Zardari's acquittal, Fatima writes: "The day Zardari was acquitted of my father's murder, I was halfway around the world. I was on an assignment in Cuba to cover the past and present of the revolution in the lead-up to the fiftieth anniversary of Castro's takeover. I knew it was coming. Even when he had been incarcerated for the murders and the myriad cases against him, Zardari hardly spent time in jail - a serious mortally ill heart patient at the time, he had himself transfered to a luxury suite at his friend's private hospital in Karachi. That doctor friend was rewarded with the cabinet post of Minister of Oil and Petroleum after his chum miraculously rid himself of his heart problems and ascended to the highest post in the land.

"I had been visiting hospitals and schools, meeting officials and travelling the country. I was away from email. I had disconnected myself from Pakistan intentionally. I got a phone call one afternoon in Havana...It was Hameed (a guard), calling from home. 'I'm sorry, baba', he said. He didn't have to explain why. Zardari had bypassed the courts' standard procedures to have himself absolved of my father's murder. There was no point in appealing. He was going to be President legally or illegally. It was typical of the way he operated; justice was always the first casualty," Fatima writes.

She also relates another instance of her father's contempt for Zardari.

"When he gave speeches or interviews, Papa often called Zardari a chor, a thief. He coined the term 'Asif baba and the chalees chor', 'Asif Baba and the forty thieves' which became an instant hit (it remains part of the popular parlance to this day, I'm proud to note)," Fatima writes.

The Bhutto family has had to contend with violence for the last four decades, losing one member every decade.

Fatima's grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed in 1979 after what many consider to be a kangaroo trial. This was after he had been deposed as president by then army chief Gen. Zia-ul Haq.

Her uncle Shahnawaz, 27, was found dead in Nice on July 18, 1985, under mysterious circumstances and the Bhutto family firmly believed he was poisoned. No one was brought to trial for the murder.

Her father, Murtaza, Shahnawaz's brother, was killed Sep 20, 1996, and her aunt Benazir was assassinated Dec 27, 2007.

Source: http://www.hindustantimes.com/Zardari-tried-to-bribe-my-father-Fatima-Bhutto/H1-Article1-526904.aspx

Fatima Bhutto says her blood froze twice

Sunday, April 04, 2010
By By Muhammad Saleh Zaafir
ISLAMABAD: Fatima Bhutto says in her recently published book that her blood froze the day when Asif Ali Zardari was elected president of the country and her blood again froze when Asif Ali Zardari, during his address to the joint session of parliament, paused and asked for a moment of silence in honour of death of his brother-in-law Murtaza Bhutto.

She said that Zardari’s election to president prompted to send her younger brother Zulfi abroad, fearing for his safety.

She says that inspite of the violence her family has suffered, including the killing of her father Murtaza Bhutto, she “could never leave” the country.

“Amidst all this madness, all these ghosts and memories of times past, it feels like the world around me is crumbling, slowly flaking away,” she writes in her just-published memoir, “Songs of Blood and Sword”. Fatima Bhutto is an Afghan born poetess and writer. She studied at the Columbia University in the United States, and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. She currently writes columns for some newspapers. Fatima is every inch a staunch Pakistani. Her book has appeared just a week before the death anniversary of her grandfather.

“Sometimes, when it’s this late at night (she writes in the Epilogue dated April 2009), I feel my chest swell with a familiar anxiety. I think, at these times, that I have no more place in my heart for Pakistan. I cannot love it any more. I have to get away from it for anything to make sense; nothing here ever does.

“But then the hours pass, and as I ready myself for sleep as the light filters in through my windows, I hear the sound of mynah birds. And I know I could never leave,” Fatima writes.

“Songs of Blood and Sword” tells the story of a family of rich feudal landlords -- the proud descendents of a warrior caste -- who became powerbrokers in the newly created state of Pakistan. It is an epic tale full of romance and legend of feudal life, the glamour and licence of the international political elite and ultimately, the tragedy of four generations of a family defined by a political idealism that would destroy them. The history of this extraordinary family mirrors the tumultuous events of Pakistan itself, and the quest to find the truth behind her father’s murder has led Fatima to the heart of her country’s volatile political establishment. It is the history of a nation from Partition through the struggle with India over Kashmir, the Cold War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan up to the post 9/11 ‘War on Terror’. It is also a book about a daughter’s love for her father and her search to uncover, and to understand, the truth of his life and death. It is a book about a family and nation driven by murder, corruption, conspiracy and division, written by one who has lived it, in the heart of the storm. “Songs of Blood and Sword” is a book of international significance by a young woman who has already established herself as a brave and passionate campaigner.

