Fatima Bhutto interview

An interview with Fatima Bhutto

By no stretch was I a lawyer. But I just knew that’s not how you deal with police brutality. You didn’t take them aside and ask them who they voted for in the last election.

Pakistan’s dynasty-bashing heir apparent discusses how Obama and corruption legitimize the Taliban, her work to include women in Pakistani politics, and why she will never run for office (it’s not why you think).

The story of Pakistani politics for the last four decades can be told through one family: the Bhuttos. Two Bhuttos have been heads of state, but four have been slain in the violence that riddles modern Pakistan.

Fatima, the twenty-seven year old poet, stands in the wake of this carnage and is its heir. Her grandfather, Pakistan’s first democratically elected head of state and founder of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was executed three years before Fatima was born by General Zia-ul-Haq (who overthrew him in a military coup).

Fatima’s Aunt Benazir was shot in her car on December 27, 2007, while campaigning. Her uncle was poisoned in exile. And when Fatima was just fourteen, outside her home in Karachi, her father was shot by dozens of police in one of Pakistan’s famous “encounters.” From that same home, Fatima insists that this violence points back to the family; she believes not only that her aunt was morally responsible, but that she played a direct role.

Fatima’s father, Murtaza Bhutto, had been campaigning one night in September 1996. Fatima, her brother (then six), and stepmother had been waiting for him. They thought he might come home only to be arrested; he’d been criticizing Benazir over her government’s corruption and challenging her to return the PPP to their father’s original manifesto.

He’d also been critical of her Operation Cleanup against the Mohajir ethnic group, which allegedly claimed three thousand Mohajir in two years of extrajudicial killings. On this night, police and armored vehicles surrounded the house. But instead of the arrest the family was told to prepare for, Murtaza and several of his men were shot from the street and from treetops in an Operation Cleanup-style barrage of gunfire. Murtaza himself was shot point-blank in the jaw and dumped bleeding to death in a clinic known not to treat gunshot wounds. Young Fatima watched her father die, insisting today that given better treatment, he could have lived. For his death, she unequivocally blames her Aunt Benazir; she certainly has her reasons, which she discusses below.

American democracy means we’ll drone your village, it means we’ll bomb your schools, and it means you live in refugee camps.

But Fatima’s is not just a story of Pakistan’s past. Benazir’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, is Pakistan’s current president. He is also a recipient of what Fatima describes as “millions and billions and scrillions” of American aid dollars.

Fatima’s grudge against him is both seething and personal. But she makes a strong case that President Obama’s new Af/Pak strategy not only fuels Zardari’s murderous corruption, but also helps him bumblingly legitimize the Taliban.

Pakistan (and Zardari’s) corruption is palpable to Pakistanis. Imagine a country where none of the schools gets its money; hospitals can’t reach their polio eradication goals because, despite having nuclear weapons, Pakistan can’t keep its electricity flowing to keep vaccines refrigerated. When the Taliban come, says Fatima, “people forget that they flog women” because they also bring schools, teach children to read, mobilize disaster recovery, and fill the vacuum left by government corruption.

It is a story of heartbreak Fatima has told in two newspaper columns in Pakistan, which discontinued with Zardari’s government, but that she continues to tell in The Daily Beast and The New Statesman. A graduate of Barnard College and the London School of Economics, Bhutto is the author of a book of poems, Whispers of the Desert, published when she was just fifteen, and an oral history of the earthquake that rocked the north of Pakistan, titled 8:50 a.m.

October 8, 2005. Like a Kennedy, like Hamlet (dad killed by uncle), catastrophe and politics have been her birthright. Rejecting dynastic politics, however, she insists that Pakistan is far better off with her as pundit than politico. But given that she still lives yards from where her dad was killed, it’s hard not to wonder, is she better off under this arrangement? I spoke with her by Skype from her home in Karachi, where she is at work on a book about the Bhutto family.

Guernica: You were inducted into adulthood in a rather violent way. Tell me about the death of your father.

Fatima Bhutto: My father at the time of his murder was an elected official. He had returned to Pakistan after some sixteen years of exile and had run for a provincial seat in the assembly, and won. He had not yet formed his own party, a reform movement actually, meant to bring the Pakistan People’s Party more in line with its original manifesto. His sister, Benazir, was prime minister at the time and chairperson for life, as it were, of their father’s PPP. And my father was very vocal about the corruption practiced by her government, and by herself personally and her husband [current President Asif Ali Zardari].

