The Age of Kali (54 page)

In the interview, this side of Benazir emerged most forcefully when we talked about her great
bête noire –
India, and especially India’s policy of brutally suppressing the separatist movement in the Kashmir Valley.

‘India tries to gloss over its policy of repression in Kashmir, claiming that Pakistan has infiltrated militants,’ she said, only minutes after describing the different flavours she used to order at Baskin Robbins. ‘India has been quite unable to substantiate these claims.’

‘But is it really worth coming in to conflict with India over the matter?’ I asked. ‘India will never let Kashmir go. Isn’t it a no-win situation?’

‘I don’t see it as a no-win situation,’ replied Benazir, swinging in to Great World Statesman mode, ‘because I don’t believe that history is the story of Might winning against Right. No matter how
great a tyranny is, over time it erodes; and if a struggle is just, and is one in which its people will give sacrifices, then I believe that that struggle will eventually be successful. Might didn’t work in Vietnam, it didn’t work in Afghanistan. It didn’t work in tyrannies all over the world. India does have Might – it has five hundred thousand troops and a hundred thousand armed paramilitary personnel in the Valley – but still it has been unable to crush the people of Kashmir.’

‘But by taking on the Kashmiris’ cause, aren’t you committing both countries to massive defence expenditure that neither can afford?’

‘We are prepared to negotiate arms reductions with India, but that doesn’t mean that we keep silent, and by our silence collude with the repression which is going on. That would be impossible – particularly for the Pakistan People’s Party, which fought so hard for freedom and human rights in Pakistan. It is simply not possible for us to keep silent in the face of Indian atrocities.’

‘But isn’t the Indian repression in Kashmir not entirely dissimilar to your father’s actions in Baluchistan?’

This was a mistake. Benazir glowered – the velvety veneer no longer masking the steely toughness beneath – and set off on a lengthy explanation of why the Pakistan army’s murder of around ten thousand separatist Baluchis was in no way comparable to the Indian army’s murder of a similar number of separatist Kashmiris.

It was only towards the very end of the interview that I was able to quiz Benazir about her other current bugbears, her brother Murtaza and her mother, Begum Nusrat Bhutto.

The Bhuttos’ increasingly acrimonious family squabbles are beginning to resemble one of the bloody succession disputes that plagued the area that is now Pakistan during the time of the Great Moghuls. Like many of the Moghuls’ fratricidal disputes, that of the Bhuttos has long roots. In 1979, on Zulfi Bhutto’s death, his children disagreed about the best method with which to carry on his legacy and return Pakistan to democracy. Benazir believed the struggle should be peaceful. Her brothers Shahnawaz and Murtaza
disagreed, and turned to terrorism. They flew to Beirut, where they were supported by Yasser Arafat. Under his guidance they received the arms and training necessary to form the Pakistan Liberation Army, later renamed Al-Zulfiqar, ‘The Sword’.

In actual fact, for all its PLO training, Al-Zulfiqar achieved little except for a handful of assassinations and murders, and the hijacking of a Pakistan International Airways flight in 1981. This secured the release of some fifty-five political prisoners, but resulted in the death of an innocent passenger. Zia used this as an excuse to crack down on the PPP, and Benazir was forced to distance herself from her brothers, even though they denied sanctioning the hijack. After Shahnawaz was poisoned in July 1985, Murtaza stayed in exile in Damascus as a guest of President Assad, unable to return home due to the multiple charges of murder, sabotage, conspiracy and robbery which had been registered against him.

So things remained until, quite suddenly in October 1993, Murtaza announced his intention of contesting the elections in Pakistan. He remained in Damascus, but registered his name as an independent candidate for nine constituencies, standing for both the provincial Sindh assembly and the national parliament. Begum Nusrat Bhutto, although remaining chairwoman of the PPP, campaigned for her son, often against the official PPP candidate. There were confident predictions that the Bhuttos’ followers would defect to Murtaza
en masse
, but in the event Murtaza won only a single provincial assembly seat, while his sister was returned to Islamabad in triumph. Undaunted, Murtaza flew in from Syria on the night of 3 November, only to be arrested at Karachi airport. After his mother protested, she was unceremoniously sacked as chairwoman of the PPP. She hit back by giving a series of interviews in which she denounced her daughter in the most florid Urdu: ‘I had no idea I had nourished a viper in my breast,’ she told one interviewer. ‘If I had known that she would be so poisonous, I would never have given the powers [of the PPP] to her … I will never forgive her.’

I asked Benazir whether she had been upset by her mother’s words.

‘I am extremely saddened,’ she replied in her most dove-like voice. ‘But I have been an extremely dutiful daughter, a loving daughter, over many years, and I feel that in due course, given this fact, that she will come back to where the love for her and the respect for her has always been. She says these awful, awful,
awful
things against me and I get mad reading them. But in the end because she is my mother and I know her frailties, in my heart I can’t even hold it against her.’

And what about Murtaza, who was threatening to topple her from her position on the Bhutto throne, the brother whom she had left to languish in jail?

‘I love my brother and I
always
wanted him to return,’ she purred innocently. ‘I was the one who gave him his passport: he didn’t even have a Pakistani passport until I gave him one. I was bitterly criticised for doing so, but I felt it was his right, and I said I would do justice for him.’

At this point Benazir’s smooth press secretary tactfully intervened, saying that in five minutes I would be ‘ushered out’. I could, he said, put one last question.

‘Don’t you feel that political power is increasingly becoming a poisoned chalice for your family?’ I asked. ‘It has already claimed your father and younger brother, and led to your estrangement from your mother and eldest brother. Do you sometimes feel that the price you are all having to pay personally is just too great?’

Benazir paused for a second before answering.

