Fatima Bhutto Fighting for Justice

Very very long but not boring.

'She is sassy and clever, a respected poet and an outspoken columnist in the Pakistani press. She has a razor-sharp mind and a forceful, determined personality.'

I can agree to that based on my email correspondence. She's like a fresh air in Pakistan but wud she ever make it to Islamabad? I doubt it.

Why do all these little morons believe that they have a god given right to be in a leadership capacity just because their dad or grandpa was an elected leader of a country? Fatima should be in the business of marketing hair products.

I am just simply sick and tired of these feudals, pirs and children of these snakes.

#2 because they are gods chosen people. My good man.

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I am afraid this article in places is a copy from a Tariq Ali article on Bhutto. William Dalrymple has not provided any reference to the source document.
Here are a few excerpts:


Tariq Ali
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n24/ali_01_.html

Nusrat Bhutto suggested that Murtaza be made the chief minister of Sind: Benazir’s response was to remove her mother as chairperson of the PPP. Any sympathy Murtaza may have felt for his sister turned to loathing. He no longer felt obliged to control his tongue and at every possible opportunity lambasted Zardari and the corrupt regime over which his sister presided. It was difficult to fault him on the facts. The incumbent chief minister of Sind was Abdullah Shah, one of Zardari’s creatures. He began to harass Murtaza’s supporters. Murtaza decided to confront the organ-grinder himself. He rang Zardari and invited him round for an informal chat sans bodyguards to try and settle the problems within the family. Zardari agreed. As the two men were pacing the garden, Murtaza’s retainers appeared and grabbed Zardari. Someone brought out a cut-throat razor and some warm water and Murtaza shaved off half of Zardari’s moustache to the delight of the retainers, then told him to get lost. A fuming Zardari, who had probably feared much worse, was compelled to shave off the other half at home. The media, bemused, were informed that the new clean-shaven consort had accepted intelligence advice that the moustache made him too recognisable a target. In which case why did he allow it to sprout again immediately afterwards?
Some months later, in September 1996, as Murtaza and his entourage were returning home from a political meeting, they were ambushed, just outside their house, by some seventy armed policemen accompanied by four senior officers. A number of snipers were positioned in surrounding trees. The street lights had been switched off. Murtaza clearly understood what was happening and got out of his car with his hands raised; his bodyguards were instructed not to open fire. The police opened fire instead and seven men were killed, Murtaza among them. The fatal bullet had been fired at close range. The trap had been carefully laid, but as is the way in Pakistan, the crudeness of the operation – false entries in police logbooks, lost evidence, witnesses arrested and intimidated, the provincial PPP governor (regarded as untrustworthy) dispatched to a non-event in Egypt, a policeman killed who they feared might talk – made it obvious that the decision to execute the prime minister’s brother had been taken at a very high level.
While the ambush was being prepared, the police had sealed off Murtaza’s house (from which his father had been lifted by Zia’s commandos in 1978). The family inside felt something was wrong. At this point, a remarkably composed Fatima Bhutto, aged 14, decided to ring her aunt at Prime Minister’s House. The conversation that followed remains imprinted on her memory and a few years ago she gave me an account of it. It was Zardari who took her call:
Fatima: I wish to speak to my aunt, please.
Zardari: It’s not possible.
Fatima: Why? [At this point, Fatima says she heard loud wails and what sounded like fake crying.]
Zardari: She’s hysterical, can’t you hear?
Fatima: Why?
Zardari: Don’t you know? Your father’s been shot.
Fatima and Ghinwa found out where Murtaza had been taken and rushed out of the house. There was no sign on the street outside that anything had happened: the scene of the killing had been wiped clean of all evidence. There were no traces of blood and no signs of any disturbance. They drove straight to the hospital but it was too late; Murtaza was already dead. Later they learned that he had been left bleeding on the ground for almost an hour before being taken to a hospital where there were no emergency facilities of any kind.
When Benazir arrived to attend her brother’s funeral in Larkana, angry crowds stoned her limo. She had to retreat. In another unusual display of emotion, local people encouraged Murtaza’s widow to attend the actual burial ceremony in defiance of Islamic tradition. According to Fatima, one of Benazir’s hangers-on instigated legal proceedings against Ghinwa in a religious court for breaching Islamic law. Nothing was sacred.

William Dalrymple

Murtaza had an animus against Zardari, who he believed was not just a nakedly and riotously corrupt polo-playing playboy, but had pushed Benazir to abandon the PPP’s once-radical agenda fighting for social justice. By doing so, believed Murtaza, Zardari had turned their father’s socialist-leaning party into a political moneymaking machine for the PPP’s wealthy feudal leadership. But Benazir was deaf to the voluble complaints being made about Zardari, which had quickly led to him being dubbed “Mr Ten Per Cent�. Instead of reprimanding him, she appointed her husband minister for investment, so making him the channel through which passed all investment offers from home and abroad.

