Chapter 20

Chapter 20

Bhutto, and The bomb; Zia and Hudood Ordnance

Bhutto fell victim to a delusion common to all tin pot dictators; he started taking his own bombast seriously and made a critical mistake .
He called a conference of all the nuclear physicists of the country, gathered them together in an old world setting under a gaudy Shamiana (a foot ball stadium sized tent mentioned before) and demanded that they produce a workable nuclear device in the next four to five years. The nuclear scientists in Pakistan hardly merited the title. They were, one and all, jaded bureaucrats living a comfortable life in cushy sinecures. There was hardly any work, which could be called new or substantial research. They prepared papers with fabricated data, and concocted results and only read each other’s articles. The only exception among physicists was Dr A. Salaam .
The group of scientists humbly expressed their inability to deliver the goods, proffering the valid excuse of lack of equipment, infra structure, technical staff, laboratories and supplies. Bhutto offered to get all the equipment they would need. They demurred. It would take much longer. He heaped obscene abuses on them, and literally shouted them out of the Shamiana. Tail between legs, they slinked out .
A Pakistani metallurgist, A.Qadeer Khan, married to a Dutch lady, was employed in a nuclear reprocessing plant in Holland. The facility was the most advanced of its kind at the time. Favored by innate shrewdness, and a native (Dutch) wife, he was trusted by his employers, and given the freedom of the plant. He was in the translation department. That gave him unlimited access to all the records. He wrote to Bhutto that if he was given a personal audience, he could suggest a method of achieving the goal dearest to all their hearts. Under normal circumstances an underling would have responded with a proforma response, or more likely consigned the letter to waste paper basket. But Bhutto was used to chewing out minions for taking any initiative. And this was an offer to build a nuclear bomb, an issue the man was obsessed with. Bhutto was shown the letter and sent word to the man to present himself forthwith.
The scientist brought photocopies of the relevant documents, which he had smuggled out secreted under his under garments. Security used to be rather perfunctory at the time. He also brought a complete list of supplies, equipment, and materiel. Bhutto ensconced him in a secure location, ordered that phony companies be set up to smuggle supplies in, and the man be given the highest priority in all he needed. Khan turned out to be true to his word. He produced the bomb in about five years though due to the fear of international opprobrium the device could not be tested.
Khan was given unprecedented security. Once two Frenchmen were found loitering near his house. They were unceremoniously man handled by the guards, their white skin notwithstanding. Zia continued to patronize him, even after killing Bhutto. At one point when India had massed a million soldiers on the border between the two countries, GOP abetted in arranging an interview of a well known Indian Journalist Kuldip Nayyar with Khan. It was later given out that the journalist had managed to sneak in. No body believed the story. Qadeer Khan convinced the Journalist that the bomb could be readied for launching in a few hours time. Indians backed off. The troops retuned to their cantonments. Qadeer himself told me this story. I have had independent corroboration since through news articles in credible journals. I was on the same table at a dinner in Islamabad in 1990. Ironically the festivities were to honor Pakistan Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War (PPPNW; an affiliate of the Boston based International Physicians For Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). I had co-founded the affiliate.
Khan had not yet started his international nuclear enterprise. I reminded the great man that in the nineteen fifties, he and I had been together in a Karachi University college and added that I had recently returned from the USA after working there for long years, and planned to go back to the land of the free shortly. He became very attentive to me. A mention of the USA works wonders in Asian countries, even on the high and the mighty.
No Government could touch the Khan. He was given the protocol accorded to a senior General, higher than that given to a senior minister. Remember, Pakistan had been in the thrall of the army since 1958. During the conference referred to above, I noticed how he talked down to a senior bureaucrat, a former head of the foreign office. One of my friends, head of the news section in Pakistan TV station in Quetta described a personal experience at work. He got word from the army HQ that he was to bring his team to record an important event. He asked for details to assess the kind of personnel he would need. He was told to bring the best. Not quite sure what he was in for, he was waiting rather nervously at the site amidst a phalanx of assistants, microphones and cameras. In due course a large black car drove in. Its windows were curtained in breach of regulations of the country, punishable by fines, jail or a hefty bribe in lieu of. The front door opened. A two star General came out and opened the rear door. A three star general preceded Khan.
