Trial and Error: The Advent and Eclipse of Benazir Bhutto 0195791606, 9780195791600

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Trial and Error The Advent and Eclipse of Benazir Bhutto

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Trial and Error The Advent and Eclipse of Benazir Bhutto

IQBAL AKHUND I/

OXFORD VNIVl!llSITY PllBSS

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OXFORD UNIVBl.SITY Pl.BSS

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6oP Oxford University Press is a depanment of the University of Oxford. ~It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in

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0 Oxford University Press 2000 The moral rights of the author have been asseried First published 2000 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, store·d in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press. Enquiries concerning reproduction should be sent to Oxford University Press at the address below. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. ISBN 0 19 579160 6 Second Impression 2000

Printed in Pakistan at Mas Printers, Karachi. Published by Ameena Saiyid, Oxford University Press 5-Bangalore Town, Sharae Faisal PO Box 13033, Karachi-75350, Pakistan.

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Dedicated With sympathy and not without Jwpe, to

Benazir

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... In that land all is lackadaisical: No la/us of cawdled spawn, and no loclud ponds Of settled purpose, no netted fishes; But only inkling streams and running fronds jritillaried with dreams, weedy with wishes; . . . On clear days mountains of meaning are seen Humped high on the horizon; no one goes To con their meaning, no one cares or knows. . . . In that land all is flat, indifferent; there is neither springing house nor lianging tent, No aims are entertained, nothing is meant, For there are no ends and no trends, no roads, Only follow your nose io anywhere. For it is a timeless land, it lies Between the act and the attrition .. .

These extracts arc from a poc:m sent to me by a colleague many years ago and that I discovered among my papers. I have not been able to trace the author's name and apologize to whoever it is for using these lines without permission. I reproduce them not as a verdict on Pakistan as a nation but because, to me, they seem to depict the country's congenital malaise that is a mixture of smugness and selfdoubt.

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Contents pages

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List of Photographs

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Preface

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Introduction 1. Exile's Return

1 24 27

2. The Hand of God 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11 . 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21 . 22.

Aftermath An Uncertain Transition A Snared Compromise 'Nation of the Year' Taking Charge A Mixed Welcome Dirty Tricks Hit and Miss The Administration Islamism Rajiv Gandhi Siachen The Armed Forces Afghanistan Kashmir The United States Foreign Policy Issues and Dilemmas The End-Game Two Benazirs

30 39 47 50 55 58 64 73

84 89 99 113 149 201 242·

262 279

304 315

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Afterword Index

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List of Photographs Between pp. 110-111

1. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto with Sardar Daud of Afghanistan. 2. Addressing women supporters of PPP. 3. Happier days. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto with his children Shahnawaz and Sanam. 4. Begum Nusrat Bhutto planting a date sapling at the Hajirabad Colony, Karachi which she visited on 8 May 1976. 5. Benazir accepting condolences on her brother Shahnawaz's death in 1985. 6. Lending a sympathetic ear to a woman from her constituency. 7. Laying flowers on her father's grave. 8. Asif Zardari and Benazir Bhutto, 1987. 9. Asif Zardari. 10. With Ghulam Ishaq Khan. 11. The Heads of State and Governments of SAARC countries on their visit to Daman-e-Koh. 1988. 12. President Ghulam Ishaq Khan swearing in Benazir's Cabinet. 13. The Heads of State and Governments of SAARC countries at the concluding session of ~e Fourth SAARC Summit in Islamabad. 31 December 1988. 14. Iqbal Akhund, Adviser to the Prime Minister on Foreign Affairs and National Security, addressing the opening session of the Security Council on Afghanistan. New York, 11 April 1989. 15. With Premier Li Peng in Beijing. 16. With King Birendra Singh of Nepal. 17. With Foreign Minister Qian Qichen.

