Shahnawaz Bhutto Muder

How many Iranians one knows who are revered religiously in Pakistan without having any religious reasons! Begum Nusrat Bhutto is the only person whose name comes in the minds of all and sundry.
She was a dashing and gorgeous women whom people saw with utter admiration in sarees and modern outfits until her husband was hanged by General Zia, the sorcerer of darkness.
Zia’s policies to convert a pluralistic and tolerant society into a mob of fanatics forced the Bhutto ladies as well to compromise on their liberal outlook to stay with the people, the nest where party’s Phoenix is to be reborn.
That was the first sacrifice the Bhutto ladies rendered — the smallest of all, which started with Bhutto’s hanging and continued with the murders of Shahnawaz and Murtaza.
Benazir had to sacrifice her own life later, so miseries for Nusrat remained unbound and never stopping. Even, now when she has breathed her last, her death has further divided the estranged royal family.
Nusrat Ispahani was an Iranian from Kurdistan Province, daughter of a businessman who settled in Karachi, British India before its partition. Nusrat met Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Karachi where she became his second wife – in fact second to none as the events unfolded later proved.
A loving mother and perfect host had to enter the practical politics when her husband was opposed to Ayub Khan. He was jailed and persecuted that brought the first test of his wife’s skill to play as a capable alternative. This was her first stint as a politician, which most chroniclers forget.
She became the most powerful and charming First Lady till mid-1970s but that was just the beginning of a Shakespearian tragedy.
A tragedy allows one to find the strength within. She found it after General Zia’s coup, which was bloodless at the outset but proved to be the bloodiest of all dictatorial rules Pakistan was inflicted with by the men with the long boots.
She saw her husband tortured to death in a dark and filthy cell before being herself jailed along with daughter Benazir.

She received a head injury in the baton charge by Zia’s cronies at the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore . That wound was not timely treated and most party elders said its lasting injurious effect on her gradually disabled her.

Young Shahnawaz Bhutto was found dead in an apartment in France, the reason of whose death is still a mystery.
She wanted to make elder son Murtaza Bhutto, the male heir of Bhutto dynasty, his husband’s political successor while Benazir was already the party’s co-chairperson, the party’s de facto chief.
The later events showed Murtaza’s political acumen was in huge contradistinction to his elder sister. Besides, Benazir had shown herself a national popular leader, while Murtaza had been unaware of how Pakistani politics had changed its nomenclature.
Quite spectacularly, the male-dominant Pakistani society loved Benazir the most, although Murtaza was Bhutto’s son – a man who is supposed to take charge of family affairs in this conservative Muslim country.
Nusrat Bhutto had proved herself a loving wife, a great political leader when the husband was judicially murdered, but now when the things had eased out a bit she turned herself what she originally was — a mother, who wanted to see her son touching the heights of glory.
She was the emotional force, besides other well known factors, which brought Mir Murtaza to Pakistan after 18 years of exile. Murtaza remained estranged to his sister after the homecoming and formed his own Peoples Party.
He hardly secured a seat for himself from Larkana, which, most voters and party cadres said, was a gift from his mother, who in person had gone all out to beg votes for him.
On Murtaza’s first visit to his father’s grave, she escaped a firing incident near Bhutto’s house in Larkana, Al-Murtaza, as Shahid Rind, a party jiyala, sustained bullets while covering her and died on the spot.
Nusrat Bhutto was pronounced physically dead on October 23, but she was emotionally and clinically dead on September 20, 1996, when Murtaza had been gunned down in a police encounter staged by the deep state. She lost everything she loved; her consciousness was the last asset she got deprived of. Alzheimer preyed on her in predetory proportions till she breathed her last.
Murtaza’s family blamed Benazir and then her spouse President Zardari of taking the old lady hostage — a blame the accused have always denied.
Insiders said even a known rights activist had tried to mediate between the two sides to allow Nusrat to live with the whole family, but to no avail.
Nusrat Bhutto was the last of Bhuttos who will be remembered for her close liaison with enthusiastic party workers,  labourers, peasants and other poor segments of society. On many occasions she escaped narrowly from rains of bullets while taking part in workers’ rallies.
Workers of Musawat and Hilal-e-Pakistan newspapers — the former an Urdu and the latter a Sindhi newspaper and party’s erstwhile mouth organs — still recall fond memories of her who never rejected a demand made by the workers.
“The Bhuttos had always helped the poor and workers. They had always saved the institutions that benefited the poor,” a worker said.
She lived a vibrant life and died a passive death. Her death in remote environs, for sure, has enlivened the forgotten tracts that made a dictator’s apprentice the people’s darling and his grave the ultimate headquarters for the rulers to come.