All the successive Governments kept A.Q, on a pedestal. Post 9/11, and only after the secret of his nuclear bazaar had been divulged, was Musharraf forced to retire him. But he would not permit USA security agents to interrogate him. When the story broke that he had been peddling nuclear know how and materiel, he was made to confess the deed on TV, but no Guantanamo Bay for him.
USA has always been obsessed with proliferation and of the exclusivity of the nuclear club. Israel is the sole exception. But it is not fair to equate any other nation with the country in US eyes. I have discussed the relationship elsewhere. Other members of the group are averse to new entrants too. This was, much to their discomfiture, to be an Islamic bomb, financed by Libya, and Saudi Arabia. It could conceivably be used against Israel. Libya had made no secret of wanting to destroy the country. King Faisal who was to engineer a highly successful oil embargo after the 1973 Yom Kippur war, in which only the threat of nuking Cairo and Damascus had saved the State of Israel, ruled Saudi Arabia and would soon pay with his life for not letting Israel get away with murder of hundreds of thousands of Egyptian soldiers they had surrounded.
Besides the disproportionate influence the pro Israel lobby wields on USA governments, the country is its most trust worthy strategic partner in the lands awash with oil. Jews are the living proof of the “Law” of natural selection. They have been persecuted for the several millennia. Only the “best” survived. Followers of no other creed have as high a percentage of talented, hard working, and dedicated people. They are highly insecure people. Their attachment to Israel goes beyond faith. There are many secular, non-practicing, even atheistic people among them. One and all would do “whatever it takes” for the survival of the state. Weizman, a noted chemist in England in early twentieth century, was requested by the Government to help with the war effort. He turned down all honors and rewards, only asking that the right of Jews to a homeland be recognized. The upshot was the Balfour declaration of 1917, named after the British foreign secretary of the time, in which the British government agreed to help in establish a homeland for Jews in Palestine. Successive British governments made all kinds of mutually contradictory promises to Arabs too, but they are not called perfidious Albion for nothing.
A Jewish haberdasher had persuaded Truman to coerce members of the UN general assembly to vote in favor of the plan to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish sections. He had also prevailed on the US President to recognize the state of Israel. Truman’s family was in the profession and the haberdasher had done favors to the family. Truman had been humiliated and kept out of the loop by Roosevelt. He was not even told that the USA had successfully tested an atomic bomb. On ascension to Presidency he kept the past contacts of his humble days.
Perhaps to confirm that every rule has an exception, a fringe religious Jewish group believes that there is no religious sanction for establishment of the State.
Since WWII, Jews have been on the ascendant. They have been able to make the entire western peoples suffer from guilt complex for the undoubted genocide practiced on them by one component of the white race. Denial of the holocaust is a crime punishable by a jail term in several European countries, this not withstanding their “passion’ for freedom of expression. You may ridicule revered figures of any faith Jesus, Muhammad, Zoaraster, even Moses, make fun of any creed, but not deny the holocaust. By the later decades of the twentieth century, they had come to dominate academic, legal, medical, financial and news media of the USA.
Arguably the most effective benefactor of his people, Henry Kissinger was a brilliant academic, a more accomplished intriguer and as shrewd an operator as any. Acting in character common to such people, he was obsequious to his superiors and overbearing to the less powerful. He had been elevated to the post of the Secretary of the State by Richard Nixon. Nixon at the time he was besieged by the right and the Capitalists, and embroiled in Water Gate scandal. He perhaps thought that Kissinger would serve as a rampart. During the early days of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Egyptian air force planes and missiles had destroyed most of the Israeli Air Force and Tanks. The Israeli defense minister, Moshe Dayan, was to confess later, there was nothing to stop the Egyptians from walking into Tel Aviv. Kissinger had gone berserk. He raved and ranted, and bypassed regular chain of command to send men and materiel to Israel. Nixon, much weakened by the brewing Water Gate scandal, had acquiesced in his demands).