Online adds: Fatima Bhutto says her “blood froze” on the day Asif Ali Zardari became the president and prompted her to send away her younger brother from the country fearing for his safety.

“On 20th September 2008, on the 12th anniversary of Papa’s death, Asif Zardari took oath as President of Pakistan. The ceremony had been scheduled for the day before, the 19th, but had been moved on the orders of the new president, who rescheduled his big day for Saturday, Papa’s Barsi,” Fatima writes.

“As he stood in front of the Parliament, which had voted him into the post almost unanimously (in the same highly democratic way that General Musharraf was ‘elected’ president), he paused in his speech and asked for a moment of silence to mark the occasion of his brother-in-law’s death. My blood froze. It was as if he was taunting us.

“But that would be nothing compared to what would follow. On Zardari’s first Pakistan Day as President he would honour Shoaib Suddle, one of the most senior police officers present at the scene when my father was killed. Suddle was awarded Hilal-e-Imtiaz, a national medal in recognition of his services to the people of Pakistan,” Fatima writes.

Zardari’s ascendancy also saw Fatima packing off her younger brother Zulfi. In the epilogue, dated April 2009, Fatima writes: “There is a similar danger, a tangible feeling that we are not safe. Seven months ago, I packed my bags and flew to see my brother off in a foreign country.

“Zulfi had enrolled for the start of his A-level year, twelfth grade, at a private school not far from our house in Karachi. Some of his friends had got into the same school. They had made plans for a more relaxed year in which they would be treated like college students. In the autumn of 2008, Zulfi had just turned eighteen and was aware how precarious our situation had become since Asif Zardari had acquitted himself in our father’s murder case. He was aware that because of our history with the man now called president, we weren’t safe in our country any longer.

“When Zardari announced himself as the PPP’s unanimously chosen presidential candidate, we knew he would stop at nothing to reach the pinnacle of power. There was no turning back for him. Against all odds, he was going to rule Pakistan. We made the decision to take Zulfi out of the country. It was a decision we had been avoiding, hoping it would not be necessary, since Benazir was killed in December 2007.

“But as Zulfi was the only surviving male heir of the Bhuttos, we couldn’t take the risk of leaving him vulnerable. Besides Zulfi, the only remaining Bhuttos are (cousin) Sassi and I. We don’t live in a country with a free press, we don’t live in a country with an independent judiciary -- or any judiciary for that matter. We have no safeguards against a violent and vindictive government,” Fatima writes.

Source: http://www.thenews.com.pk/print1.asp?id=232540

Bhutto scion takes on America on Indian soil

Utpal Borpujari, New Delhi, April 3, DH News Service:
Fiercely critical of the continuing American drone attacks on the northern tribal areas of Pakistan, prominent political commentator and Bhutto family scion Fatima Bhutto has blamed US interference for the continuance of India-Pakistan problems as well as the dropping of the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project.

“The history of American involvement in Pakistan involves playing Pakistan against India. They give both of us money, they take away money from one, and threaten the other. First we had British, who divided and ruled us, and now we have the Americans,” Fatima Bhutto told Deccan Herald in an exclusive interview here on Saturday.

In the country on a multi-city tour to launch and promote “Songs of Blood and Sword,” a book which explores the Bhutto family saga, particularly the assassination of her father Mir Murtaza Bhutto during the prime ministership of her aunt Benazir Bhutto, the author-columnist is of the view that the gas pipeline could have been a major catalyst in bringing peace.

Interference

“Not only America has interfered in Pakistan but it has also interfered in Pakistan and India issues. The gas pipeline is a very important thing for peace, but America does not want India and Pakistan to be at peace. So, they come and interfere with India, and they go and interfere with Pakistan. They have stopped it. This is what apparently America does everywhere,” she says.

Bhutto says the US uses its influence in the region to keep the two neighbours on the edge against each other, and that the governments of the two countries have always played along.

Friendly people

“If you put a Pakistani and an Indian in a room, they are the friendliest people on the earth. They share the same culture, the same language, the same food, and cricket. But the governments make it very hard for them to meet each other. It’s in our interest to make peace, it’s totally in the interest of our economy, our peoples to make peace. But the governments of course have different agendas,” she says.