Murtaza Bhutto Murder

Murtaza Bhutto by Sallubhaai

My Mother Benazir Bhutto

At Edinburgh University she is known as Itty Bee, a gregarious final-year English literature student with a penchant for MIA, Jay-Z and impromptu boom-box-and-barbecue picnics with her close-knit circle of friends. Right now, she is, like most of her contemporaries, locked away in her bedroom, forcing on her “revision face” and keeping herself fortified with Diet Coke, political rapper Immortal Technique and regular bursts on Facebook. After several weeks of hard slog, she recently posted that her dissertation was finally in the ring binder. But with finals now upon her, there is still little time for going out.
When she gets on the train to London, however, Itty Bee enters a different world. Here, she dons a headscarf and becomes Bakhtawar Bhutto-Zardari, the eldest daughter of Benazir Bhutto; the scion of a clan that has gripped Pakistani politics for the past four decades. She has already experienced more than her fair share of family tragedy. Her mother was assassinated just a few months before she went to Edinburgh. She never knew her grandfather, who ruled Pakistan in the Seventies but was hanged in 1979. Two uncles have been murdered. And her father – whom she calls “Baba” – is Asif Ali Zardari, the President of a fractious country often described in the West as “the most dangerous place on Earth”.
As a result of all this, Itty, 22, has made friends with extreme caution. But very soon, after her graduation this summer, she will face some life-changing decisions. Will Itty, whose Urdu name, Bakhtawar, means “a harbinger of good luck”, choose to go into the family business that has already claimed so many Bhuttos? The answer is almost certainly yes. There is already a political buzz around her, with thousands of supporters following 20 Facebook pages dedicated to her, such as the one entitled “Bakhtawar Bhutto Zardari, our great leader”.
We meet at Benazir’s old flat in Queen’s Gate, London, around the corner from the Natural History Museum. Scattered between tapestries and keepsakes from around the world are dozens of images of Benazir and Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who founded the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) in 1967. Itty’s recently completed dissertation sits on the dining room table. Its title is telling: “Shakespeare’s political heroines in Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, Othello and The Winter’s Tale”. For Itty, these characters demonstrate how human frailty is the cause of failure, rather than fate or, especially, gender. It is a view her mother voiced repeatedly, having constantly lived with taunts from Pakistan’s male-dominated political system that women were politically incapable and naive.Dressed in her trademark black, Itty settles into an armchair. Her BlackBerry is buzzing with messages from friends and relatives wanting to see her during the few days that she is in town. “I’m proud of my family,” she says, as her younger sister, Aseefa, 19, who is also studying in the UK, pours a Diet Coke.
For most of their childhood, Itty, Aseefa and older brother Bilawal lived with their mother in Dubai, where Benazir had gone into self-imposed exile after the collapse of her second government in 1996. The girls didn’t see their father, who was in prison in Pakistan on what the family maintain were politically motivated corruption charges. “By the time the authorities allowed us to have regular phone calls, I was almost a teenager and yet he was still telling me to go to bed by 8pm, not to watch television or read comics,” recalls Itty. “In Baba’s mind we must still have been the young kids we had been when he was arrested.”
These days, both parents are absent, although Itty and her sister stay in daily contact with their father on their phones. “Baba gets really cross when I don’t answer, and says he’s going to send in the Army,” jokes Aseefa. The image of a doting father massing troops to protect his kids sits oddly with President Zardari’s battered public persona back home, where newspapers portray him as vain, incapable of taming the military establishment, muddled, corrupt and never able to shake off the resulting monicker, Mr 10 Per Cent.
The endless sniping makes Itty fume and at Edinburgh she has earned a reputation asa fierce defender of the family name. “As part of my degree I took a course in South Asian studies and on the first day went into the lecture hall to find an enormous photo of Zia-ul-Haq, the military dictator who hanged my grandfather, projected on to the wall,” she says. “All the recommended books were telling me how my grandfather was the worst man in history. I had big arguments with the teacher. He didn’t like the Bhuttos.” She jumps up and starts pacing around the room: “I’m sick of hearing how corrupt my mother, my father and grandfather are supposed to be – until they die, of course. Then, they become the best thing Pakistan has ever had.”
In recent months, both she and her sister have started using Twitter to get their message across. Itty’s profile declares: “Proud daughter of shaheed [martyr] Benazir Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari.” Between them, they have nearly 50,000 followers, although for several days in May supporters were unable to pick up messages after Zardari’s Government banned Twitter, accusing the website of posting blasphemous content against Islam. Itty carried on tweeting anyway: on drone strikes, a bloody Nato attack against Pakistani troops last year and the continuing investigation into her mother’s assassination.
After the cushion of four years in academia, Itty is clearly aware that many eyes are on her. She will graduate this summer around the same time that her father begins plotting the PPP’s future. After a series of collisions with the country’s all-powerful military and its cantankerous judiciary, Zardari is widely predicted to call a general election in October, bringing his five-year term as President to an early end. Officially, it is Bilawal whose hat is in the ring to succeed him. A handsome Zardari lookalike and Oxford graduate, Bilawal is co-chairman of the PPP with his father. If Itty joins him in Pakistan, they will become a mirror image of the Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi brother-and-sister team across the border in India. And almost before we sit down, she is talking like a politician. “I want to continue my mother’s work on social issues such as women’s rights, education and poverty.