Kissinger saw red in Bhutto’s plans to develop an atomic bomb. He flew to Pakistan to upbraid the latter. Bhutto blandly denied the whole affair. Kissinger, as arrogant as they come, was incensed. He told Bhutto that the latter was insulting his intelligence, and that unless he ceased and desisted , “ we would make a horrible example of you”. Bhutto, a megalomaniac of equal caliber, handicapped though he was as the leader of an underdeveloped country, did manage to stand on his dignity. He dispatched his interlocutor with a flea in his ear, reducing him, according to an eyewitness, to incoherent spluttering, just short of foaming at the mouth. To reduce the USA Secretary of State to a quivering mass of jelly must have been very gratifying to Bhutto’s ego. He thrived on moments of glory. He had upstaged as polished a politician as Trudeau of Canada, when during a state visit, he had invited Mrs. Trudeau to a state visit to Pakistan. The lady in question was being widely criticized at the time for her unorthodox amours and uninhibited association with swingers. But confrontation with Kissinger sealed his fate.
Opportunity to exact revenge, and make a “horrible” example of him, came soon enough. Elections were due in Pakistan. Even though the luster of a savior had dimmed somewhat, it was widely perceived that Bhutto and his PPP would win the elections hands down. There was no credible alternative to him. No other leader had equivalent acceptance in different provinces of the country. No other politician had a substantial following in all parts of the country. No other party had comparable organization or funding. He had control over all levers of power and had managed to crush all segments of society. Leftist students had been neutralized. Bureaucrats lay supine at his feet. Capitalists had been driven out. Worker’s trade unions, never of much account, had been dealt with. Mullahs were, in his words, blithering idiots and appeared to act in the fashion. Army was a spent force. It had not recovered from the humiliation of the East Pakistan debacle yet. He had placed a nondescript nonentity Zia as its head. Feudals were his kin. By removing the nascent capitalist class from the equation, he had served the feudal cause better than any one in living memory. News media served as his handmaidens.
. He announced the date of election with his usual theatrics. His party published a schedule of his visits all over the country. They thought that, bar the shouting, all was over.
But he had reckoned with out the good old, the Almighty Dollar. The opposition, hitherto rather laid back, was suddenly energized. They had funds to spare. So much US currency flooded the money exchange enterprises, that the dollar lost a bit of its value in the local market. People in the urban areas, politically more aware, had not been so taken in by Bhutto’s antics. They were largely disaffected. This was especially true of Karachi, where the opposition candidate, a politically inept, and colorless former chief of the country’s air force Air Marshal Asghar Khan drew huge crowds. But they were handicapped by lack of organization and grass roots effort. It takes a long time and dedicated work to build bridges with proletariat. If you are in a hurry, you have to adapt “capitalist” methods and that means money. Fated were finally looking kindly on Bhutto’s detractors.
Elections were held in due course. As polling results started trickling in people looked at each other in dismay and disbelief. The final straw was the defeat of the Air Marshal in Karachi. At the end of the day Bhutto’s people’s party “won” the requisite two third majority which would enable it to amend the constitution, hold it in abeyance or over rule a Presidential veto.
There were howls of outrage. People would have accepted a simple majority for the party. That the results would be manipulated had been widely anticipated. But this was beyond the norm even of “Banana Republics”. PPP had won even in the urban centers of Sindh dominated by Urdu speaking immigrants who hated Bhutto’s guts for not declaring Urdu the official language of the province.
Now the opposition really came into its own. They took out mammoth processions in all the major cities of the country. Unrest was widespread. Incidents of arson and looting were common. Law and order broke down completely. Police were unable to control the mobs. The Government resorted to calling out the army to restore order. They were only too willing to use force in Karachi, Sind and Baluchistan. But they hesitated in suppressing the uprising when it came to the Punjab, and to a lesser extent in NWFP, the heartlands of the harvesting fields of the armed forces.
The Air Marshal gave a public call to the armed forces not to obey Government orders. This was seditious. But the Government was in no position to try him on the charges. Situation on the ground was deteriorating fast. Rumors of all kinds were given wide currency. People made unfavorable comparison with pre-Ayub days. Uncertainty was in the air. Government and the opposition held off and on negotiations. Bhutto offered to have polling held again in the disputed seats. The opposition would have none of it. They wanted the elections results cancelled, and new ones held under the auspices of a provisional all parties Government. Bhutto could not accept that. The agitation continued. The army chief reportedly warned Bhutto that the soldiers could no longer be depended upon to obey orders unquestioningly. From fawning sycophants, bureaucrats turned into neutral observers. News paper Editors, till lately, perfect toadies, had suddenly regained professional integrity. Trade union leaders moaned betrayal. Professional bodies passed resolutions against the Government. Students, till recently straddling the fence, not quite sure if they should support an opposition led by the obscurantists and reactionaries, jilted him. Bhutto resorted to strident, shrill and undignified speeches. Gone was the statesman like posturing. Nothing could hold the slide in his fortunes.
