Bhutto's end
Ian Jack
Bhutto: Trial and Execution Victoria Schofield (Cassell £7.95) Famous men who are hanged unjustly after long and public trials tend to become martyrs, and martyrs tend to turn swiftly into saints. So it is with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan, deposed by a military coup in 1977 and executed earlier this year, on the most doubtful evidence and despite worldwide protest. Bhutto is already a martyr, thanks to his successor, General Flog-em-all-Zia, and now looks well placed for a position in the gallery of Subcontinental saints. He always knew he would end up there and often immodestly said so — 'My status is written in the stars,' is one of many such prophecies made from his prison cell — for Bhutto was not a humble man. The pity about this book is that it encourages Bhutto's own view of himself and that, by dwelling on the legality of his trial, misses the chance to explore the much larger question of how Bhutto found himself in such miserable circumstances alb' months after his overwhelming victory in the national elections. Bhutto's Pakistan People's party won more than two-thirds of the seats to the national assembly in the polls of March 1977. The opp0s1t1011 immediately claimed the election was rigged (which seems at least partially true) and rioting ensued. Several hundred people died shot in the streets — it was not, as Miss Schofield implies, simply a case of a fawn busses being burned, though it soo became obvious that the mobs were 110_1 complaining so much about rigged results as, about Bhutto himself. 'Bhutto is a Hindu_ was one popular cry, which in Pakistan slander equivalent to 'Paisley is a papist ii Sandy Row. Bhutto first tried locking up the, opposition as a solution, then, when tilt .
hold_
me nt and flesh elections seemed in sight w "` the army stepped in, promising to the ring until the elections took place. At fir„.s..,` Zia said Bhutto was a fine fellow. A 1 U. 7. weeks later he converted him intic's wtan; Prince of Darkness. Bhutto was on h ths to the death cell. This brief six-rnell_..ai passage in Pakistan's history raises sevfe_. questions. Why was Bhutto hated:°0.1'0101? cely by sizeable sections of the poP Were the opposition, or some of them' cahoots with the army? Did Zia ever imagine he could allow Bhutto to. live after apower he had deposed him? Was a foreign .n.ster hut, behind the coup? Bhutto, as prime ri:t claimed the CIA was financing the rl° Was later from his cell withdrew the charge. he then looking to American pressure for clemency? And finally, why, if Bhutto was as loved by the masses as Miss Schofield appears to believe, did the masses never rise in support?
A book which really attempted the answer would need time and some emotional distance from the protagonists on the writer's part. Miss Schofield has neither. The dustjacket reveals that she posted the manuscript piecemeal out of Pakistan during the trial and that she is a great friend of Bhutto's eloquent and passionate daughter, Benazir, whom she succeeded as president of the Oxford Union.
Hurried writing has produced several careless mistakes in describing the background to Pakistan's foundation, including the geographically odd notion that Kashmir was the vital link between the country's two wings. It has also produced some rushed and banal descriptive passages — 'The row of judges was fit for an art gallery. Tall, short, fat, thin, they were all sorts.' But, more important, her friendship with the Bhutto family during the trial (and these were obviously dreadful months for his wife and children) has distorted what could have been a valuable account of Bhutto's last days into a eulogy of the man. Thus Bhutto's faults and misdeeds are always 'alleged by his critics' or blamed on the 'sycophants and fortune-seekers' who surrounded him.
Of Pakistan under Bhutto, Miss Schofield writes: 'Even if there was an element of autocracy, most people shrugged their shoulders. It was certainly nothing new. In general the PM was considered not to be at fault and many of the accusations of cruelty were attributed to his underlings, making the most of their power.' It won't do. Pakistan during the Bhutto years was an unhealthy place to be if you opposed the People's leader: one need go no further than the Amnesty report of 1976— a sorry story of mass political arrest, detention without trial, murder and abduction — to discover that fact. And Bhutto condemned himself out of his own mouth far too frequently to duck the charge of arrogant despot. What else can one say of a man who once promised that his country would manufacture a nuclear bomb 'even if the people have to eat grass', or who wrote of Raza Kasuri, the man he was accused of conspiring to murder, 'He must repent and he must crawl before he meets me .. He is ungrateful .. . Let him stew' (A statement, extraordinarily enough, produced in Bhutto's defence.
There can be no doubt that Bhutto met his end bravely and with dignity; no doubt either that he was murdered from political necessity by a military junta too scared to let him live. But to describe bad justice should not be to sanctify its victims.
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