A few weeks earlier, according to a widely reported story, an incident took place the truth of which is now difficult to establish. In view of their worsening relations, Murtaza is said to have rung Zardari and invited him for a chat at the Bhutto headquarters, 70 Clifton. It was agreed he should come without bodyguards, in order that the two might meet privately and try to settle their differences. Zardari agreed. But as the two men were walking through the garden, Murtaza’s guards suddenly appeared and grabbed Zardari.
Murtaza took out a cut-throat razor, and after slowly sharpening it, personally shaved off half of Zardari’s moustache. Then he threw him out the house. A furious Zardari, who had presumably feared much worse than a shave, was compelled to remove the other half of his moustache once he got home.

Whether there is any truth to this story – and Murtaza’s family strongly deny there is – the two brothers-in-law had become irreconcilable by the end of the summer of 1996, and few believed the rivalry was likely to end peacefully. Both men had reputations for being trigger-happy. Murtaza’s bodyguards were notoriously rough, and Murtaza was alleged to have sentenced to death several former associates, including his future biographer, Raja Anwar, author of an unflattering portrait, The Terrorist Prince. Zardari’s reputation was, if anything, worse.

Around the time of the alleged moustache shaving, when Benazir’s mother, the Begum Bhutto, suggested that Murtaza be made the chief minister of Sindh, Benazir and Zardari’s response was to remove the Begum as chairperson of the PPP. Zardari was also said to have leant on Abdullah Shah, the man who held the chief ministership the Begum had wanted Murtaza to be given, and asked him to get his Karachi police to harass Murtaza and obstruct his election campaign. There were also hints of worse to come. So insistent had these rumours become that at 3pm earlier that afternoon, Murtaza had given a press conference saying he had learnt that an assassination attempt on him was being planned, and he named some of Shah’s police officers he claimed were involved in the plot. Several of the officers were among those now waiting, guns cocked, outside his house.

According to witnesses, when the leading car drew up at the roadblock, there was a single shot from the police, followed by two more shots, one of which hit the foremost of Murtaza’s armed bodyguards. Sizing up the situation immediately, and guessing that the police wanted to provoke his guards into retaliating, Murtaza immediately got out of his car and urged his men to hold their fire. Even as he stood there with his hands raised above his head, urging calm, the police opened fire on the whole party with automatic weapons. The firing went on for nearly 10 minutes.

In the silence that followed, as the wounded men lay bleeding on the ground, the police circled the bodies with pistols, administering the coup de grâce to several of the prostrate figures with assassin’s shots to the back of the neck. One of Murtaza’s aides, Ashiq Ali Jatoi, the Sindh president of Murtaza’s faction of the PPP, was standing up cradling a broken arm and begging to be taken to hospital when he was shot at point-blank range in the back of the head. It was all over in quarter of an hour, leaving seven men either dead or dying. The remaining more lightly wounded men were left to bleed on the road for nearly an hour before being taken for treatment.

Two hundred yards down the road, inside the compound of 70 Clifton, the house where Benazir Bhutto had spent her childhood, was Murtaza’s wife Ghinwa, his daughter, the 12-year-old Fatima, and the couple’s young son, Zulfikar, then aged six. When the first shot rang out, Fatima was in Zulfikar’s bedroom, helping put him to bed. She immediately ran with him into his windowless dressing room, and threw him onto the floor, protecting him by covering his body with her own. When the firing had stopped, Ghinwa had tried to leave the house, but the police told her to stay inside as there had been a robbery nearby. After another 45 minutes, an increasingly worried Fatima called the prime minister’s house and asked to speak to her aunt. Benazir’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, took her call. Fatima recalls the following conversation:

Fatima: “I wish to speak to my aunt, please.�
Zardari: “It’s not possible.�
Fatima: “Why?� [At this point, Fatima says, she heard loud, stagy-sounding wailing.]
Zardari: “She’s hysterical, can’t you hear?�
Fatima: “Why?�
Zardari: “Don’t you know? Your father’s been shot.�
Fatima and Ghinwa immediately left the house and demanded to be taken to see Murtaza. By now there were no bodies in the street. It had all been cleaned up: there was no blood, no glass or any sign of violence at all. Each of the seven wounded had been taken to a different location, though none were taken to emergency units of any of the Karachi hospitals.

Good detective work, HP genius... but in recounting of factual events as well as actual conversations of recent past.. the sources of both articles can be the same 'zardarai cook'.

Nice crying plagirism-wolf.. Now try again.

