THE ZARDARI BEHIND THE BHUTTO

AROUND two months before Benazir Bhutto was removed from office for the second time in 1996 on charges of corruption and misrule, her niece Fatima Bhutto telephoned the prime minister’s official residence in Islamabad.

Fatima was desperate—there had been a fierce gun battle near her house in Karachi and her father Murtuza Ali Bhutto, Benazir’s younger brother and political opponent, was missing.

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.

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