Blaming the United States for invading her country’s sovereignty by regularly making the drone attacks that has allegedly killed scores of innocent children and women, Fatima Bhutto quotes Arundhati Roy to say that “the drones are the perfect weapons to fight the poor, who have no chance to fight back.”

“This is an incredible attack on the sovereignty for Pakistan. Imagine having a foreign country coming whenever it likes and bombing your country. It’s a great pain to see this happen to your country, a country that you love,” she says.

Source : http://www.deccanherald.com/content/62006/bhutto-scion-takes-america-indian.html

Fatima Bhutto hails move to reduce powers of Zardari

New Delhi, Apr 3 (PTI) Hailing moves in Pakistan that may lead to reduction in the power of President Asif Ali Zardari, Fatima Bhutto, niece of slain former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, said there should not be two different laws for the powerful and the common citizens.

"We are yet to see the law passed. It is important that now we are talking about it but in the first place I don't think or believe that Presidents or those in power should be be granted immunity.

"There should not be a law for the powerful and a law for the ordinary citizens. In fact those in power should be scrutinised even more closely and more severely than ordinary citizens," Fatima, who is here for the launch of her book 'Songs of Blood and Sword' said.



Source :http://www.ptinews.com/news/594529_Fatima-Bhutto-hails-move-to-reduce-powers-of-Zardari

I can never leave Pakistan: Fatima Bhutto

New Delhi, April 3 (IANS)

Fatima Bhutto, the niece of slain former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, says that in spite of the violence her family has suffered, including the killing of her father Murtaza Bhutto, she “could never leave” the country.
“Amidst all this madness, all these ghosts and memories of times past, it feels like the world around me is crumbling, slowly flaking away,” she writes in her just-published memoir “Songs of Blood and Sword” (Penguin/Rs.699).

“Sometimes, when it’s this late at night (she writes in the Epilogue dated April 2009), I feel my chest swell with a familiar anxiety. I think, at these times, that I have no more place in my heart for Pakistan. I cannot love it any more. I have to get away from it for anything to make sense; nothing here ever does.

“But then the hours pass, and as I ready myself for sleep as the light filters in through my windows, I hear the sound of mynah birds. And I know I could never leave,” Fatima writes.

Murtaza was killed Sep 20, 1996, when Fatima was 14, in a shootout near his Karachi residence. On Dec 3, 2009, a Karachi court acquitted 20 policemen charged with the killing.

The Bhutto family has had to contend with violence for the last four decades, losing one member every decade.

More at : I can never leave Pakistan: Fatima Bhutto http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/south-asia/i-can-never-leave-pakistan-fatima-bhutto_100342799.html#ixzz0k9BlHyhG

Source : http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/south-asia/i-can-never-leave-pakistan-fatima-bhutto_100342799.html

In the name of the Father-SoBaS livemint review

Songs Of The Blood | Fatima Bhutto

Of all the stories available to human beings, none is as instantly fascinating as that of a powerful family riven down the middle, feuding in public view and throwing the entire world out of shape with its might. This storyline is central to our epics, and is often reprised by contemporary events, especially in feudal societies. In such cases, the testimony of any one participant inevitably turns the story into one of good versus evil—the stakes are too high for it to be anything else, but the thrill of receiving the inside story more than compensates for the lack of detachment in perspective.

Whistle-blower: In this book, Benazir isn’t just a suave Oxford graduate; and (below) the author.

Just such a story—long-awaited since the first metaphorical gunshots were fired in recent years—is served up by Songs of Blood and Sword, 28-year-old Fatima Bhutto’s angry and sometimes incoherent retelling of the macabre lives and internecine warrings of the first family of Pakistani politics, the Bhuttos of Sindh.

Bhutto is best-known as the estranged niece of Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in 2008 shortly after her return to Pakistan after several years in exile. What she would like to be known as, however, is the daughter of the older of Benazir’s two brothers, Murtaza, who was himself estranged from his sister and was shot dead in an encounter with the police in 1996, while Benazir’s government was in power. Her book is, among other things, an attempt to claim for her late father the legacy of her grandfather Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the founder of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) now run by Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir’s controversial husband, who appears to be keeping the seat warm for Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, Fatima’s cousin. In Fatima’s icy view, it is herself and her brother and her cousin, and not the children of Benazir, who are “the only Bhuttos remaining”. Clearly, the fighting is not over yet.