He was very vocal about compromises she had made coming into power, [and argued] that she did not represent the mantle of the PPP. [He was critical of] her crackdown, carried out by her security agencies, on the Mohajir ethnic groups in Karachi, and the MQM [Muttahida Quami Movement], a quasi-fascist ethnic movement. The operation Benazir initiated was called Operation Cleanup; it targeted members of the party but also ethnic Mohajirs, who she believed were terrorists, attacking her regime. They were not arrested, taken to court, or tried for these crimes she claimed they were committing. They were instead killed in these very dubious police encounters, where the police or the elite security group would turn up in an area; there would be several dozen of them; and they would kill the offending Mohajir member; usually, he would be shot in the back, and they would say, “We were trying to arrest him.” They never had warrants to back up their claim.

If I’m going to self-censor, then I’m going to be doing Zardari’s job for him. I’m not inclined to help him out in that way.

Guernica: But your father spoke out.

: [My father] was very vocal about these extrajudicial murders being carried out by police. So when he was killed in September of 1996, he was by no means the first person to be killed in this way. He was returning home from a political rally in the outskirts of Karachi and came to the road in front of our house, Clifton Road. The streetlights had been closed. There were anywhere between seventy and a hundred policemen on the street in trees, in sniper position. All the embassies on our road had their security told to withdraw into their premises. The roads were blocked so when my father was stopped, a police officer was charged with confirming that it was him in the car, a signal was given, and then a barrage of fire followed.

Guernica: I understand you were nearby.

Fatima Bhutto: What is important about that night is several things. The seven men who were killed all died of shots to the head or chest; my father and one other man were killed with point-blank shots. The shot that killed [my father] was fired into his jaw at close range, the autopsy showed. After the shooting, the men were left to bleed for about forty-five minutes on the road. Just feet away from where this was all happening, we were not let out of our house; we were told by the police that there had been a robbery and to stay indoors. By the time we realized something was wrong, they moved the men. The men were not moved to emergency hospitals; they were moved to different locations. [When] we left the house forty-five minutes after the shooting, the roads had been cleaned. So there was no blood on the streets, no glass, nothing, all evidence washed away. Benazir was prime minister and did all kinds of strange things, like not allowing us to file a police report. Benazir’s government set up a tribunal that was to have no legal authority to pass sentence, designed, I imagine, as some sort of stalling technique. Eventually the tribunal ruled in several important ways. They concluded that it was in fact a shootout; using state ballistics and forensics, they saw that the only ammunition spent came from police.

Guernica: Is this an attempt to whitewash, in your view?

Fatima Bhutto: It may well have been. The tribunal was put in place by her government, but the ruling came after her government. Perhaps that afforded them a degree of freedom. The government always insisted it was a shootout even though there were no injuries on the police side (except one officer shot in the foot, later proved to be self-inflicted). The tribunal also ruled that the police had used an excessive amount of force and that they did not offer medical assistance in a timely manner. Most importantly, they concluded that the very public assassination of an elected member of Parliament could not have been carried out by police without approval from the highest levels of government. Of course, they stopped short of naming Benazir. But at that time, there was no one higher than the prime minister.

Then there is the Benazir we lived with in Pakistan, a two-time woman prime minister who didn’t remove the Hudood Ordinance; these are the most violent laws against women.

Guernica: You must have been filled with intense feelings like anger and fear and grief; you were just fourteen.

Fatima Bhutto: At the time, we lived in a city that was on fire. You know, weeks would go by when I couldn’t go to school because of riots. Gunfire was something we heard fairly frequently. So when I first heard the shots, I didn’t immediately think it had anything to do with me or my family. It was not an unusual noise to hear.

Guernica: Was there a moment when you realized what had happened?

Fatima Bhutto: We had seen police cars and these armored vehicles around our house. We were expecting something. But we expected that they would cook up some charge and simply put him in jail. He was expecting that, too, and had packed a briefcase with books and magazines. We didn’t have cell phones in Karachi; they’d been banned. So we had no way of reaching him. After the shooting ended, I started to get nervous. When we left our house, we looked and found him in a clinic called Mideast, quite close to where we lived. They don’t take gunshot cases. I watched my father die essentially because he hadn’t been taken to a medical facility that could treat his wounds. I was fourteen, but there were things immediately that began to seem so wrong that it was almost like your fear had to be pushed aside to understand these other things. For example, all the witnesses and the survivors were arrested and were held in jail (until Benazir’s government fell, actually). But all the police officers were honorably cleared in an internal review and reinstated to their posts.

Guernica: You said you pushed aside the fear. What about the grief?

Fatima Bhutto: It was impossible to push aside the grief. I was very, very close to my father. Every time I left our house, I would pass the spot where he was shot. Six other families lost people. We knew their children, we knew these men’s wives, we knew their mothers. So the grief was impossible to push aside. That was everywhere. And because he was a public figure and lived publicly, his death was also public. It meant we were grieving but also had to comfort a lot of other people who were grieving for him. And our grief was everywhere: in newspapers, the funeral was very public. But it’s sort of funny how these things happen; the fear is pushed aside because of the anger I felt in knowing all those survivors had been jailed. That sort of anger and confusion pushed aside the fear. The fact also that it was my aunt in charge of the government at that time…

Her grandfather, Pakistan’s first democratically elected head of state and founder of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was executed three years before Fatima was born by General Zia-ul-Haq (who overthrew him in a military coup).