“I don’t consider myself Western,” she says. I do recognise that I’ve benefited from a UK education for the past four years, but otherwise I consider myself Eastern. I’ve got a lot to learn. I want to educate myself about my country. I want to wander around and see real life for myself. There’s an awful lot to do.” She talks about the country’s rapid slide towards religious extremism and how the population has more than doubled since her mother was in power. “There was one baby I saw in the flood-hit areas in 2010,” she says. “She was lying on the ground, covered in flies, while the mother just sat there. When I asked why she didn’t swat away the flies and pick her baby up, she looked at me and said, ‘This is how I was brought up, so why should I treat my child any differently?’ That’s one of the things that needs to be remedied in my country. We need to make life worth living.”
The last time I was here at the Queen’s Gate flat was in 2006, when I came to interview Benazir Bhutto on her self-imposed exile, only to discover that she was planning to end it. Then it was filled with advisers and chain-smoking party workers, talking up her plan to go home and contest new elections, having already served twice as Prime Minister.
Bilawal, Itty and Aseefa were away at school in Dubai. Zardari was recuperating, after his 11 years in prison, at a medical clinic in New York. It was a bizarre scene, with Benazir hopping around in jogging pants, picking at a plate of uncooked vegetables, her raw diet designed to get her in shape for the arduous campaign trail ahead, as calls from political leaders in three continents pinged around the living room.
Today the flat is quiet, although Itty gets minute-by-minute text updates about the storms raging in Pakistan. Her father, whom she has not seen for five months, is defending his coalition government against multiple challenges from the courts, the Opposition and the military. There are continuing attempts to prosecute him for corruption charges. There remain whispers of a coup in the offing and Pakistan’s relations with its closest Western ally, the United States, are at an all-time low following the revelation that Osama bin Laden lived in the country for up to nine years. Only last month, the two countries came to blows again after a Pakistani doctor, Shakeel Afridi, was sentenced to more than 30 years in prison for his role in helping the CIA monitor the bin Laden compound.
Itty’s life has been a political rollercoaster for as long as she can remember. “The family had one summer together after my mother was killed and before my father became president,” she recalls. “Our private time is very special. It’s the only time I can really relax.” When Aseefa last saw her father it was on official business, accompanying him to meet Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma in January this year. “They were joking about spending 11 years in prison,” Aseefa says. “Aung San Suu Kyi told my father the first ten years were the easiest.”
The closest the girls had to a normal life was between 1997 and 2004, when they were living in London and Dubai. “It was the only time we had Mama to ourselves,” says Itty. After she was killed in 2007 at the age of 54 and the children returned to Pakistan for the funeral, the local press declared open season on the Bhutto offspring, even ridiculing Itty for a rap she wrote in memory of her mother and uploaded to YouTube: “Shot in the back of your ear/ So young in 54th year/ Murdered with three kids left behind/ A hopeless nation without you, you are in all their hearts.”
Since then, the girls have kept a low profile. For the past three years, Aseefa has been living with her sister in Edinburgh, having enrolled at the city’s exclusive St George’s School for Girls. “Baba and Bilawal were in Pakistan. I just wanted to be near Itty,” she says, glancing at her sister. But she has just started a degree at another British university. “I don’t want to name it because I don’t want the attention,” she says apologetically. “Why not?” challenges Itty. “Everyone knows who you are anyway.”
Both girls understand the need for caution, Itty citing her launch of a relief charity during floods that crippled Pakistan in 2010. “It became some story about me starting a political party against my brother,” she says. “They said the dynasty was splitting. It’s total fiction. I want to support my brother. My mother always told us to be proud and to stick together.”
Keeping an eye on them today is Benazir’s younger sister Sanam Bhutto, their default mother. “Sticking together is the most important thing,” Sanam says, nodding at the girls, who call her Aunty Sunny. “My father [Zulfikar Ali Bhutto] used to say, ‘You kids must hold together like a fist. Individual fingers can be broken, but together as a fist you are strong.’” Not all of Zulfikar’s children heeded his advice. Benazir’s oldest brother Murtaza, who set up a political movement to rival his sister, was shot dead in 1996, a crime pinned for a time on Zardari, while Shahnawaz, Zulfikar’s younger son, was poisoned during a family holiday in Nice, France, in 1985. Only Sanam, who has lived in London since her father was killed, has shunned politics. “That’s why I’m still alive,” she says grimly.
Despite the risks, Itty is keen to get back to Pakistan this summer, although she is well aware some will not welcome her. “People say to me, ‘What do you know about Pakistan? You don’t know how we suffer.’ But our family has also suffered so much for Pakistan.” When Itty thinks of home, she thinks of Bilawal House, the family home in Karachi, where she spent her first six years. When she returned in 2004 to greet her father on his release from prison, she found all her childhood toys still in her bedroom, arranged by her mother. “Even now, I feel like I’m literally coming home, my mother’s make-up is still in her bedroom, our family photo albums are still on the shelves.”
Bakhtawar Bhutto-Zardari’s life has been overshadowed by Pakistani politics, from her birth. Benazir Bhutto became pregnant with her second child in March 1989, just three months after being voted into office, the first woman elected to govern a Muslim state. She kept the pregnancy a secret for as long as possible, determined that the men around her should not exploit the situation.
“Once they learnt I was pregnant, all hell broke loose,” Benazir told me in 2006. Facing a parliamentary vote that it was unconstitutional to have a pregnant head of government, she secretly arranged to have her daughter delivered by Caesarean section. “I drove over to Bilawal House wearing a burka,” Sanam says today. “We swapped places and then she drove off in the burka to the hospital. Nobody had a clue.” The following day, Benazir was back on the job. Sanam beams: “As a baby, she was so tiny my sister called her Itty after the song, Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie,” she says, explaining the pet name.