Meanwhile, the story of the past goes something like this in Fatima’s often laboured telling. In the arid political landscape and frequent periods of military rule in the newly formed state of Pakistan, one figure stood out for his inherent nobility of mind, nationalistic fervour, commitment to democracy, and intelligence: Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, scion of one of feudal Pakistan’s most prominent families and head of its government from 1971 to 1977.

This portrait itself requires many dodges around some of the more unsavoury actions of Zulfiqar, but in this Fatima has a precedent: Reconciliation, the book published posthumously in 2008 by her own aunt Benazir, who was just as keen to claim Zulfiqar’s legacy. Indeed, as Fatima herself says, many in her own circle of family and friends have noted the resemblance between herself and her headstrong aunt, which makes her flaming hatred of Benazir all the more ironical and compelling.

When Zulfiqar was unseated by a coup by General Zia-ul-Haq in 1977 and later executed, his sons Murtaza and Shahnawaz fled Pakistan and set up an insurgent movement, Al-Zulfiqar, in Kabul, while Benazir, his eldest child, and Nusrat, his wife, were kept under house arrest by Zia but slowly managed to revive the party in the 1980s. Shahnawaz was mysteriously found dead in 1985—an event in which Fatima sees the hand of her aunt (throughout the book, no conspiracy theory is ever thought too outrageous to be discounted, and much of the testimony dredged up by Fatima’s research is clearly partisan).

Songs of Blood and Sword: Penguin, 470 pages, Rs699.

Murtaza, meanwhile, remained in exile—allegedly because Benazir felt threatened by him—even as his sister came to power as Pakistan’s youngest prime minister in 1988, following Zia’s death in a plane crash. Against his sister’s wishes, Murtaza returned to Pakistan in 1993, launching a splinter faction of the party and running for parliament himself and winning. His assassination in 1996—this is where Fatima’s evidence is strongest—was clearly a set-up, with Benazir and Zardari the most likely ringleaders of the operation.

For Fatima, Murtaza Bhutto was the real legatee of Zulfiqar’s ideas on Islam, democracy, socialism, foreign policy and governance, while his feted sister Benazir was actually a shrewish and corrupt manipulator who would do anything for power and wealth, and who turned the party into a personality cult. A long section of the book is devoted to Murtaza’s life and legacy, but the effect is often that of being forced through every photograph of a family album. Ingenious explanations are devised for every one of Murtaza’s controversial actions, such as this three-pronged analysis of the hijacking of a PIA plane by Al-Zulfiqar in 1981. Murtaza knew nothing about it until it was done, claims Fatima; it was Zia’s government which staged the hijack as a propaganda move against Al-Zulfiqar; further, it was Benazir who got Murtaza into trouble by exulting and speaking intemperately about the hijack.

One understands Fatima’s love and devotion for her father, and her courage in launching a no holds barred attack on Zardari and others in power in Pakistan today is certainly to be admired. But her narration is often so partisan, and her language so loaded, that it asks to be taken with more than a pinch of salt.

Further, Fatima’s book never seriously challenges the basic assumption that has been the ruination of democratic politics in Pakistan: the idea that political parties are the fiefdoms of families. There is a lot of vengefulness in the book, but very little by way of a larger vision. The sense of her story is that a Bhutto deserved to be in charge of the PPP, only that it was the wrong Bhutto, and that her father was cheated of his due. Much of her contempt for Zardari appears to derive from the fact that he was a low-born, unlike the Bhuttos. She recounts, entirely unselfconsciously, the story that her grandfather Zulfiqar had disliked Zardari’s father Hakim even though Hakim was a PPP man, and that “he humiliated him and even had him thrashed on occasion”, as if this reveals something about Hakim’s inferiority and not about Zulfiqar’s feudal arrogance.

A more realistic picture of the Bhutto family and all the other actors implicated in the story is formed by reading against the grain of this black-and-white reconstruction of the past, not with it.

Chandrahas Choudhury is the author of Arzee the Dwarf.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

Source : http://www.livemint.com/2010/04/01205526/In-the-name-of-the-father.html

“I am the least recognisable Bhutto”

For Fatima Bhutto, there is little that sets the political apart from the personal

Fatima Bhutto is excited about her India tour for her memoir Songs of Blood and Sword. “I’m going to wear a saree at every city launch. A Maharashtrian silk for Pune, a south silk for Bangalore , it’s a good cultural relations strategy, don’t you think?” she smiles, as we begin the interview in her hotel room in Delhi. The 28-year-old writer-journalist is the daughter of slain political leader Murtaza Bhutto and niece of Pinky Aunty, Benazir Bhutto. “You didn’t know she was called Pinky? I called her Wadi and we used to read books together,” says Fatima . This was before 1996, before her father was shot dead two days after his 42 nd birthday.