Guernica: You told the London Times: “I rang my aunt several times to ask why none of those who did the shooting had been arrested… She just said, ‘Fati, you don’t understand how this works.’” What do you think she meant?

Fatima Bhutto: You know, I think there were many Benazirs. When people in the West see Benazir, they see her in that sort of almost hagiographic light. Then there is the Benazir we lived with in Pakistan, a two-time woman prime minister who didn’t remove the Hudood Ordinance; these are the most violent laws against women. So you had a very opportunistic Benazir, [who was] entitled to power and behaved like it. And Benazir the personal one I knew. She was not someone who liked to be criticized, very domineering. When I had that conversation with her, my brother was six and I was fourteen. There was a lot of talk saying, “Well, this is an attack to finish the Bhutto line, and they’re gonna deal with the children, as well.”

So one week after our father was killed, we left. We went to Damascus where we had grown up and my mother’s parents, my grandparents who are Lebanese, came to stay with us. I was without my mother at the time; I was frightened. But I was hearing these facts in Pakistan, and when I called her up, she said, “Oh, you don’t understand; this is not how these things are done. This is not the movies.” I remember saying to her, “Well, look. How is it done?” And she gave these very Benazir answers: “Well, look, we’ve got to speak to the police officers first; we’ve got to find out who they’re allied to, what their political leanings are.” By no stretch was I a lawyer. But I just knew that’s not how you deal with police brutality. You didn’t take them aside and ask them who they voted for in the last election. I said to her as well that the scene of the crime was washed up… I said to her, “How is that allowed?” And she said, “Look, this is how it’s done in Pakistan.” Years later, after she was killed, the scene of her murder was also washed up. That’s what was so dangerous about Benazir; the power that she had as a two-time prime minister was enormous; had she used her office for something other than personal gain—for example, to rectify the system, to look into how police crimes are investigated—these things would not have continued happening, even to her.

Guernica: Did that conversation convince you she played a role in his death?

Fatima Bhutto: Yes, I think there are several roles. The first role is a moral role. She absolutely bears moral responsibility in that she presided over a state that was empowering the police and other security agencies to kill. Operation Cleanup was genocidal. Three thousand people in two years is no joke. And a lot of the police officers who were quite senior on Operation Cleanup were brought that night to kill my father. I mean, they were known for these extrajudicial murders. So on the one hand, yes, absolutely she’s responsible. And the more direct role that she played as prime minister, in terms of the investigation, suppressing facts from coming out, stopping us from filing a police case. She did a lot of things. One of the officials present that night on the road was Masood Sharif; he was the director general of the intelligence bureau, the office that reports directly to the prime minister. After the murder, Benazir awarded him a seat on the central committee of the People’s Party. Now for someone who’s accused in your brother’s murder, that sounds like a pretty strange thing to do. I think it speaks volumes to how Benazir and people in her party viewed power as a right.

Guernica: Looking ahead, what are Pakistan’s greatest challenges?

Fatima Bhutto: Corruption. [Pakistan has] a government universally known for graft, with the state treasury at its disposal. What that means is if you go to a state hospital just about anywhere in Pakistan, you are more likely to die than to receive treatment; they don’t have electricity, they don’t have sanitary conditions. If you are a child of school-going age in just about any rural area in Pakistan and your only option for an education is a government school, you’re going to end up illiterate. There are no teachers, no books, nothing. We’re an incredibly rich country in terms of our resources; we’ve got oil, gas, natural resources, we grow our own fruit. So forget the foreign aid for a moment. What that [corruption] means is that you create a vacuum; that vacuum has been and is still being filled by militant Islamic groups that come into these rural areas and bring schools. Everyone will naturally think that a madrasa is a jihadi training ground; that’s true in a lot of cases. But if your child is either going to be illiterate or is going to learn how to read and how to read the Koran at that madrasa, parents are going to take that option. It would be crazy to ask them not to. In 2005, we had a devastating earthquake in the northern part of the country. I went to a lot of the affected areas about a month after. We didn’t see any evidence of the state of Pakistan in these towns. But what we did see were a lot of Islamic charities, groups that had set up a mobile hospital unit, tent villages. If you want to look at the Taliban’s presence in Pakistan today, you can directly tie that to the corruption. If you want to look at the illiteracy rate in Pakistan today, you can tie that to the corruption. If you want to talk about the lack of democracy, that can again be tied to the corruption.