Seven months after Itty’s birth, Benazir was ejected from office on corruption charges. Zardari was arrested, accused along with his wife of accepting millions in bribes. But in October 1993, she was voted back into power and the family was reunited at the Prime Minister’s house in Islamabad. Then in November 1996, Benazir’s government was again overthrown, Zardari was rearrested and the children sent abroad.
Zardari was finally released in December 2004. Itty remembers the summers following his release as “the best times ever. We’d all go off to the US, where Dad was undergoing medical treatment. He was known as Mr Ali so we could just disappear from the scene.”
However, by 2007, politics again loomed. Pakistan was reeling amid a wave of suicide bombing and support for President Pervez Musharraf, a general who had seized power in a military coup in 1999, was dwindling. Behind the scenes in London, Washington and Dubai, the PPP, spurred on by the British Foreign Office and the US State Department, secretly hatched plans to return Benazir to Pakistan.Itty says they were not unduly worried. “We were excited about her going back because we knew how happy she was to return. We didn’t think, ‘It’s a life and death thing.’”
Benazir told me before leaving for Pakistan that autumn that she was not frightened;she had survived several attempts on her life already. However, she had not witnessed the growth of the lawless Pakistan Taleban, a deadly and invidious force aimed against domestic targets. Within hours of her arrival on October 18, 2007, she was targeted again.
Itty reveals that her mother had asked her daughters to accompany her. “But I was sitting my A-levels two weeks later,” she recalls. “So we stayed at home with Baba and followed it all on TV.” That night, Benazir’s tank-like lorry wound its way through Karachi flanked by supporters chanting, “Long live Bhutto.” Itty remained in touch with her mother by text and e-mail. “She was waving with one hand and messaging me on with the other. We were discussing my university application form.”
Just before midnight on October 18, after the girls went to bed, two huge explosions rocked Benazir’s convoy, killing 126 people. She had just ducked down into the truck to remove her sandals, so survived the blast. Even more horrific was Benazir’s belief that one of the two bombs had been attached to a baby. “Just before the blast, a man was trying to pass this child to her and she almost took it,” says Itty. “After realising there were too many people, she gesticulated not to bring her the baby and the security van behind took it instead. That’s when the first explosion happened.”
Benazir returned to Dubai, telling her family she was shocked at just how far Pakistan had fallen. But when Musharraf declared a state of emergency soon after, she decided to go back. “Mama came into my room the night before leaving,” says Aseefa. “She said, ‘Don’t wake up tomorrow morning. We will say goodbye now.’” But Aseefa insisted on coming to the airport anyway. “In the lounge Mama said, ‘Come with me, you can sit on my lap on the plane.’ And I said no, I had school,” she recalls, sobbing. “I wish I’d gone with her. I should have been with her. My biggest regret ever is that I didn’t go with her on that last trip.”
Their worst fears were realised on December 27, 2007. The family were at home in Dubai watching television when a news flash popped up. Benazir had been injured during a gun and suicide bomb attack as she left a rally in Rawalpindi. Dozens of PPP supporters were dead. “I remember it like it happened yesterday,” says Itty. While her father and brother tried to find a plane to take them there at short notice, “I was ringing up all these people in Pakistan, demanding updates about her condition. I thought she was just injured, that we would see her in the hospital… But nobody was telling me the truth.”
On the way to the airport, she listened as her father took a call. “I heard him say, ‘You must put the body on ice,’ and my world turned upside down.”
It was chaos when the family landed in Karachi. Itty recalls, “My father and brother were taken in an ambulance with my mother’s body and the doors didn’t even close properly.”
The funeral was held in Naudero, the Bhuttos’ ancestral village near Larkana, in Sindh province, 400 miles to the north. “It was unreal,” says Aseefa. “People were so upset they were setting themselves on fire. All I wanted was to have a little time alone with her. But people were desperate with grief. They were climbing on to the roof of our house and breaking all the windows.”
Aseefa says that after the funeral, Zardari told his children he was ready to pack the family up and get them as far away from Pakistani politics as he could. But when he found that Benazir had placed him in charge of the party founded by her father he pledged to stay. “We were all in a room together when he read out my mother’s will,” says Itty. Almost immediately, Zardari suggested that Bilawal should stand as PPP chairman. “It was his idea, not anyone else’s. He had tears in his eyes. He said we have to let the party vote.” At the time it was widely reported that he was so desperate to seize power that he had faked his wife’s will, but Aseefa says it was the opposite. “He was angry and upset. He wanted to get us away from politics until we were married with children. He himself had no intention.”
After the funeral, Zardari and Bilawal remained in Pakistan to contest the elections of February 2008, while Itty and Aseefa returned to Dubai. “It didn’t hit home that Mama really was not there,” says Aseefa, “until I came home from school one day months later with a good grade for my essay.I wanted to show her like I used to. Finally, I knew I would never be able to do that again.”
During my last interview with Benazir Bhutto, she admitted that her children had suffered as a result of her political career. “With me coming and going, I always worried they were fearful I wouldn’t return, like their father didn’t return one day. I told them no matter what I would always be back.”
Now she is gone, Bhutto’s daughters say they respect their mother’s choices. “I’m not angry,” says Itty. “I’m just sad it has to be this way.” She also understands the political legacy that Benazir has left behind. Like her mother, Itty is resolute that home is Pakistan, whatever the chattering classes in Islamabad say about her foreign upbringing. She also has a clear sense of duty. “I want to stand up and be counted; to make an effort to help my country.” That voice, if you close your eyes, is her mother’s voice.