Bhutto was reported to have finally agreed to cancel the results of the elections and hold new ones under the auspices of an independent election commission, which would have opposition nominees too. The agreement was to be signed the “following morning”. Ghulam Ishaq Khan, a grizzled bureaucrat, serving as secretary general to GOP was privy to all confidential documents and had intimate and first hand knowledge of the negotiations. He was reportedly in cahoots with the army and “foreign agencies”. That he went on to serve as the Chairman of the senate and succeeded Zia as President would lend credibility to the conjectures. He contributed not a little to post Zia failure of democracy in the country. But more of him later.
Army struck the same night. They took Bhutto and all the ministers in “protective” custody. The jackals had attacked the bleeding, and weakened lion. General Zia had been chosen for his meekness, servility and supposedly low I.Q. But there should have been no doubt of his low cunning. He could otherwise not have risen to high ranks in the army. If he had demurred in the take over, another general would have displaced him. He declared martial law, suspended the constitution, dissolved National assembly and promised new elections in ninety days.
People took a sigh of relief. The nation had stepped back from the edge of another precipice. They would have preferred polling in the limited hotly disputed number of seats because elections are a terrible burden on an already weak and gloomy economy. But they could live with another exercise. It had become widely known that the army had pre-empted an agreement. They were thoroughly annoyed but kept their peace. They had to. Bhutto was in jail. Opposition was satisfied at the turn of events. Their demand for a whole new election had been accepted. No one was prepared to lead and organize another insurgency.
But the public had not forgotten the humiliation of 1971 civil war in East Pakistan. The army, which had accounted for more than half of public expenditure, had abjectly failed. They had been terribly let down. Before the civil war they had been proud that they were pampering a pride of lions. It turned out they had been fattening a pack of jackals. They wanted the men in uniform back in the barracks expeditiously.
The army went on a propaganda offensive. Pictures and statements of concentration camp detainees were given wide coverage in government-controlled media- Radio, TV and Newspapers. Other scandals were publicized. White papers were issued.
Zia, unsure yet of his ground, called on Bhutto in his jail cell. Standing at attention before the prisoner, maintaining the façade of a humble man, he plaintively asked “Sir why did you have to do it”(Rig elections-Newsweek published a photo with Bhutto sitting in a chair and Zia standing at attention in front of him. Blair was caught in a similar pose with bush the junior)). He was perhaps giving Bhutto a false sense of security. To test waters, to see how much popularity the man retained, he released Bhutto soon afterwards.
Jails in South Asia are wonderful places for political rejuvenation. There was an upsurge of support for the man. People started recalling his “good” deeds again. He had managed to get ninety thousand prisoners of war released from India. The army on the other hand had lost East Pakistan. He had given a measure of self-respect to the poor, the workers, the dispossessed and the wretched. He had convened a grand conference of all Islamic heads of state and presided over it. Foreign leaders lionized him. Canadian PM Trudeau had gushed in his praise. He had given the nation a measure of self-respect. He was making atomic bombs. What if he drank a little alcohol and womanized a bit. He did not drink the blood of the poor.
A few gave in to fantasy. They had dreamed that Bhutto had vowed to quit drinking and keep his favors for wives only. Imagination of a few went wilder. He prayed regularly in jail and had undertaken special fasts to curry divine favor.
In ay event he was given a wild, ecstatic, tumultuous and overwhelming reception in Lahore. I am a witness. A strange coincidence, but I was in Lahore on both occasions, when he was released by Ayub and by Zia.