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x 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

UST OF PHOTOGRAPHS

At the Siachen Glacier. Murtaza Bhutto addressing a rally of his party. Murtaza receiving blessings from a poor woman. After the shoutout which resulted in the death of Murtaza Bhutto and six of his supporters. 20 September 1996. Murtaza Bhutto in the Mideast Medical Centre after the shootout. PPP supporters at a rally in Larkana, 1998. Photo © Sacheverell Wilkinson. Benazir Bhutto addressing a PPP rally in Larkana, 1998. Photo © Sacheverell Wilkinson. PPP rally in Larkana, 1998. Photo © Sacheverell Wilkinson. Benazir with Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan in Lahore, 1998. Photo © Sacheverell Wilkinson. 'The Co-Chairperson'. Benazir with Nusrat Bhutto .

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Preface The substance of this book was originally to have been the last chapter of my previous book, Memoirs of a Bystander, but on further thought, I found that its subject matter did not quite fit into a book of memoirs, nor would an epilogue be the proper place for what it has to tell. For Benazir's advent and the return of democracy was not the end of a story but a new beginning. It was not fullfledged parliamentary democracy but something of a viceregal diarchy, with power shared between a popularly elected prime minister and an indirectly elected president. Many disappointments and much disillusionment lay ahead. Still, it was a beginning. Her advent was seen by many as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's Second Coming. But Benazir was not Zulfikar Bhutto reincarnated. Rather was she heir to a twin legacy-that of her brilliant, mercurial, and illstarred father and that of the sly and ever-smiling Ziaul Haq, whom and whose works she had reason to abominate from the depths of her being. The legacy left by her father, - opu_!_n!Y Zulfikar Bhutto, was a double-e With -~~asses and distrust and suspicion amoo& the e stablishment and kc forei owers like the USA and ntatn. enazir was to be accused by her critics isappointed partisans o giving u the first and sellin out to e esta s ment for the sake of power and perks. Benazir's advent was by no means the end of the Ziaul Haq era. Zia's death had not closed a chapter but only opened up, or reopened, possibilities in every field, or so it seemed in the initial euphoria of the times. Zia' s chief

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endowment to the nation was a constitutional amendment that, almost ex officio, set the president and the prime minister at loggerheads. 1 Moreover, Ziaul Haq was not, so much a dictator as a Head Oligarch and, though he was gone, members of the oligarchy remained entrenched at all levels of the system. They paid lip service to the restoration of democracy but only on a basis that left them undisturbed in the enjoyment of the power and perks to which they had become accustomed. Nonetheless, Benazir's first government had a significance beyond its brief duration. It was the first genuinely elected government after Pakistan's longest martial law regime. Then it was headed by a woman, and a woman who had suffered hardship and endured personal loss as few others. This was Pakistan's third attempt at democracy-the first being the period up to the adoption of the 1956 constitution and its brief existence; the second, aborted after the elections held by Yahya Khan, led to the break-up of Pakistan and then to the 1973 constitution adopted under Bhutto: (I do not count Ayub Khan's 1962 'Basic Democracy', which was a one-man show and fell by the wayside as soon as his own rule did.) Now there was a chance to make a fresh start on Pakistan's fifty-year adventure with nationhood and democracy. On one side, all hopes were pinned on the return of Bhutto's heir; on the other, the prospect provoked all the hatred and fears that he himself had aroused. Were the hopes dashed and the fears confirmed? What was Benazir seeking and what did she achieve? Vindication or revenge? To restore and consolidate democratic institutions and norms? Or would she be content with power for its own sake and for personal aggrandizement? There were different views on the subject from the start and these differences remain. Pakistanis, living in a country of stark contrasts and aware of the country's chequered historical background, tend to view things in black and white, judge people and events against absolute standards. Perhaps only