She’s the daughter of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto and Pakistan’s current President. So will British-educated 22-year-old Bakhtawar Bhutto-Zardari now enter the violent political arena of her homeland?

Read more: http://www.secrets-and-lies.co.uk/2012/like-mother-like-daughter/#ixzz2QPgMNEvS

FATIMA BHUTTO Songs of Blood and Sword – Truth and Lies

Songs of Blood and Sword by Fatima Bhutto! I wanted to read this book since its launch but couldn’t find it at the library I visit to get my reading ration. Two weeks back, I borrowed it from a freind. The book is mainly about the Fatima Bhutto and her father (Murtaza Bhutto); starting from the life of Bhuttos in 20^th century Bhuttos, Murtaza’s youth, exile, conflicts with Benazir, assassination and its aftermath.

Though, the book seemed interesting when I went through its pages randomly, however, found it biased and boring. Though, parts covering the relationship between the father and daughter have been beautifully written and are interesting. Fatima has made interesting observations about his uncle and the current President of Pakistan Asif Ali Zardari. In a reply to a letter of Fatima, Murtaza Bhutto, who was jailed by her sister Prime Minister in 1994-5, reminds her of a poem she had written during her stay in Damascus. I think no one will find it difficult to understand.

A (funny) poem by Fatima Bhutto!

Inky, Pinky, Ponky

Her Husband is a donkey

Both loot the country

Her Husband is a monkey

Inky, Pinky, Ponky
(Pinky was the nickname of Benazir Bhutto)

Chums of Zardari & Benazir

In her book, Fatima has sometimes openly and sometimes disguisedly named the chums of Zardari. According to Fatima, these people were never part of the original PPP founded by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. They only came after the marriage of Asif Ali Zardari & Benazir Bhutto. Fatima says that Nisar Khuro, current speaker of Sindh Assembly, was an anti-Bhutto and he had chanted“First hang Bhutto then try him!” after Zia ousted Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in a coup d’état. After the execution of Bhutto; Nisar distributed sweets in Larkana. Now he is a prominent leader of PPP Sindh. Fatima also names Dr.
Asim, Dr. Zulfiqar Mirza and her wife Fehmida Mirza(Speaker of National Assembly) as chums of Zardari.

————

During my reading of the books, I came across some historical errors in the book which I have highlighted below.