Kulharee writes "Fatima should be in the business of marketing hair products. "

.... and you should be selling bootlegged cds on the streets of nyc idiot. She has a good understanding of the issues and her family connections can be manipulated to make a difference for the common person in Pakistan. You on the other hand, a self-hating, rank racist with the intelligence of a baboon should keep out of any and every political discource, and keep producing those Gill-esque mass produced mediocrity that is published by chowk staff (of which you are a member), and keep censoring my stuff....

HP writes "William Dalrymple has not provided any reference to the source document."

The person is a third rate plagirist, who produced an article out of another article! Like most orientalists these fools lack the morals, integrity or interest to produce works of depth, their (Western) name alone is supposed to impart authority on the document, and is honored as the Holy Quran itself by the assorted (eastern) peons of the West....any damn fool can see that WD has copied the TA article but then baboons like hamzaad are a few notches below the damn fools in their "intelligence" or lack thereof...

Have no doubts about it, Zardari's time is coming too and those that used him to butcher Murtaza and Benazir will butcher this sob too using those near to him when he loses his utility...

Brother masadi,

How hard is it to access the original sources to write either one of these articles? Even you can write one without having read either one of these articles BUT END UP USING SIMILAR WORDS AND NARRATIVE.

You and HP want to say something significant.. but there is nothing here. Sorry.. you two are medriocre

PS. Brother, what is this okla nick saying on UP about your circumstances in the pinD State University where you worked. kaka thought you were a high faluting scholar but seems like chowk staff is right about you. Kindly explain in 3 distinct posts, as the revelation come to you in stages.

Masadi, this is chowk-staff here. Hows it going? Anyway you probably already know this but this site is owned and maintained by the CIA, with the explicit aim of keeping the Muslim man down. Also, forgot to mention we have sent a hitman to hunt you down since we really really give a flying fuck about your rants (honestly, we really do).

Peace out nigga.

#article

I have just one word to say:

“Wow!�

What a piece of work the courageous Dalrymple has assembled - I wonder why it always has to be a foreigner who can disseminate the truth without fear of (or in spite of the fear of) its consequences.

Apparently, the Beeb was no saint – power had corrupted her – like it does everyone it touches. I would personally trust the words of a poet who does not benefit (and in fact can only receive harm) because of what she says – much more than the words of a politician who has evidently much to lose from the same. I pray for the safety and well-being of this courageous beauty!

Dalrymple skirts the key question, though. Who killed the Beeb?

Re: # 13; bjk
"the Beeb was no saint – power had corrupted her"

she wasn't the only one...ZAB was a lot worse if anything...any many others

I am sure recent Indian history is not THAT much better although the overall respect for a democratic process has to be applauded..

Beej old man,

there have been many detailed and informative articles on all of these topics, you were too drunk to notice.

I hope Fatima stays far away from politics. She already expressed her disdain for how politics seem to remain in the same few hands...and that she does not believe in the "legacy politics"

Sad story though, the bhuttos.

Re: # 14 akcheema

[I am sure recent Indian history is not THAT much better although the overall respect for a democratic process has to be applauded..]

Perhaps a weak applause! I believe Indian politicians are no less power-greedy, crime-prone, corruption-basking than anything the Pakistanis could come up with! :(( I suppose the main difference was that the army always kept out of politics. Good for them, too – because the country is too unwieldy to be run by ANY army. Politicians – whatever they do – certainly do not want to get rid of the very system which brings them to power. :)

We have not had anything like what this article describes though. Perhaps things would have come out different had Sanjay Gandhi not crashed his plane in that stunt and had Rajiv Gandhi been a bit more ambitious at the same time!

But use of the state machinery to consolidate political power is very prevalent in India too.

Back in 1975-76, during Indira’s “emergency� – they put JP Narayan in the slammer and when he came out he was about ready to die from kidney trouble which had become aggravated during his incarceration. Not to mention the countless other excesses of that period!

They had instituted a “sedition� case against George Fernandes at the same time – but as soon as Indira lost in 1977, the case disappeared like the proverbial donkey horns! Now, if there WAS a case against him – it should have been pursued. If there really was no case – why, whoever was pushing the “case� should then have been punished. The fact that neither happened tells you a lot about the “impartiality� of the state machinery.

Before that, back in 1972-3, there was the bomb blast in Samastipur which killed LN Mishra who was a rising politician in Bihar at the time and some suspected would have been a contender for power. One will never know who killed him. The investigation went nowhere and the art of investigative journalism is/was unknown in those parts.

Even before that, there was the murder of Pratap Singh KairoN, a chief minister of Indian Punjab.

Before that, it is said that the Bharatiya Jana Sangha leader Shyamaprasad Mukherjee was killed by the state.

I could go on and on but then this Hurricane guy (#15) will immediately start casting aspersions regarding my age and start claiming that I am one hundred years old! :((

I am sure there were countless other cases of second rung politicians who had a lower profile and so we do not know much about.