Mass adulation went to his head. He shouted defiance and vowed colorful, and sexually explicit vengeance. He denounced the political legitimacy and cast doubt on birth antecedents of Zia. He had promoted the man over the heads of eight generals senior to him; he could demote him to the rank of a foot soldier and would do it too. He would try him for treason. Subversion of constitution was high treason; Bhutto had the provision inserted in the law of the land. He would get the court to hang the man. He was the savior of Pakistan. He belonged to the people. People loved him. He would smash the capitalists who had financed the insurgency against his lawful government. He would make senior bureaucrats who had abetted the breakdown of law and order (he actually used the term Pharaohs) sweep the streets, and get the generals to do sanitation work (clean latrines). He would force Mullahs (the driving force of the opposition) to make an honest living. They never did a day of work, and lived on ill-gotten wealth extracted in the name of religion. They misled masses, and gave the faith a bad name. People will make them crawl on their belly in the streets. Property of all feudals who had aided and abetted the army would be confiscated and distributed to their peasants/tenants.
It was a rollicking show. People loved it. No body could move, or entertain a crowd as he did. They identified with him. He had spoken to their heart, and captured their imagination once again.
I do not believe Zia was too put out by the insults. He was too thick skinned. But the threat to try him on charges of high treason was a real risk. Bhutto was vindictive. He had not even spared his mentors. The possibility of Bhutto winning a majority of seats in elections was real too. Members of the opposition parties in the parliament would not stand in the way to save him from the gallows. Previous martial law regimes had treated them in worse fashion than Bhutto had. Constitution was a bigger protection for them than it was for the party in power. They would be ineffective any way.
Bhutto was arrested again. There was, surprisingly little public out cry. His supporters expected that after further deals he would be released soon.
Zia broke his pledge. Elections were postponed. His skin was more important than any considerations of honesty or integrity. He brazenly declared that elections would be held only after a “positive” result could be assured. On the face of it, it was a stupid statement. But the opposition, spear headed by obscurantist groups and the retired Air Marshal, did not mind. They would rather deal with the military than with a resurgent Bhutto. Bhutto used to ridicule the Air Marshal that he had spent too much time in low oxygen high altitudes, and that had affected the latter’s brain. He was a past master at ridicule. The statement had received wide publicity. The statement fitted the intelligence profile of many opposition politicians). After several postponements, elections were put off indefinitely.
The military regime started churning out propaganda again. Several more voluminous “White papers” on Bhutto’s “misdeeds” were published. A formal case for ordering the murder of a political opponent had been simultaneously filed against him. One of my friends, a former student leader Fatehyab, in a quixotic display of legalism, went to the Supreme Court, and prayed that publication of white papers be proscribed. It would prejudice Bhutto’s trial. Court obliged, but the damage had been done.
Zia piously (some would like to substitute hypocritically) proclaimed his intention to introduce laws according to Islamic Shariah (jurisprudence). He was not the first one to do it; nor I suspect he would be the last. Charlatans of all faiths, from times unknown have used religion for furtherance of their personal and political agenda. Zia co-opted religious and other dis-affected and dis-enchanted anti Bhutto groups into the government. Bhutto had managed to alienate many power centers. He had heaped insults and ridicule on many persons. They had set aside their democratic, anti army, and secular scruples and rejoiced in his downfall. There was no shortage of turncoats from PPP either.
Zia issued ordinances legitimizing his deeds, past, present and future through the legal framework order (LFO). The LFO was drafted by the presiding genesis of such affairs, a prominent attorney, Sharifuddin Pirzada . Selected judges were invited to sign and take oath under the LFO, which served as the legal subterfuge to achieve legitimacy for the military coup. If they were not so invited or refused to sign, they automatically lost their job.
In the ensuing months and years Zia was to enact and use suppressive measures in the name of Islam. He had political opponents publicly flogged, jailed and tortured. Under Hudood ordinance raped women were tried for adultery. Islamic law of evidence required that there be four adult male practicing Muslims, and willing to give witness to the act. The rapist, for want of such evidence, would on most occasions go Scot-free. The victim, if she conceived, could not deny that she had had a sexual act. She had no way of proving that she was not a willing party. (Now why would four good Muslims not try to intervene and subdue the assailant is a moot question).