Custody of 200 Pakistani Soldiers (Officers)

On page 111-112, Fatima writes: “Pakistan also used the summit (1974 OIC Summit) as an occasion to announce formally its recognition of Bangladesh and in return Bangladesh withdrew criminal charges against some 200 Pakistani soldiers in its custody.”

In reality, 200 Pakistani soldiers were held as Prisoners of War (POW) in India. So, India had the custody of Pakistani soldiers not Bangladesh.

Khilafat Movement

Page 187: ‘During the Khilafat movement in the subcontinent around the Second World War there was a fighter named Obaid Ullah Sindhi – he too was Sindhi- who based his resistance against the British Empire from the Kabul.’

A big error! The Khilafat movement took place after the First World War. It was a Pan-Islamic movement initiated mostly by Muslims of Sub-continent after World War I in an attempt to save Office of Caliphate and Ottoman Empire after the occupation of Istanbul and Treaty of Versailles.

China’s Military Aid

Page 107, Fatima Bhutto claims: “Several months later, in the spring of the year (1972), China sent Pakistan sixty Mi-G fighter jets and one hundred T-54 and T-59 tanks as part of the $300 million economic and military assistance package…”

The only jets Pakistan got from China during 1970s were 30 Shenyang FT-5 (intermediate trainer jet) in 1975.

WHO KILLED MURTAZA BHUTTO?

September 16 2011 – Lahore
Writer: Daniel Jacobius Morgan

Fifteen years after Benazir’s brother was gunned down, politics and emotions continue to cloud the assassination.

There was great urgency at the other end of the line. A shootout had been reported near Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s mansion, 70 Clifton, and the editor of Kawish, a Sindhi-language daily, wanted the pictures. When photographer Zahid Hussain arrived at the crime scene, it was eerily quiet, and dark. The street lights on Shahrah-e-Iran had been turned off. The spot of the shooting, 100 meters from the Bhutto gate, cordoned off by armored police vehicles. Hussain could make out the bodies, strewn across the street. He saw policemen gaping at a blue SUV. “They got him,” Hussain said to himself, with a mixture of incredulity and anger, after he recognized the bloodied passenger in the front seat. Hussain gathered himself and started stealing snatches of the scene. His camera flash alerted police to the growing presence of photographers and reporters at the scene. They started smashing cameras and rounding up the reporters. Hussain darted into a dark side alley, shaken and shocked.

There are eerie similarities between Murtaza Bhutto’s assassination in Karachi on Sept. 20, 1996, and his sister Benazir’s on Dec. 27 in Rawalpindi 11 years later. Both siblings died in an SUV, both were the bane of Pakistan’s permanent establishment led by the Army and its intelligence agencies, and in both cases the crime scenes were washed away hastily before key forensic evidence could be collected. It is no less uncanny that when Benazir ended her self-exile and landed in Karachi on Oct. 18, 2007, the street lights before Karsaz were mysteriously flicked off before two blasts tore through her homecoming procession, killing at least 146 people.

“When I saw him there in the car, I remembered Benazir’s words,” photographer Hussain told us, “that the military and civil establishment were after their family. First Zulfikar, then Shahnawaz, and now the one remaining brother had been shot too.” Forty-five minutes after the shooting, Murtaza was taken to Mideast Hospital. Hussain photographed him there, lying on a gurney in the lobby, awaiting medical attention. “I saw him trying to sit up, but he was unable to,” says Hussain. They took him in for surgery, but by that time Murtaza had already lost too much blood. He was 42.

Murtaza’s sister, who was then prime minister, and her husband, now President Asif Ali Zardari, were accused of complicity in Murtaza’s assassination. The then president, Farooq Leghari, sacked Benazir’s government 45 days after the killing, insinuating that it was one of the reasons for the ouster. “For him, Murtaza’s death was killing two birds with one stone,” said Hussain of Leghari, who died last year. “It got rid of Murtaza, who was difficult to control, and it implicated Benazir—in a murder case.” Hussain had been covering Murtaza since the Bhutto ended his 16-year self-exile and returned to Pakistan in 1993. Hussain says he liked Murtaza, despite his aggressive, often reckless behavior.

A Haughty Man

Some of this aggressive behavior was on show just hours before the shooting. At 70 Clifton, a visibly enraged Murtaza railed against the police and his sister’s government, which he and his mother, Nusrat, frequently accused of unprecedented corruption that had besmirched and damaged the Bhutto brand name. If Murtaza sometimes tread delicately about his older sister, he had no such reservations about her husband. A popular and very likely apocryphal account has Murtaza confronting Zardari and shaving off his mustache, an insult in Sindhi culture. Zardari was seen as having a motive to get rid of Murtaza, who presented himself as the true (male) heir to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s political legacy, and he was charged with involvement in the murder. At this last press conference, Murtaza accused Benazir’s government of ordering the arbitrary arrests, and killings, of workers from his renegade PPP splinter group. Murtaza challenged the police to arrest him if they dared.