‘Yes. It is extremely difficult. During the election campaign when I found that Murtaza was contesting these seats I thought of my father. I thought how deeply affected he would be to see his children fighting. I was even prepared to step out myself to prevent this ugly family scene. But in the end I had to make a choice: between having this ugly showdown, or being blackmailed by it and submitting. In the end I felt I couldn’t do that to my father’s political legacy, to his political memory.’

As Benazir rose to go, I asked if there was any hope of continuing the interview for a few more minutes, perhaps the following day.

‘Tomorrow the Prime Minister is going to Lahore and Karachi,’ said the smooth press secretary.

‘But I suppose you could always come too,’ said Benazir. ‘If you wanted to.’

I was on the tarmac of the military airbase by nine the following morning, being thoroughly frisked by a huge military policeman, when a black Mercedes pulled up beside the Prime Minister’s jet. Out of it piled two of Benazir’s Filipino nannies, a pile of Louis Vuitton bags, a crate of Evian water and Benazir’s youngest child, the beautiful ten-month-old Asifa, decked out in a red OshKosh B’Gosh designer jumpsuit. After the nursery party had been ushered on board, an ADC showed me to my place behind various party functionaries and across the aisle from the Filipino nannies.

Benazir rolled up to the airport a cool twenty minutes behind schedule. She floated up the gangway and appeared, flanked by a pair of liveried ADCs, at the top of the aisle. The entire planeload of passengers rose; a few of the older functionaries actually bowed. The Prime Minister nodded and without a word took her seat. Then she picked up a
Vogue
from the pile of glossies which had been left on the seat beside her and gave a signal; the plane taxied along the runway.

When we had reached cruising height I went up and asked Benazir whether we could continue our interview, but was dismissed with a peremptory wave of the hand. ‘It’s only a thirty-minute flight,’ she said. She buried herself in the glossies, and I had to make do with the attentions of her daughter, who sat at my feet making calls with her power-toy, a little red telephone (when you are a part of a political dynasty, you can’t start at this sort of thing too early).

Half an hour later we arrived at Lahore. Waiting for us on the runway were a crescent of politicians and dignitaries, flanked by huge Pathan security guards. Behind them stood a phalanx of black Mercedes limousines ready, revved and waiting; at a distance, a little behind the black limousines, stood a single plebeian white Toyota. Benazir waved breezily from the top of the gangway, then descended the steps and passed along the line of waiting dignitaries, nodding and muttering
‘Salaam Alekum’
to each of them. There was a brief speech of welcome from the Chief Minister of the Punjab, then it was in to the limos and off. The Toyota, it became apparent, was for me.

Being Prime Minister of Pakistan has its moments. The whole airport road had been shut off for Benazir’s cavalcade. Armed guards lined the pavements; overhead, flags and bunting had been hung across the road, much of it blazoned with welcoming messages to Benazir from admirers as diverse as the Habib Bank and Diet Pepsi. We swept at high speed through the old colonial centre of Lahore – past the Zam-Zammah gun with which Kipling opens
Kim
, and the museum where Kipling’s father was curator – the train of Mercedes announced by a posse of open-top police jeeps and flanked by a swarm of motorcycle outriders, all blaring horns and wailing sirens. Another posse of jeeps followed behind. Last of all came me in my dingy white saloon.

Benazir had dropped in to Lahore to open an exhibition of Pakistani
kilims
. Our destination was the Al-Hambra, Pakistan’s principal contemporary art gallery. I had been there before on a number of occasions, but had never seen anything like the reception which awaited us now: a Pakistani pipe band, swathed in tartan turbans and merrily wailing The Gay Gordons’. As Benazir lowered herself out of her limo, the Pipe Major did his stuff with his baton, the drums beat and the bagpipers played the Pakistani national anthem. (According to Benazir’s press secretary, whom I later taxed on this subject, Pakistan is now the world’s leading manufacturer of bagpipes, and has begun exporting them to Scotland.)

Inside the gallery auditorium, the assembled audience were
treated to a half-hour prayer, first in Arabic then in Urdu, by a bearded mullah in a lambskin cap, followed by nearly an hour of speeches on the theme of Pakistan’s contribution to the hand-knotted carpet. After this Benazir rose, made another speech, had a four-minute dash round the principal exhibits; then it was back in the limos – a screech of tyres and more wailing sirens – and off to the next city, Karachi, three hours’ flight to the south, where the deserts of Sindh meet the Arabian Ocean. Another cavalcade of limousines was waiting on the runway as we stepped out of the plane in to the muggy heat of Sindh, and with another blare of sirens we were escorted in to the city by yet another swarm of outriders.

Our destination this time was the Presidential Guest House, where Benazir was chairing a meeting of the regional PPP. Inside, the marble passages of the old colonial building were filled with politicians slapping each other on the back or pulling allies aside to whisper political gossip in alcoves. In the main durbar hall, under a huge portrait of Jinnah looking as drawn and emaciated as Christopher Lee in a horror film, thirty-three men sat in a semi-circle around one woman.

Without even a minute’s break to recover from the journey, Benazir immediately convened a meeting of the party workers from her Larkhana constituency. Most of the men looked about twice her age, but all of them were on their best behaviour – not speaking until they were spoken to, and sitting bolt upright as Benazir lounged on a divan before them. For twenty minutes the Prime Minister grilled the men – ‘Elaborate, Ali!’ ‘
Thank
you, Nadir’ – as they stammered to explain themselves: ‘Excuse me respected Prime Minister, I’m so sorry, but …’ Eventually they were all dismissed with a wave and the command
‘Jaldi kare’
(‘Do it quick!’). Then the next group was summoned in and another grilling began.

It was ten o’clock at night before Benazir had finished. Throughout the evening, as successive groups of men wilted, she showed not the slightest sign of fatigue.