To anyone in Pakistan the name Bhutto carries the weight of history, violence and power, and Benazir's niece Fatima bears it more than most, as she shows in her new book, writes MARY FITZGERALD
FEW NAMES EVINCE as much passion in Pakistan as that of the Bhutto family. In the slums of Karachi and the dusty plains of rural Sindh, the House of Bhutto is treated with something approaching a quasi-religious fervour. But there are also plenty who revile the Bhutto dynasty, seeing it as epitomising so much of the deeply rooted feudalism that has kept a stranglehold on Pakistan in the decades since its traumatic birth in 1947.
As granddaughter of Bhutto patriarch and former prime minister Zulfikar Ali, and niece of Benazir, Fatima Bhutto knows only too well the weight of the letters that make up her surname. She has spent the past six years sifting through her family's past, trying to make sense of the fault lines that run through Pakistan's most storied political clan, one long riven by infighting and intrigue. The result is her recently published memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword.
The book is threaded with violent episodes that act as a grim leitmotif to the Bhutto family history. Fatima recounts the untimely deaths that have fuelled much of the mythology that surrounds her family name – from her grandfather’s execution on the orders of Gen Zia-ul-Haq, in 1979, to the shooting of her father, Mir Murtaza, in 1996, from the mysterious demise of her uncle Shahnawaz in the south of France, in 1985, to Benazir’s assassination, in 2007.
“Benazir was such a larger-than-life figure. She seemed to overshadow a whole country. There was a feeling that nothing could happen to her. I couldn’t believe she had been killed at first, but later it hit me that something like this happens every 10 years,” says Fatima, sitting in the basement cafe of the Royal Court Theatre in London. “Every 10 years this family loses one of its own in very bloody circumstances. There was a terrible sense of deja vu.”
The last time Fatima spoke to her aunt was in the late 1990s. Before her father’s death – he was gunned down by police metres from the family home in Karachi – Fatima’s relationship with Benazir had become estranged, although previously they had been close. “People used to tell me, whether affectionately or admonishingly, that I was just like my aunt, even at that young age,” says Fatima, whose striking looks are very reminiscent of Benazir. “She looked after me almost as if I was hers.” Their relationship deteriorated, Fatima says, because Benazir changed after she was elected prime minister. “She became this person you couldn’t talk to any more, or feel close to. Things were strained before my father’s killing, but everything broke apart afterwards.” That later animus stemmed from a belief shared by Fatima and her Lebanese stepmother that Benazir, then prime minister, and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, were “morally responsible” for Mir Murtaza’s death. A tribunal ruled the shooting could not have happened without approval at the highest levels of government and that Benazir’s administration was “probably complicit”.
THE LAST TIMEFatima spoke to Zardari was just hours after she heard the gunshots that killed her father. Cowering indoors with her younger brother, Fatima, then a precocious 14-year-old, phoned Benazir. Zardari answered and told her Benazir could not take the call. "Oh, don't you know? Your father's been shot," he said. Fatima grimaces at the memory. "To announce it like that was unbearably cold," she says. "It was a very cruel thing to do to a child."
Today Zardari, the man whose alleged propensity for kickbacks during his wife’s time in power prompted the nickname Mr Ten Per Cent, is president of Pakistan. He was formally acquitted of any involvement in Mir Murtaza’s death shortly before he was elected in 2008.
“If you had said before that Asif Zardari was one day going to rule the country, I think most people would have just laughed in your face,” says Fatima. “They wouldn’t have believed it possible, because he was probably the most hated man in the country. He has a really venal reputation in Pakistan.” Fatima knows that her outspoken criticisms of Zardari, which are now reaching a much wider audience due to her book, have made her many enemies in Pakistan. Detractors, including members of the bitterly fragmented Bhutto clan, have described her as naive and biased. Others have dismissed her work as poorly researched and riddled with inaccuracies – accusations Fatima has robustly rejected.
“It seems the establishment and all those who represent or benefit from it have been spitting blood over the book . . . and if not daily attacking it, attacking me, which is something I figured would happen,” she says. “I think I am a large thorn in [Zardari’s] side because he is using my family name to remain in power. His is a government based solely on a family, a name. My talking about the family and about the murder of these family members makes me very inconvenient to him.”
She pauses and weighs her words carefully when asked whether she fears for her safety, given the furore her book has caused in Pakistan. “The reactions to the book make me feel there is more danger now because there are people who will go to no end to obscure the truth, to continue furthering a system or people they have benefited greatly from. When people are so frightened about words, about talking, about opening up a space to discuss things that are public knowledge, it does make me feel they are capable of doing desperate things.”
Fatima, who was born in Kabul and spent much of her childhood in Syria before the family moved back to Pakistan, says it is only in recent years that she has come to realise the weight of her family name. “Outside Pakistan it was a name that didn’t really mean anything. In Syria it was unpronounceable, and when I went to college in the US and in England it was just a difficult last name – very rarely did it register with people.
“In Pakistan the name enters the room before you, but I was never raised to think of it in that way. So for me and my brothers it seems very bizarre that people continually want to fall back on family and dynasty. To us that seems the most dangerous way of doing things, particularly for such a young country like Pakistan.” In writing her book Fatima has mulled over the Bhutto name, its bloody history and the power it still wields in the treacherous waters of Pakistan’s politics. “I think its meaning has mutated a tremendous amount. It is a name that once meant a certain struggle, a certain sacrifice, a commitment to the country. But I think when [Benazir] entered power she changed it for the worse. And after her death Zardari has turned it into a cult of some kind.”
WHEN HER AUNTwas alive, Fatima, like many Pakistanis, bristled at the discrepancy between the image Benazir cultivated in the West and the reality. Benazir liked to portray herself as a democratic, progressive force, but her time in office was dogged by allegations of corruption, not to mention her government's recognition of Taliban rule in Afghanistan.
“The western take on Benazir was so disconnected from her record,” says Fatima. “It was about the cosmetics of Benazir – she was beautiful and she was one of them; she spoke wonderful English; she went to all the right schools; she had all the right friends in all the right places. It looked very different in Pakistan.”
Some in Pakistan talk of Fatima as another Benazir in waiting, predicting that she could take on the Bhutto political mantle in the future. “Every time I turn around somebody asks me why I am not getting into politics,” she sighs. “I am ruling it out completely. It seems to me that to throw my hat in the ring would be to perpetuate a system that I have grown up watching eat my country alive. I am very political, and I am active in political causes, but I have no interest in power politics or being part of a system and government that only serves itself.”
Fatima might baulk at the thought of running for election, but there is no denying her passion when discussing Pakistan’s many woes – from homegrown militancy to the corruption that seeps into so many aspects of life. Part of the problem, she says, is that for many Pakistanis fear has engendered something of a conspiracy of silence.
“At the end of the day this is a state that has used violence enthusiastically, and each time it gets away with it, it makes it possible for it to continue. They impose a certain amount of violence on the population and then they impose silence. I have always felt that silence is more dangerous than speaking out in countries like Pakistan, because that silence is what enables governments like ours to behave they way they do.”