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history can give definitive answers to these and similar questions This book deals mainly with developments during Benazir's first government, which lasted only twenty months and in which I was Adviser on National Security and Foreign Affairs. It was a position of some importance and I believe that I had Benazir's trust, but I cannot claim that mine was a central role in the government, whose primary concerns did not lie in the field of foreign affairs. On Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India the government was faced with very complex and thorny issues, but the decision-making in all of these had been taken over by the army and the intelligence agencies in Zia's time and there, in the ultimate analysis, it remained. The role of the Foreign Ministry was scarcely that of a primus inter pares. The Bhutto phenomenon has a special place in the political history of Pakistan. In the ups and downs of the Bhutto political dynasty one may see a metaphor for the contradictions and vicissitudes of Pakistanis as a nation and Pakistan as a state. It would not be altogether a literary conceit to do so. The leaders who have governed Pakistan during the fifty years of its existence have, almost without exception, in one way or another failed the country. In answer to criticisms after her s~cond overthrow, Benazir responded to a pressman's question with a question of her own2 , to whom do you compare our leadership ...to that of India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, or to President Ayub who built the 22 families/ to President Y ahya Khan who presided over the disintegration of Pakistan, or do we compare ourselves with Ziaul Haq...the man who gave us the Kalashnikov culture and the drug culture, the politics of ethnicity and sectarianism ... when the Afghan Jihad funds were robbed by one of his colleagues while another indulged in the drug trade?'

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She made a telling point indeed for, by the prevailing standards, the Bhuttos certainly pass muster and in many ways make a better showing. ~e . _!_ad thing about the__ Bhuttos was not that their governments were no worse ttlan the others bat that; all saia and done, d1cy wete not very d1ftere~!~8. fa~lure that seems especiilfy po1gnant m the of the daughter because -oldie"'pnce that- was - extracted.from .iliC father for his ·transgressions.and·became of all that sliene iselfiuffiired Cridu[ed. so brave1¥-Mid-. ~flinchingfy,- y~~. ~ the end it seemed as if it had all been ··-·· -- -·--··- - -- - -- - ··-·- · for nothing. r

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NOTES 1. The Eighth Amendment to the 1973 constitution, obtained by Ziaul Haq from the National Assembly as the price for lifting martial law, gave the president the power to dismiss at will the elected government as well as the National Assembly and to order fresh elections. 2. The monthly Nninline, Karachi, December 1996. 3. The phrase is from a book published in the 1960s by the Pakistani economist, the late Mahbubul Haq, in which he argued that substantial economic development during President Ayub Khan's regime had not benefited the country as a whole but only enriched a limited number of businessmen.

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Introduction 20 September 1996. Mir Murtaza Bhutto, brother of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, lies dying on a dusty pavement outside his home in Karachi. His life is ebbing away with the blood flowing from a fatal bullet wound that has pierced his jaw. In the darkened street, the policemen who fired the bullets come and go without paying much attention to his condition, but put him under arrest for possessing unlicensed arms. Alongside lie, dying or dead, a number of his armed henchmen, all similarly under arrest. Then one of the policemen thinks about providing medical attention but considers it necessary to check with higher authorities before doing anything so bold as sending the grievously wounded man to a hospital. So he goes to a nearby post to seek instructions from senior officers. These are that Murtaza should be taken to a hospital 'as soon as possible'. The prime minister's brother, whose life is oozing away minute by minute, is then put in a police van which stops at the police post, where the senior officers are duly informed that he is being taken to the Mideast Medical Centre, about three minutes down the road. There the police put him on a stretcher, leave it in the doorway of the hospital, and themselves leave the place without a word to anyone. Mir Murtaza Bhutto, tall, handsome, debonair, the only surviving son of the executed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had been returning home after addressing a public meeting in an out-lying shanty town of Karachi. He did not know that he was riding towards his own execution, though in a press