“I want to tell Zardari,” Murtaza told the press, “that this isn’t the Peoples Party in which you are seated: a corrupt Peoples Party, a weak Peoples Party, a shameless Peoples Party … Every other day you say you want to arrest me, come if you have the guts, you shameless people, come arrest me, I am standing here!” His final flourish was prescient: “[I am not] afraid of your CIA or your police, you just don’t have the guts to arrest me!” Hours later, he was dead.

Two nights before he was gunned down, Murtaza, who was an elected member of the Sindh Assembly, raided a couple of police stations in Karachi flanked by a dozen heavily-armed loyalists in an unsuccessful attempt to extricate a party member detained on charges of terrorism. He forced police to surrender their weapons, and ordered his men to search the stations. Murtaza’s imperiousness and haughty air of entitlement outraged many people. These grating personality characteristics only strengthened the public’s unfavorable impression of him as a man who sees himself above the law. Authorities suspected the involvement of his Al-Zulfikar guerilla group in two recent bomb attacks in Karachi.

The group, modeled after the Palestinian Liberation Organization and set up to avenge Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hanging in 1979 by Islamist dictator Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, was accused of anti-State activities, including the 1981 hijacking of a Kabul-bound PIA flight, an abortive rocket attack on Zia’s plane, political killings (including the apparently accidental assassination of Chaudhry Zahoor Elahi, the father of Pervaiz Elahi, a former Punjab chief minister and currently a cabinet member in the Zardari-led government), bank robberies. According to the late Raja Anwar, a reformed member of Al-Zulfikar, the group was founded in Kabul and received arms and funding from the Dubai royal family, the PLO, Syria’s Assad, Libya’s Gaddafi, and India. In her book Songs of Blood and Sword, Murtaza’s daughter, Fatima, claims the guerilla group was formed after Zulfikar Ali Bhutto suggested it to Murtaza in a letter from jail.

A Family Affair

Murtaza’s cousin Tariq Islam disputes the claim. Murtaza had asked Islam to fly to Pakistan and deliver two messages to his father. On March 27, 1979, Islam told his jailed uncle that Murtaza wanted his sanction to wage a guerilla war from Afghanistan against the Zia dictatorship. The second message was PLO chief Yasir Arafat’s offer to spring Bhutto from jail. The former president and prime minister vetoed both ideas. “Did I send Mir to Harvard and Oxford to learn about all this stuff? Already they are calling me a murderer and a smuggler. Next, they will be calling me a terrorist. Tell him that I forbid him to go to Kabul. No matter what happens to me, he should concentrate on his studies,” Islam recalls Zulfikar as saying.

Murtaza exhorted Islam to try again. Islam met Zulfikar again on March 30, and again the message was the same. “I think Mir has boxed himself into a corner. He has made some commitments to the Afghans and is finding it difficult to back out now. Tell him to go if he wishes but I am not at all happy. The Afghans are too shrewd … they will manipulate Mir for their own reasons and sell him down the river when it suits them. He must be very careful in what he does and says. I leave him in God’s hands. But ask him to complete Oxford,” recalls Islam of his last conversation with Zulfikar, who was hanged less than a week later.

Sanam, the only one of Zulfikar and Nusrat Bhutto’s surviving children and who lives in London, supports her cousin’s position. “My father, from his jail cell, quite directly and forcefully ordered all four of his children to return to school and finish our educations. My parents put us on a plane and told us no matter what happens we were to stay on board until it left and return to our universities,” she wrote in Dawn last year. “My father never told any of us, his sons or his daughters, to start a terrorist wing, to hijack planes, to murder passengers or to be violent in any way. My sister chose to avenge his death through the ballot, and my brothers may have chosen a different path, but the wishes of my parents were quite clear.”

His alleged involvement with terrorist activities kept Murtaza away from Pakistan, even after Zia’s sudden demise in a mysterious plane crash and his sister being elected prime minister in 1988. In a TV interview in 1995, Murtaza said he had been “kept away” from the country. “I was told my life was not safe and that if I returned I would jeopardize the political standing of my sister,” he said. “I could not forever base my politics on the remote possibility that it would hurt my sister’s politics.” He went on to describe Benazir’s government as “directionless … corrupt to the core. Its only purpose seems to be to earn money by hook or by crook.” Their mother, Nusrat, did not hold back either. “If we are asking for democracy, why don’t we have democracy in the party?” she told the interviewer, a young Fatima sitting close by.

