Bhutto clan battlelines blur at Naudero

NAUDERO, January 1: On Sunday evening, as a three-day mourning period drew to a close, Asif Ali Zardari sat with his back to the tiled wall, under a sparkling pink chandelier, in a mansion filled with mementos of his wife’s legendary father, and described discovering how meticulously she had prepared for the aftermath of her death.

In her will, he said, Benazir Bhutto had made provisions for all that she considered valuable. There were detailed instructions on what to do with her clothes and about her servants, Zardari said, as well as how to manage the political party that her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had founded, and of which she was chairperson for life.

The will spoke volumes for how much Bhutto considered the Pakistan Peoples Party to be hers, perhaps almost as deeply as party loyalists believe themselves to be tied to her and her family.

Bloodlines are creatively drawn in any family, and the legendary Bhutto family seemed no different. There were outsiders and insiders, feuds and inheritances, except that in Bhutto’s death, they lay quite exposed to the world.

Naudero House, the mansion in which the party and family gathered, was not actually Bhutto’s ancestral home, but belonged to her father’s first wife. Bhutto’s house in the town next door, called Larkana, had gone to his firstborn son, Benazir’s brother Murtaza, and was named after him — Al-Murtaza.

Murtaza Bhutto, for his part, had fallen out of favour with his sister, apparently over the question of who would inherit their father’s political legacy, and in 1996 he was gunned down in the port city of Karachi; his widow, Ghinva, blamed Zardari.

Over the last two days, in the courtyard of Naudero House, Murtaza Bhutto’s teenage son, Zulfikar, has sat quietly, wrapped in a shawl, never once entering the house where strangers and journalists tramped through all day. It was a stark illustration of the scars that divide the Bhutto clan.

Murtaza Bhutto is buried in the family mausoleum, in a village less than five miles from the house, but not next to his father, who lies in the middle of the shrine, on a slightly elevated platform. The coffins of Murtaza, and of his brother, Shahnawaz, who died mysteriously of poisoning in a family apartment in France in 1985, lie in one corner of the mausoleum. Bhutto lies next to her father. Their coffins are blanketed with rose petals.

Senior party leaders have said that Zardari is anxious to take the reins of the party organisation and that he had been taken into confidence by his wife on all major party matters. Some among them are worried about the prospects of dissension in the future, though not anytime soon.

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