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conference at his home earlier in the day he had spoken of a plot against his life, and he had named names. Some three days earlier, the police ha'd picked up one of his closest associates, a man by the name of Ali Sonara, on charges of being an Indian spy and of involvement in various terrorist acts. The next day, Murtaza, accompanied by his strong-arm boys, had gone on a rampage, raiding various police stations in order to find and free his comrade and confidant and, according to some, a man who knew too much. At the public meeting, Murtaza, in his habitual fashion, had lashed out at the iniquities and shoncomings of his sister's government and the corruption and wheelingdealing of her husband, Asif Zardari. Meanwhile, a heavilyarmed police contingent had arrived at the seaside residential suburb of Clifton and blocked the way to Munaza's house in pursuance of a decision by the Sindh government to disarm Munaza's armed guards. At a traffic check-post at the so-called 'Two Swords' roundabout close by the Bhutto house, a number of senior police officers had come down to supervise the operation. As Murtaza's motorcade carrying him and his armed men neared home, a police van that had been tailing it crackled a wireless message to the check-post, 'Your "guest" is on his way!' After the shooting was over, the police filed an FIR (First Information Repon), or complaint that the police pany had been fired upon by Munaza's men and been compelled to fire back in self-defence. Then, as noted in the repon of the Sindh government's Judicial Enquiry Tribunal, the police proceeded deliberately to obliterate all pertinent pieces of evidence from the scene-fingerprints, footprints, bullet marks, cartridge empties, police vehicles at the scene, everything was removed, nothing was recorded. Meanwhile, as described, Munaza had been left bleeding on the pavement for forty minutes until his chances of survival had all but vanished. The Mideast Medical Centre

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where he was silently deposited by the police is not equipped to deal with such emergency cases, whereas the fully equipped Jinnah Post-Graduate Hospital is only a ten-minute ambulance drive from the scene. It is doubtful whether the police would have behaved in such a way towards the brother of a prime minister unless they were sure that it was meant to be done. Benazir said as much herself in her testimony before the Tribunal: 'My brother could not have been killed unless there was an assurance from the other side that they would be protected, and that sort of assurance must have come from no less a person than the president.' The Tribunal found no evidence to uphold this supposition but observed drily that those police officers who had planned the operation must have been aware of the risk of Mir Murtaza himself becoming a victim of the shooting along with his bodyguards. 'As such [they] would not have gone ahead without approval from the relevant provincial or federal higher authorities.' Murtaza had been dead for hours when Benazir, who had come from Islamabad, arrived at the hospital. She came barefoot to show her bereavement, but her arrival was greeted with boos by the pro-Murtaza crowd that had gathered outside the hospital when news spread of his fate. In Larkana, where Murtaza's body was taken for burial in the family graveyard, the hostility of the crowds was such that she was unable to attend the funeral. Things had come a long way in the eleven years since she had brought home the body of another brother, Shahnawaz, who had also died of foul play, in the Mediterranean resort of Cannes. Ziaul Haq still ruled Pakistan then, but delirious multitudes had greeted her at every railway station and wayside stop as she travelled by train from Karachi to the family burial ground near Larkana. Six weeks after Murtaza's killing, she was out of her job for the second time, perhaps for good this time. In an interview with Time magazine a few months later, her

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answer to the question whether she wanted to be prime minister again sounded out of character, almost sulky: No, I don't. Why should I? ... for me, the prime ministcrsh.ip means hard work. My father worked from morning to night. I worked from morning to night. What did my father get? He got hanged. What did I get? I got slandered ...

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1 Exile's Return In April 1986, Benazir returned to Pakistan from two years of sdf-imposed exile. The world media's attention had made her name familiar all over the world, a 'Daughter of the East' who spoke in western accents, a Muslim woman who was a role model for women everywhere. She came home as the flag-bearer of the Bhpua name dauibrcr of a martyr, herself the object oLGCllCl"al-Ziaul..Ha~ Ion ersccutton, the shinin ho c of democrac and freedom an progress a world medja supemar. Wherever she went vast crowds turned out to meet her. At Lahore, her first stop and then considered a Bhutto fief, the multitudes recalled those that used to gather for her father and it looke:d, at least to her, as if the city was ready to be taken by Stonn. 'Marcos is gone, the president of Haiti is gone, now another dictator must go!' she proclaimed. In Peshawar, emotional, chanting crowds, including Afghans from refugee camps, fired their guns in the air and released colourful balloons. She declared: 'There is fear in the heart of the usurper. The time has come for the usurper to run away.' The crowd echoed: 'Za za Zia! Zia za!' (Go, Zia, Go!) 'We could have taken over that day!' she declared in the euphoria induced by Lahore's welcome. But the crowds were in a festive mood, not a violent one. Police everywhere remained on the sidelines and troops stayed in their barracks. Martial law had been lifted and a semi-democratic government was in power under Ziaul Haq's handpicked Mohammad Khan Junejo. Junejo, man of moderation by

