POLITICS - Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter's Memoir Fatima BhuttoJonathan Cape, 470pp. £20
TWICE ELECTED prime minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto was both times removed from office by presidential authority on allegations of corruption. In December 2007, within a few weeks of her return to the country from a self-imposed exile to contest upcoming elections, she was assassinated.
On April 16th this year the UN commission investigating her death ruled that “the failure of the police to investigate effectively Ms Bhutto’s assassination was deliberate”.
Unfortunately, this should not come as a surprise in a country where assassinations and, allegedly, politically motivated executions have been the historical norm. Fatima Bhutto's memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword, written in memory of her father (Benazir's brother), carries an abbreviated CV of the author on the cover page: "Granddaughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Executed 1979; Niece to Shahnawaz Bhutto, Murdered 1985; Daughter of Mir Murtaza Bhutto, Assassinated 1996; Niece to Benazir Bhutto, Assassinated 2007."
The 27-year-old author mirrors such potent brevity in her descriptions. Writing about her great-great-grandfather and feudal Pakistan, she wryly notes that “Bhuttos very rarely, even then, died natural deaths”.
There is no scope for the maudlin in a memoir that chronicles a family history that in many ways acts as a justified allegory of the nation of Pakistan. Zulfikar, Fatima’s grandfather, founded the Pakistan People’s Party in 1967, based on socialist principles, and since then it has been identified with the Bhutto family.
The socialism trickled down to his son Murtaza, the author's father, who, fired by the progressive vision of Zulfikar, and the revolutionary aspirations of the 1960s, started a magazine in his teenage years named after Che Guevara's battle cry: Venceremos(We Will Overcome).
Their deaths signal an end to the ideological struggle of socialism in Pakistan but, more than that, the cloaked circumstances in which they both lost their lives reveal a malignant instability at the heart of the Pakistani establishment.
Zulfikar was executed in 1979 at Rawalpindi Jail for allegedly authorising the murder of a political opponent, an allegation many believe was orchestrated by General Zia-ul-Haq, who had overthrown Zulfikar in a coup d’etat two years previously.
Murtaza, on the other hand, was killed right outside his home while dozens of policemen guarded it. On hearing incessant gunfire the author, then a young girl, desperately tried to speak to her aunt, who was then prime minister. But Asif Zardari, Benazir’s husband and the current president of Pakistan, held her at bay, adding to her sense of agitation: “‘What? No, I have to speak with her please put her on the phone’, I continued, growing confused at what seemed like a theatrical attempt to keep me from talking to the one person who was in charge. ‘Oh, don’t you know?’ Zardari responded. ‘Your father’s been shot.’ ”
Murtaza Bhutto sustained several gunshot wounds when he was ambushed, with his supporters, in front of 70 Clifton, the Bhutto residence. But he died from one shot at point-blank range at his neck. He was also left to bleed for an hour before he was taken to a hospital that had no facilities for emergency procedures. The orders for his assassination, Fatima Bhutto believes, like many others, could only have come from the highest authorities in the country. The argument holds for Benazir’s own assassination years later.
Political intrigue, administrative corruption and widespread avarice, refracted through a narrative of family history and sibling hostilities, make Songs of Blood and Swordread like a darker version of Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy.
What remains fictional in this book, however, is the immediate possibility of a politically stable Pakistan. Writing about the appalling administration of the Karachi Electrical Supply Company, Fatima Bhutto notes that “whether you’re at home or not your electricity bill is always the same. You pay phenomenal charges and then sit in darkness for most of the year”. But if there is a sense of the bizarre in this she never fails to extrapolate the ominous from the mundane: “We are a nuclear-armed state that cannot run refrigerators.”
Pakistan, like other developing nations sweating the memory of imperialism from its pores, has had its share of unstable governance. Its history, though, has been defined by military coup d’etats that occurred in unnervingly steady succession: General Ayub Khan (1950s), General Zia-ul-haq (1970s), General Pervez Musharraf (1990s). If the imposition of martial law testifies to the breakdown of democratic processes in a country, then so does ludicrously rampant changes in government. In the 1950s, for example, Pakistan had seven prime ministers, each of whom intended to serve a five-year term. The author deduces that “what seemed aberrant in the late 1950s has now become a sad trademark of Pakistan’s feckless political landscape”.
Fatima Bhutto’s memoir, a result of years of research, which includes personal letters, testimony from people who were close to Zulfikar and Murtaza, and numerous family photographs, narrates the history of post-partition Pakistan up to the present. If anything, the turmoil of a newly independent nation seems to have mutated into an impossible mixture of feudalism, military anarchism, personal vendettas and corrupt political dynasties.
Add to this unstable compound the US war on terror, and the alleged harbouring of terrorist cells in Pakistan, and what we get is a country that is the “world’s new battleground”, after Iraq and Afghanistan. Barack Obama said that if need be the US would bomb Pakistan; Fatima Bhutto asserts that they already have. US drone attacks occur at regular intervals in the frontier zones of the country.
But it is President Zardari and the late Benazir Bhutto, whose combined history of allegations of corruption amount to millions of dollars, who are the ultimate focus of the book’s analysis – not least because they seem to be implicated in the assassination of the author’s father. (Other murder cases are pending against the president as well.)
"Poor Pakistan," Tariq Ali, a prominent intellectual from the country, once sardonically noted. But the narrative of Songs of Blood and Swordhas an undercurrent of anxiety: "As I finish this book [there is] a tangible feeling that we are not safe".
Malcolm Sen teaches in the English department at NUI Galway. He is currently in India, researching South Asian postcolonial literature