By the time Murtaza ended his self-exile, the row between Benazir and their mother was an open secret. Jugnu Mohsin, one of the country’s most powerful satirists, even started a column on the theme, Mommy and Me, for The Friday Times. “Unfortunately, Murtaza and Benazir and Asif’s was a difficult and, at times, turbulent relationship,” Islam told Newsweek Pakistan. Murtaza landed in Karachi almost a month after Benazir was elected prime minister for the second time, in 1993. The numbers that came out to greet him at the airport were considerably fewer than those who received Benazir in 1986. The police beat them back. The aircraft was directed to a less crowded runway and Murtaza was arrested, kept in solitary confinement for seven months on terrorism charges. Benazir had warned Murtaza from returning to Pakistan fearing, say her supporters, for his life. Murtaza’s camp maintains it was because she felt threatened by him.

Himalayan Grief

Ghinwa, Murtaza’s widow and Fatima’s stepmother, blamed Benazir and Zardari. She was only able to get the official police case registered against Murtaza’s killers two days after Benazir’s government was dismissed. The first-information report states that the “federal and provincial government of Sindh, jealous of his rising popularity had conspired to eliminate him and, in league with the accused police officers … and one Maj. Masood Sharif, a senior officer of Intelligence Bureau, have cold-bloodedly murdered Mir Murtaza.” Newsweek Pakistan contacted Ghinwa Bhutto for this story. She declined to comment citing security fears.

Estranged niece Fatima, who is half-Afghan and was born in Kabul during her father’s days of exile, has accused Benazir of “moral responsibility” for her father’s murder. Despite the family tensions and polarization within the party, even the most hardened Murtaza acolytes now concede that Benazir had no involvement in her brother’s assassination. Even though Fatima has derided and dismissed Benazir’s grief as choreographed drama, it was all too apparent that Benazir was shocked and reeling from yet another violent death in her family. State television aired footage of Benazir at Murtaza’s hospital: her head uncovered, her feet bare as a mark of respect, the prime minister too upset to even stand up straight. At the post-burial rituals in Larkana, a red-eyed and shaken Benazir sat next to her mother; the old tensions between them still showing. Benazir said hidden hands had “killed a Bhutto to get a Bhutto.”

Assassinations in Pakistan are puzzling affairs, always unresolved and unexplained. Benazir wanted to know the truth. She hired a team of British investigators, paying them £200,000 from federal funds to probe the Murtaza murder. Their report, released in spring 1997, referred to the “grassy-knoll syndrome” and justified Benazir’s suspicions. According to ballistics reports, said investigators, there was another shooter on the other side of the road who triggered the firefight. After her government fell in 1996, Benazir alleged that members of the police and Murtaza’s security detail had been planted by Inter-Services Intelligence. The shooting and deadly firefight was preplanned so Murtaza could be murdered, she said. Shortly before her own assassination, Benazir gave an emotionally-charged interview to Business Plus in which she spent considerable time going over her personal quest for answers. Murtaza’s brutal death had affected her deeply, and she never gave up her search for the truth. Benazir’s own assassination was probed by Scotland Yard, who bizarrely sanctified the then government’s “lever theory” explaining away Benazir’s death, despite cell-phone footage to the contrary.

Murtaza Bhutto assasnation

Murtaza Bhutto by Sallubhaai

tariq luqman speaks: BHUTTO FAMILY

tariq luqman speaks: BHUTTO FAMILY

THE BHUTTO FAMILY

fatima bhutto dating

BHUTTO FAMILY

Is Fatima Bhutto Dating George Clooney?
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This is some news. According to the grapevine, Fatima Bhutto is dating George Clooney.
Fatima Bhutto, the 26-year old niece of assassinated former Pakistani Primer Minister Benazir Bhutto, a passionate feminist writer and journalist, graduated with a degree in Middle Eastern studies from Barnard and received a masters in South Asian studies from University of London.
Fatima is the author of two books: a volume of poetry published when she was 15 years old in her father’s memory, Whispers of the Desert, and a collection of firsthand survivor’s accounts from the October 8, 2005, earthquake in Pakistan entitled 8:50 AM
George Clooney, the 47-year-old actor and aspiring politician reportedly met Fatima Bhutto at an international conference last year.
The Nation, quoting National Enquirer (the same publication that blew the lid on OJ Simpson and John Edwards), reported earlier:
Clooney is also said to be uncharacteristically serious about her, especially considering how smart and independent she is. Although Clooney has been able to keep the relationship under wraps, in private he is gushing to pals about the raven-haired Fatima, say insiders. George and Fatima met at an international conference last year. George quickly fell for her, revealed the source.
“Fatima was educated at Columbia University… and knew of his heartthrob rep, but she didn’t take his advances seriously because she thought their age difference - not to mention where they each lived - would make a serious relationship impractical. But George has courted her by phone and e-mail and arranged to meet her abroad when their schedules allowed it. Now he wants her to spend time with him in Hollywood.”