Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir

Songs

of

Blood

and

Sword

Songs

of

Blood

and

Sword

A DAUGHTER
’
S MEMOIR

FATIMA BHUTTO

VIKING CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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Copyright © Fatima Bhutto, 2010

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ISBN: 978-0-670-06960-6

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For my Joonam, Nusrat, who is always with me
And my mother Ghinwa
for giving me life

THE BHUTTOS OF LARKANA

Taken from a family tree commissioned by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and kept in 70 Clifton

Poem of the Unknown

On your breast lay

the deep scar of your enemy

but you standing cypress did not fall
it is your way to die.

In you nestles songs of blood and sword
in you the migrating birds

in you the anthem of victory

Your eyes have never been so bright.

K
HOSROW
G
OLSURKHI
(Executed 1972)

Preface

12
November
2008

I
t is almost eleven at night in Karachi. From my bedroom in70 Clifton I can hear the constant hum of traffic. I’m used to the sound now; it has become the soundtrack to my writing and thinking here. But now there are sirens too. Ambulances, or maybe politicians, driving around the city blaring out announcements of their arrival. Heavily armed elite guards, mainly Rangers toting Kalashnikovs, accompany them. Sometimes, there’s gunfire. More often than not, it’s a staccato burst and it sounds far away. It’s not the wedding season in Karachi, when macho males take to the streets and spray the sky with bullets. It’s not New Year’s Eve, traditionally boisterous and often peppered with gunfire to mark the start of the New Year. This is the new Karachi. But we’ve seen it all before.

Fourteen years ago I missed weeks of school because of the violence that had taken hold of our city. I remember going to sleep hearing the hum of bullets nearby. I remember picking up the newspapers the next morning and seeing the previous night’s body count. It was a dangerous city then, my Karachi. The Sindhi PPP government launched a genocidal strike, called Operation Clean-Up, against the ethnic Muhajirs who form the bulk of the MQM political party. The MQM began to hit back. They formed their own death squads and the sound of their revenge became aggressively familiar too.

There were moments, when I was younger, when it scared me to be here in Karachi, in this house. I used to shiver in the dead of summer nights, begging myself to sleep and praying that I might push
past the fear of the violence and the spectres of the dead that surrounded me and my city. But one night I heard the mynah birds outside my window crowing at five in the morning. After that I would wait to hear them, these dark, rough birds, and I would fall asleep as they reassured me with their raven song that we had defeated the night once more. I made my peace with 70 Clifton and with this city when I realized that the sounds of the mynah birds would not follow me elsewhere and that I would miss them should I pack my bags and head somewhere far away

But that was a long time ago. We haven’t lived like this in over a decade. We haven’t been this afraid in a long time.

After the PPP government fell in 1996, on the heel of more violence, we had a few years of calm in Karachi as Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the sometimes opposition sometimes ruling party, the Pakistan Muslim League, blundered through his own second term. It was quiet then. We went to school, took our tests, ate our watery lunch at the school cafeteria, and came home safely.

After the Musharraf coup and the advent of the war on terror, we saw violence rear its head in our city again. The times and methods of terror had changed in the sleepy interim period; violence shifted its course and mutated, growing stronger until it became an unrecognizable strain of what we once knew intimately. This time they weren’t gunmen. Instead, they were suicide bombers and they tended to strike fast-food outlets and crowded malls designed like traditional bazaars. When they were feeling particularly aggrieved, they attacked embassies. But we Karachiites, so schooled in survival, knew which ones to avoid. We avoided driving past the American consulate. We didn’t drive very close to the British high commission either. And we ordered take-away when we were feeling peckish.

The electricity just went off, blinking out in between the typing of these words. The lights go out all the time now; this is the fifth time the power has been cut today. It’s worse outside the city, though. A friend recently returned from the interior told me today that in central Sindh villagers are lucky to get two hours electricity a day, if any at all. Autumn in Sindh, oddly enough, is one of the hottest
periods of the year. Rarely, on good days, my friend explained, four hours worth of electricity might reach the poorest houses across the province. There is, fortunately, a generator in my house so I sit in the darkness listening to the restless sound of Karachi’s errant traffic, chaotically composed of cars, trucks, amped-up motorcycles carrying families of four or more and auto rickshaws, as I wait by the glow of my laptop for the generator to whirr into life. Its frenzied sound overpowers everything. It’s like a mosquito buzzing in my ear as I write.

Electricity prices under this new PPP government have soared. The Karachi Electrical Supply Company, one of the most corrupt organizations in this country, has always been appalling – no matter whether you’re at home or not your electricity bill is always the same. You pay phenomenal changes and then sit in darkness for most of the year. The poor, who don’t have generators, subsist in darkness. Pakistan recently missed its millennium goal of eradicating polio, still rife in our country, because the state could not guarantee the proper refriger-ation of the vaccines. Corruption is as simple as that. This winter, Karachi traders have decided not to pay their KESC bills in protest over the latest blackouts. They’ve been on the streets every day this week, burning their electricity bills in Saddar, the city’s commercial centre; burning tyres in Malir, a poor Baloch neighbourhood near the airport; and protesting outside local press clubs and business centres. India has just launched a moon mission and we can’t even light up the streets. We are a nuclear-armed state that cannot run refrigerators.

But back to the violence. We’ve had a record number of suicide bombings in the past year, topping Iraq and Afghanistan at various points. Suicide bombers have grown plucky now; they are no longer targeting infidel Western food outlets or foreign embassies. Now they strike on main roads, outside office buildings, police stations and army barracks; they direct their vengeance against the government and those politicians, back in office, who have promised us to a foreign power.

For several months, unmanned American Predator drones have
been flying over Northern Pakistan in what feels like daily missions. Local newspapers report the strikes that kill scores of people with disheartening ease. They say the ‘operations’ were ‘successful’. Our newspapers, which are now so heavily censored that my column, which I wrote for two years, has been halted because the democratic government of Pakistan does not tolerate criticism – especially not internally – are shallow empty shells of what newspapers ought to be. They never say exactly what they mean – that a ‘successful’ drone mission means people were killed, often as they slept. Sometimes, they tell us that the dead were militants. Sometimes they tell us they were Al Qaeda operatives. Other times, they say they were part of the burgeoning Pakistani Taliban. They’re never civilians. There are never mistakes; the drones remove the possibility of human error. This is terrorist hunting, American-style. Dead women and children killed in their schools and fields are ‘human shields’, young boys armed with only blackboard slates in their local madrassahs, since they have no government schools to attend, are future
jihadis
, it is inconceivable that anything less than the hysterical is possible.