Songs of Blood and Sword (Penguin, Rs 695) was launched in Karachi on March 31 st before Fatima left for Delhi and she does not know if Benazir’s family has read the book. “I don’t think they’ll read it. We launched the book at the park where my father was killed. 700 people showed up and I am thankful for such a great show of solidarity in a time when the situation in Pakistan is so difficult,” says Fatima .

The decision to write the book had come a great deal earlier, in 2004. “I felt like a private detective going through boxes, letters, diaries that my father and other family members kept. A year later, I began e-mailing and speaking to people who knew him well and would talk to me about my father,” she says, adding, “There is a tendency in South Asia to either idolise or demonise our political leaders. My grandfather and father made mistakes and it was part of their journey. I didn’t want to write a hagiographic book.”

While the book offers a personal history of the first family of Pakistan, at the heart of the memoir is a story of a daughter’s love, loss and remembrance of a time when things were less complicated. There are intimate anecdotes too — of her father Murtaza suddenly picking her up and throwing her into a swimming pool. A furious nine-year old Fatima had angrily turned on him, asking her laughing father to refrain from such pranks till she turned 14. “But Fatushki (her pet name), what if I’m not alive then?” Murtaza had replied.

Interesting nuggets about the other family members too occupy a large chunk of the memoir. There are accounts of Benazir signing her younger brother Murtaza’s report card instead of their mother, of Murtaza and Shahnawaz marching to commemorate Che Guevara’s heroic career, Pinky and Sunny (Sanam Bhutto, the youngest child of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto) secretly smoking cigarettes in their room. “My brother Zulfikar is reading the book now and he’s just discovering things about his father. He was only six when Papa was killed, and we realise that some of the activities that we still engage in, such as driving to the dargah at Mango Pir and feeding the crocodiles there, are part of a Bhutto tradition,” she says.

But this Bhutto is adamant that she is not entering the political arena. “I don’t believe in dynastic politics. Besides, I am the least recognisable Bhutto. I always wanted to be a writer. For me, writing has always been about getting those unheard voices out,” says Fatima, who was a vocal critic of Musharraf’s reign through her newspaper columns in Pakistan . “After the new government took over, the editors at the paper asked me to take a trip to Malaysia , write fluffy travel pieces, and stop the column,” she shrugs. “Journalism in Pakistan is muted and often muffled, but I take comfort in the fact that there are more brave people than those who are afraid,” says Fatima, who still continues to write for international media houses such as The Daily Beast and The Guardian.

While her memoir is exhaustive, there is one character missing in it: Karachi . “I know, I didn’t write about the city so much because I am saving it for a book I am writing on Karachi. It’s a ridiculous, beautiful and dangerous city, much like Mumbai. As soon as the tour ends, I’ll return to complete that book.”

Source :http://www.indianexpress.com/news/iamtheleastrecognisablebhutto/599432/

Delhi Launch of Songs of Blood and Sword

My blood froze when Zardari became president: Fatima Bhutto

NEW DELHI: Fatima Bhutto, niece of slain former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, says her "blood froze" on the day Asif Ali Zardari became the country's president and prompted her to send away her younger brother from the country fearing for his safety.

Zardari was accused of plotting the murder of Fatima's father Murtaza Bhutto but had been acquitted of the charge.

"On 20 September, 2008, on the 12th anniversary of Papa's death, Asif Zardari took his oath as president of Pakistan. The ceremony had been scheduled for the day before, the 19th, but had been moved on the orders of the new president, who rescheduled his big day for Saturday, Papa's barsi," Fatima writes in her just-released memoir "Songs of Blood and Sword".

"As he stood in front of parliament, which had voted him into the post almost unanimously (in the same highly democratic way that General Musharraf was 'elected' president), he paused in his speech and asked for a moment of silence to mark the occasion of his brother-in-law's death. My blood froze. It was as if he was taunting us.

"But that would be nothing compared to what would follow. On Zardari's first Pakistan Day as president he would honour Shoaib Suddle, one of the most senior police officers present at the scene when my father was killed. Suddle was awarded Hilal-e-Imtiaz, a national medal in recognition of his services to the people of Pakistan. Shoaib Suddle was then made the head of the Federal Investigation Bureau," Fatima writes.