By implication Zia legitimized honor killing which is a tribal custom in which an aggrieved party whose honor was besmirched could kill the offending male or female or both and pay blood money with agreement of the victim’s heirs. The British government unwilling to alienate powerful interests accepted the custom. They had, nevertheless, imposed stringent conditions. The act had to be witnessed and witnesses willing to testify. The aggrieved party must be an actual relation of the girl by blood or marriage. The act was made a crime against the state, and not just against a person or a family. Long, harsh and rigorous imprisonment during which prisoners are made to do hard physical labor was awarded. Convicts had to pay a hefty fine too. Hudood law made honor killing an offence against the family who could forgive the killer. In practice, the cover of honor killing is used to keep the girl’s share of land and property from going with the girl to her husband’s family. Another subterfuge is to marry women to Quran. There is no provision for such an act in Islam, but Quran does not ask for the girl’s share. Benazir’s deputy, a hereditary Pir (progeny of a saint) has so disposed off two of his sisters).
Several other violations of human rights and gender discrimination practiced in Pakistan. Hudood laws gave all the social crimes a legal fig leaf.
After postponing elections several times, enacting discriminatory laws, and violating human rights, Zia became an international pariah. Bhutto’s legally contrived assassination drove his personal standing even lower. Harsh economic sanctions were imposed on the country. Once again it was on the brink of economic collapse. The whole rice crop had to be mortgaged to the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) .
With out Abdi at the helm, the bank got into severe trouble. Powerful interests had been getting uneasy. It had bid for several US banks and was emerging as a robust rival to western banking interests. Capitalists do not brook competition easily. It was accused of money laundering, financing arm and drug deals, and giving billions in unsecured loans. White papers detailing the amount and number of loans were published. The figures were mind-boggling. Its advisors and employees were indicted. The number included several prominent corporate attorneys of the USA, and Europe, and that eminence grise, advisor to several USA Presidents, former cabinet secretary, Clark Clifford. The bank collapsed pauperizing its employees and depositors. Saleh Naqvi who had succeeded Abdi as the chairman of the bank was extradited from a gulf state and languished in jail in USA for many years, Many other US, Europe and Mid-East based employees shared his fate.
Pakistan refused to extradite Abidi whose connections ran very deep and very high. Pakistan would accord the same protection to just one other person, A.Q.Khan, the “father” of the bomb. Abdi’s trial would have been a scandal. The likes of Carter would have to testify. Western countries did not twist Pakistan’s arms to get him).
Providence is fickle. It smiles, capriciously and without prejudice, on the good and the bad. Soviet government decided to install their man in Kabul. Background to that misadventure deserves a brief mention. A few communists backed by some army officers had overthrown and killed the PM, who had, in his turn a few years before, overthrown his cousin the King. Afghanistan was, and remains, very much a tribal state. Ninety eight percent of the population is conservative conformist Muslim. Why did they think they could get away with imposing Marxist dogma on the country is difficult to explain or understand unless seen in the back drop of American misadventure in Vietnam. They tried and failed to prop up a client regime there. Never ones to learn a lesson, Americans were to do it again in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The communists fell out amongst themselves, the deputy PM killed the PM and started imposing communist theology, ordering people not to pray, women to shed their veils and schoolteachers to learn and then impart the knowledge of Marxist lore. The five times a day call to prayers was banned. People were exhorted to refrain from following the tenets of their religion. Even Lenin couldn’t have gotten away with that. Widespread riots broke out. Police and army refused to obey orders. All hell was let loose.
Soviet government surmised, I think correctly, that the new PM was a reactionary agent provocateur in the pay of western secret services, CIA & subagents. He was out to defame communism. They should also have known from history that no one has been able to control Afghans for long. Alexander only passed through, as did many other invaders. British tried their hand, and after losing hundreds in the process, had to resort to bribery. Only the native warlords can manage their own bailiwick. They favorite pastime is sporadic clashes with neighbors followed by exchange of gifts, sheep, women and bodiless heads. They should have cut their losses. But they were a superpower, with a mission.
Berzhenev, who was more or less non-compos, was presiding over the communist hierarchy at the time. He was kept in office so his cronies could continue to act in his name with out the uncertain process of picking a new boss. Soviet forces “invited” by the Afghans, took over the capital and handed it over to loyal cadres headed by Babrak Karmil who had fled the country in the wake of the massacre of the erstwhile PM and his faction. Karmil revoked all anti-religious orders. Things seemed to settle down, but Afghans remained suspicious.