THE ZARDARI BEHIND THE BHUTTO

According to an account Fatima later gave to London-based writer and left-wing activist Tariq Ali, it was Zardari who answered the phone call.

Relations between the Bhutto siblings were severely strained. The mercurial Murtuza had returned from exile to challenge his sister’s leadership of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), created by their father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Their mother Nusrat had switched loyalties and now openly supported her son against her prime minister daughter. Many party functionaries also seemed to be secretly rooting for Murtuza, who was seen as unpredictable but honest.

Benazir’s main support in her public battle with her brother came from Zardari, who by then was popularly referred to across Pakistan as “Mr Ten Percent” for his legendary wheeling-dealing.

This is how Fatima recalled her telephone conversation with Zardari on that day in September 1996:
Fatima: I wish to speak to my aunt, please.
Zardari: It’s not possible.
Fatima: Why? (At this point, Fatima says she heard wails and what sounded like fake crying.)
Zardari: She’s hysterical, can’t you hear?
Fatima: Why?
Zardari: Don’t you know? Your father’s been shot.

Some time before he was ambushed and killed by a large police posse, Murtuza had summoned his brother-in-law to the Bhutto family bungalow in Karachi, ostensibly for ‘peace talks’. But instead of burying the hatchet, Murtuza got his henchmen to shave off one-half of Zardari’s impressive handlebar moustache. Both men knew that the ultimate insult for a wadera grandee was to have his moustache forcibly removed.

Who ordered the police to gun down Murtuza Bhutto is still a mystery, even though a three-judge tribunal concluded that it could not have taken place without approval from a ‘much higher’ authority. However, Fatima, now a columnist for the Pakistani daily The News, broke years of silence shortly before her aunt returned from exile last October and alleged that the ‘not-so-hidden hand’ behind her father’s cold-blooded killing was Zardari’s.

Benazir was aware of the strong emotions her husband aroused in Pakistan. Even at the time of her arranged marriage to Zardari in 1987 with the blessings of her mother, Karachi high society tut-tutted about the alliance. The Bhuttos were aristocracy; the Zardaris, despite being landowners in Sindh’s Nawabshah district, were seen as upstarts.

Even though Zardari, who was younger than Benazir, led his own polo team, had a disco at home and styled himself as a playboy, his father was often derisively referred to as “that cinema hall owner”.

The marriage was the result of political necessity, with Benazir, pushing 35, requiring a mandatory husband before launching her bid to become the first woman prime minister of a modern, male-dominated Islamic state. She confessed later to Claudia Dreifus of the New York Times Magazine: “I decided to make a personal sacrifice in what I thought would be, more or less, a loveless marriage, a marriage of convenience.”

But the marriage worked, even as Benazir came to power for the first time in December 1988. “The surprising part is that we are very close and that it’s been a very good match,” she told Dreifus.

The marriage may have been made in heaven, but there was hell to pay. During Benazir’s two tenures as prime minister, Zardari, described by Tariq Ali as ‘the deadly angel who guided her’, was accused of corruption, embezzlement, extortion, blackmail and murder.

Benazir’s friends worried about the political fallout of her association with Zardari. On a visit to Karachi once, one such friend wailed to me about Zardari. I asked why she didn’t warn Pakistan’s prime minister about the damage being wrought by her husband. “It’s not possible,” said Benazir’s friend. “The moment you say something against Asif, a shutter drops and she stops listening.”

Benazir’s interview with Dreifus provided some insight into her deep attachment to Zardari. After she was first ousted from power in 1990, Benazir said she asked her mother and Zardari to flee Pakistan. She had been warned they would be imprisoned if she continued in politics and challenged Nawaz Sharif, who was now prime minister. Nusrat left, but Zardari refused. “I begged my husband to go,” she told Dreifus. “And he said to me: ‘I cannot abandon my wife and children. I would rather die than abandon all of you’.”

“Our bond grew much deeper as a consequence of his imprisonment, because he then shared what I had known (of her own and her father’s incarceration) and we became much closer emotionally,” Benazir added. “I feel there is someone to spoil me, to take care of me, comfort me. It’s so nice to have somebody who cares about you,” she said. “I was so lonely after my father died.”

Despite Zardari’s unsavoury reputation, she made him minister of environment and investment when she became prime minister for the second time in 1993. But he was back in jail after she was ousted again in 1996. Zardari spent a total of 11 years in prison, and some of the charges against him were pretty sensational even for a South Asian politician, from strapping a bomb to a British-Pakistani businessman’s leg in a bid to extort money to masterminding his brother-in-law’s assassination. He was also alleged to have amassed $1.5 billion along with Benazir, though she seemed genuinely unaware of some of his more extravagant investments. Both the famed diamond necklace in Switzerland and the Rockwood mansion outside London, for instance, were linked to Zardari’s girlfriends.

None of the cases were ever upheld in court and he was finally released and allowed to leave the country in December 2004. Prison also ruined his health — he suffers from a spinal injury, a heart ailment and diabetes. He was tortured to make him turn against his wife, and an attempt was even made, confirmed by a human rights group, to slice his tongue off. Still he remained politically loyal to Benazir.

And the Bhutto-Zardari family, including son Bilawal and daughters Bakhtawar and Asifa, remained close-knit, despite rumours that Zardari beat his wife. After her death, a friend insisted the rumour was true, but added: “Benazir adored him. And the children, especially the girls, are still close to their father.”

But while in Pakistan, Zardari had only been bad news for Benazir. Not surprisingly therefore, when Benazir returned from exile to fight the general election, they agreed Zardari should stay away. Aware that he had become a divisive figure in the party and a public relations liability, they also decided he should not stand for the national assembly. After leaving Pakistan, Zardari had been holed up in a swanky apartment in New York. Just before Benazir flew to Karachi in October, he moved to her Dubai residence.

But in a strange twist of fate, even as elections in Pakistan have been postponed to February due to Benazir’s assassination, Zardari has taken control of her party through what some have dubbed ‘a grotesque medieval drama’. Not everyone was fooled though by the charade of the ‘will’ Benazir is said to have entrusted to a Filipino maid before leaving Dubai or the anointment of 19-year-old Bilawal, a history student at Oxford, as PPP chief and the self-effacing Makhdoom Amin Fahim as the party’s prime ministerial candidate.

If the PPP emerges triumphant in February, it is Zardari who will be the power behind the throne. Asked by NDTV’s Barkha Dutt if he would seek to enter the national assembly later, Zardari replied: “Who knows what the future brings?”

As some close aides of Benazir, such as her political secretary Naheed Khan and hatchet man Rehman Malik, left the ancestral Bhutto home in Larkana this week, reportedly in anger and disgust, stories began circulating of fresh shenanigans by Zardari. But others, such as media advisors Farahnaz Ispahani (the wife of US-based political analyst Husain Haqqani) and former Herald magazine editor Sherry Rahman, stood by the widower.

Some critics, however, see trouble ahead. “Once emotions have subsided, the horror of the succession will hit the many traditional PPP followers,” predicts Tariq Ali. “The result almost certainly will be a split in the party sooner rather than later.”

Much will depend on what happens between now and the postponed election on February 18, and how well the PPP fares. What Zardari will do though is difficult to predict. After Benazir’s assassination, Zardari has turned belligerent against Pakistan’s ruling establishment. But asked by Barkha Dutt if he would do business with Musharraf were the party to emerge on top in the elections, Zardari tellingly responded: “When we get to that goal we will think about it.”

Pakistan’s future now seems inextricably linked to what Zardari thinks and does.