Murtaza was killed Sep 20, 1996, when Fatima was 14, in a shootout with police near his Karachi residence. On Dec 3, 2009, a Karachi court acquitted 20 policemen charged with the killing.

After Benazir's government was dismissed in 1996, Zardari was detained for having a part in Murtaza's assassination. However, no charges were ever proved for want of evidence as the scene of Murtaza's assassination was wiped clean before police investigators could arrive.

Zardari's ascendancy also saw Fatima packing off her younger brother Zulfi. In the epilogue, dated April 2009, Fatima writes: "As I finish this book, it feels as though the world around me is slowly collapsing. There is a peculiar sense of deja vu as I write about the death of my father. There is a similar danger, a tangible feeling that we are not safe. Seven months ago, I packed my bags and flew to see my brother off in a foreign country.

"Zulfi had enrolled for the start of his A-level year, twelfth grade, at a private school not far from our house in Karachi. Some of his friends had got into the same school. They had made plans for a more relaxed year in which they would be treated like college students. In the autumn of 2008 Zulfi had just turned eighteen and was aware how precarious our situation had become since Asif Zardari had acquitted himself in our father's murder case. He was aware that because of our history with the man now called president, we weren't safe in our country any longer.

"When Zardari announced himself as the PPP's unanimously chosen presidential candidate we knew he would stop at nothing to reach the pinnacle of power. There was no turning back for him. Against all odds, he was going to rule Pakistan. We made the decision to take Zulfi out of the country. It was decision we had been avoiding, hoping it would not be necessary, since Benazir was killed in December 2007.

"But as Zulfi was the only surviving male heir of the Bhuttos, we couldn't take the risk of leaving him vulnerable. Besides Zulfi, the only remaining Bhuttos are (cousin) Sassi and I. We don't live in a country with a free press, we don't live in a country with an independent judiciary - or any judiciary for that matter. We have no safeguards against a violent and vindictive government," Fatima writes.

The book comes at a time when Zardari is set to be deprived of his sweeping powers through a constitutional amendment being tabled in parliament Friday to transfer to the prime minister major powers like the appointment of armed forces chiefs and reduce the president to a titular head of state.

The Bhutto family has had to contend with violence for the last four decades, losing one member every decade. Fatima's grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed in 1979 after what many consider to be a kangaroo trial. This was after he had been deposed as president by then army chief Gen Zia-ul Haq.

Her uncle Shahnawaz, 27, was found dead in Nice, France on July 18, 1985 under mysterious circumstances and the Bhutto family firmly believed he was poisoned. No one was brought to trial for the murder.

Her father, Murtaza, Shahnawaz's brother, was killed Sep 20, 1996, and her aunt Benazir was assassinated December 27, 2007.

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/pakistan/My-blood-froze-when-Zardari-became-president-Fatima-Bhutto/articleshow/5756517.cms

Fatima Bhutto on CNN IBN

V V: Fatima Bhutto's seasons in hell

A memoir is not, strictly speaking, an autobiography. It is an account of the author’s relations with some interesting people who have left an indelible impression on his/her mind. Fatima Bhutto’s Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir (Penguin/Viking, Rs 699) is a description of life under the Bhuttos, one of the six most powerful landed aristocracies of Pakistan that controlled the destinies of the country. At one level, it is a microcosm of state and society in Pakistan; at another, a history of the family that is also the history of the nation, a fractured memoir that embodies in an equally fractured form the political life of Pakistan. At a personal level, it reminds me of Tolstoy’s observation that while all happy families are alike, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own special ways. Bhuttos were unhappy, not because they had an embarrassment of riches but because of the violence that riddled the lives of each successive generation. The masthead on the cover tells it all:

Fatima Bhutto:
Granddaughter of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (President 1970-73 and Prime Minister (1973-77): Assassinated
Niece to Shahnawaz Bhutto — Murdered 1985
Daughter of Mir Murtaza Bhutto — Assassinated 1966
Niece to Benazir Bhutto — Assassinated 2007

So, Fatima said in a recent newspaper interview that the history of the dynasty could be read as a kind of Greek tragedy: “It seems like every 10 years we bury a Bhutto killed violently and way before their time.”