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nature, was playing it cool by design. In allowing the rally to be held, he was banking on the relaxed political environment that prevailed in the country and acting in·the belief that the initial fervour of the crowds would die down in time. It was possibly also his shrewd way of showing Zia what the alternative to Junejo could be. (Ziaul Haq did lock her up again for a while but let her out when Washington frowned.) For her pan, Benazir focused her attacks on Zia, sparing Junejo, and indeed suggested that the Junejo government could play a role in the restoration of genuine democracy. Alexander Stanic, of the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug, noted that the way in which her rallies had been organized and conducted, and the political maturity displayed at them, showed that Benazir's campaign was more than just euphoria. 'I have not come here to take revenge!' she declared in order to reassure powerful men in the establishment who might have had fears on that score. When, during her nine-hour procession through the city of Lahore, American flags were burned amidst slogans against the United States for its suppon of the Zia dictatorship, she was careful to dissociate herself from these manifestations. The New York Times wrote that on her return, Benazir was faced by, 'defections, splits, and a lack of discipline in her organization'. This was perhaps an overstatement, but on the political plane she did face serious problems. Contention within the party broke out almost as soon as she landed. First came the brea.k with Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, who had been the PPP's acting leader in the absence of the Bhutto ladies from the country. It happened on Jatoi's pan for reasons of pique, and on Benazir's pan, due to her desire to break free and take over the leade1'hip of the Party, to be rid, in her ironic words, of the 'uncles'her father's colleagues and senior party men who had known her as a little girl and whom now she found it irksome to consult and defer to. Among the 'uncles' who

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went, or were sent, their way, was a real uncle, Mumtaz Bhutto. Mumtaz felt strongly about the situation of Sindh and of the Sindhis in Pakistan and considered that the PPP was far too dependent on the Punjab vote to be able to protect Sindhi interests . He came out on a platform for a confederal constitution, in which he saw the only solution to Pakistan's abiding constitutional dilemma, viz., that the population of one province out-numbered those of all the othen put together. (Before the secession of Bangladesh, this had been East Pakistan; now it was the Punjab). He predicted that Benazir's was going to be the last throw for federalism and if it failed, as, in his view, it inevitably would, the most that could be hoped was that Pakistan might survive as a confederation. The challenge to Benazir came also from the left wing of the PPP- from ' Old Bolsheviks' like Malik Miraj Khalid, Rao Rashid, and Shaikh Rashid, who were dismayed by the pro-American and pragmatic tum she was giving to the party's traditional policy. Talking to Labour's Neil Kinnock in London a year later, Benazir spoke of her problems in bringing the PPP from left to left of centre, and generally in maintaining a credible political posture. Ziaul Haq, she said to him, had the advantage of being in power and could and did take up more and more political space, forcing the PPP to the margins. 'We had to fight hard to regain territory.' Even to many sympathizen she appeared to be in the doldrums because her policies were increasingly indistinguishable from the government's. They felt that she risked losing her leftist vote bank on account of the changes she was making in the PPP's platform and orientation. Nevenhcless, she was able to quash these challenges without too much trouble. which she was ab e hi

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decade-long defiance of the martial law re · e and the persecunon she had suffered at its hands. On the ideologi plane, in adop_~~~g ~·praimatic :iP.£~O!i~h .~h~. was .not sw1mniing "against ~c:__c~rrent_ but_goin&~wilh..Jtl..e political treiid"as .. if.h.~.4H~~y~.1-