The book is specifically centred on the assassination of her father, Murtaza who was shot dead outside his house in Karachi’s fashionable residential district. The news of the shooting is first broken to her over the telephone by Asif Zardari who says, “casually, ‘Your father’s been shot.’” and puts the phone down. Nothing more; as cool as that, as if nothing much had happened. Fatima describes in great detail the commotion and confusion that followed, who came and went and the conversations that always follow after death — so much noise at the edge of silence.

Fatima doesn’t mince words; she calls the assassination a cold-blooded murder and provides a pile of evidence including eyewitness accounts, backed by interviews and documentation. The needle of suspicion points to Zardari, who, in fact, was investigated but later let off, presumably because of lack of evidence but more because he could pull the punches, backed by enormous financial resources which he had accumulated during his wife’s tenure as prime minister. Fatima tells it all without flinching.

Fatima adds that her aunt (the two could never get along) “years later in an interview before her own death said that it was Murtaza’s own fault that he was killed. Besides, she changed the facts about his injuries, rambling incoherently, claiming he was shot in the back by his own guards, that his guards opened fire on the police and Murtaza had a death wish”. There were just too many loose ends which more than suggest that Zardari, aided and abetted by his wife had a hand in the murder. In the murky world of Pakistan’s politics of intrigue and counter-intrigues, murder is not too heavy a price to pay for the goodies of office.

And there is one bit of solid circumstantial evidence that makes the case against Zardari almost foolproof: corruption charges and his cut in every government contract, the accumulation of assets abroad which Murtaza had unearthed. Could this have forced Zardari’s hand?

Investigations into murders always leave unanswered question even in serious crime fiction. We have to go by circumstantial evidence and fill in the blanks ourselves which Fatima tries to do. And the most substantial evidence is that Murtaza had become “inconvenient” and was probably done away with. But this leads to further conjectures for which we can have no answers as with other political assassinations in Pakistan’s turbulent history. Everything gets hushed up till one assassination fades into the next.

Indian readers will lap up Fatima’s memoirs for the gossipy side of the palace intrigues that haunt Pakistani high society. Most of them ring true and they are told with a novelist’s touch backed by all the paraphernalia of scholarship — footnotes, interviews and documentation of sources. It is not a quickie, stretching over 20 chapters backed by family photographs and other memorabilia. But she doesn’t relate the lives of the Bhuttos to larger questions of Pakistani state and society. Maybe this wasn’t the place or the time to do so in what is a highly personal and painful memoir of her family.

Source : http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/v-v-fatima-bhutto%5Cs-seasons-in-hell/390583/

Benazir, the PM, was cruel: Fatima Bhutto

atima Bhutto, the outspoken niece of former Pakistani Prime Minster Benazir Bhutto, is in India to release her book 'Songs of Blood and Sword' on the tale of one of Pakistan's most powerful family.

Speaking to NDTV in an exclusive interview, she said President Asif Ali Zardari was behind her father Murtaza's death and the moral responsibility laid with her aunt Benazir Bhutto.

"Before Zardari ascended to the presidency, he was facing four murder cases in the courts of Pakistan that were quickly wiped clean. He was acquitted in the middle of four ongoing trials involving the killing of 11 men. My father was one of them," she said.

"It's more important to speak about justice when you see that there's one law for the powerful and one law for the average citizen. I don't think it's for the first time that criminals have ascended to the highest posts in power. Certainly in Pakistan it's a new precedent for us. We need to be more aware as to who's leading this country at the moment," she added.

"There is certainly a moral responsibility for my father's murder. And that lays squarely with his sister, my aunt Benazir's government. Benazir was the PM at the time and she presided over a state where security officials killed with impunity. Extra-judicial killings were the norm. Some 3000 men were killed in the two years of operation clean up which was led by the Karachi police. So moral responsibility absolutely rests with the government," she further said.

Fatima also said her aunt was two different people for her - one who used to bring her books to read, and the other who was the Prime Minister and was cruel.

Source: http://www.ndtv.com/news/india/benazir-was-two-different-people-for-me-fatima-bhutto-18962.php

Fatima claims aunt Benazir had a split personality

At 27, Fatima Bhutto isn't busy typing out status updates on Facebook, which she insists she loathes. Instead, she has spent the last six years writing a "love letter" to her father in which she has resurrected him, 14 years after his assassination, and held her aunt and uncle responsible for his tragic end.

In the Capital for the launch of her third book, Songs of Blood and Sword (Penguin), Fatima made it clear that she has no love lost for her aunt, Pakistan's slain former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and her husband Asif Ali Zardari, the country's President.

On a day when a constitutional reforms package striking at Zardari's powers was tabled in Pakistan's National Assembly, Fatima said, "We don't need a President like Zardari. We need someone who is clean and honest, committed to public service, whose qualifications for ruling 180 million people is more than the fact that his wife was once the Prime Minister." Fatima's father, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, brother of Benazir Bhutto, who was then Prime Minister of Pakistan, was killed by the police in a burst of gunfire just outside his Karachi home on September 20, 1996. Mir Murtaza, who was then a member of Pakistan's National Assembly, died along with six others.

"The moral responsibility for my father's death lies with my aunt's government.

She presided over the security forces which killed 3,000 men in Karachi in extrajudicial ways in a year and a half," said Fatima, who has studied at Columbia University, New York, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, and was once rumoured to be George Clooney's love interest. "It was Benazir's government that foiled the FIR on my father's assassination, arrested and tortured witnesses, and gave them no access to lawyers," she said.

The book, Fatima said, is the start of a search for justice. "You can't kill seven persons and stop us from talking about it and erasing it from public memory," said the articulate young woman from an illustrious family that has lost one member in each of the last four decades to a violent death.

As she met this correspondent in a hotel room, a stone's throw away from Khan Market, which reminded her of Zamzama Market in her beloved Karachi, Fatima seemed unaware of the ripples her statement against her relatives was making on Indian television. Reiterating that it was the police that pulled the trigger on her father, she asked, "Who ordered them?"

The irony of it all is that Zardari took oath as Pakistan's President on the 12th anniversary of Mir Murtaza's death. And then he honoured Shoaib Suddle, one of the senior-most police officers present at Murtaza's death scene, with the Hilal-e-Imtiaz, a national medal.

WHAT WERE her best memories of her wadi, as she once used to call Benazir? "There are good and bad memories.

She had two very distinct personalities," said the niece. On being prodded to say more, Fatima said, "She had a larger than life persona. Before she entered the PM's office, she was an ordinary woman, brave and strong. Once in power, she was frightening. As PM, she presided over a lot of violence." And in the end, it was Benazir's callous approach to investigations into her brother's assassination that hindered the probe into her own assassination, Fatima said. "When I complained about the scene of the

crime against my father being washed, she said this is not the movies. Eleven years later, her scene of crime was washed up. If she had put up a genuine fight, she could have set an important precedent and helped us get justice in her case," she added.

Her father, Fatima and many others in Pakistan believe, came as a breath of fresh air in the country's turbulent politics. "He had a clean record and wasn't beleaguered by corruption charges," Fatima said. "He was open, funny, didn't do political speak and was outspoken. People responded to him when he spoke of corruption and human rights abuses." She added grimly, "We know from history that those who challenge power become a threat." But isn't Fatima exposing herself to threats by taking on the most powerful man in her country? The option of staying silent, Fatima said, was worse. "Speaking the truth and the pursuit of justice is much stronger than fear," she said, though she admitted that her mobility in Pakistan was "restricted by virtue of who is President". But that didn't stop her from releasing her book in Karachi next to the spot where her father was gunned down. "Seven hundred people turned up, despite the security threat," she said.

A FORMER columnist for Jang and a contributor to The Daily Beast, Fatima said she was "slightly obsessed by Twitter". But no, she wasn't going to leverage the microblogging site or her books to launch herself into a political career. "I am a writer. My heroes have always been authors and journalists," she said.

For this young Bhutto, wielding the pen is the way to drive the changes her father wanted to bring about - when his life was cut tragically short. This is just one of the things she wants to change about her country: "India has launched a moon mission and we can't even light up the streets. We are a nuclear-armed state that cannot run refrigerators."

Source: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/91036/India/Fatima+claims+aunt+Benazir+had+a+split+personality.html

Fatima Bhutto on Songs of Blood & Sword

Following are some videos of Fatima Bhutto talking about her book Songs of Blood & Sword:


Fatima Bhutto's speech at the launch of her book Songs of blood & Sword:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jRhQ8btDuQ


Fatima Bhutto's interview on NDTV:

http://www.ndtv.com/news/india/benazir-was-two-different-people-for-me-fatima-bhutto-18962.php


Fatima Bhutto's interview on her book Songs of Blood & Sword:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBKWvPy_yGc

Photos from SoBaS launch in Karachi 30/03/2010

The pictures are provided by Maple Leaf