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Memoir
By Hammad Khan
in Friday Times, lahore.
Hammad Khan charts a very personal journey through 1971 and Zia's Pakistan on the twenty-fifth death anniversary of the military dictator
Aftershocks
0 0 Gen Zia in uniform
The reality recently dawned upon me that twenty-five summers had past since that particular moment in time when Pakistan and I both found ourselves on the white knuckle ride of happenstance that culminated in the death of a certain military dictator - and the liberation of my imprisoned father.
On 17th August, 1988, history records that a Hercules C-130 plane mysteriously crashed somewhere near Bahawalpur, Pakistan, killing all passengers onboard, amongst them the US ambassador to Pakistan, senior military commanders and the President of Pakistan, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. After eleven years of military rule in which the constitution, democracy, human rights and progress had been systematically marched on and trampled over, all in the name of US stinger missiles, public floggings and compulsory Arabic, the notion that General Zia would actually depart this Earth one day had become near-fantastical to most Pakistanis.
Benazir Bhutto at a press conference in exile in London
Benazir Bhutto kick-started her own Harvard-style PPP operation out of her Barbican headquarter
But it wasn't merely the looming prospect of democratic rule or watching more than one TV channel in the post-Zia landscape, which made 17-8 the most momentous day of my thirteen year-old life. The clincher for me, rather selfishly, was that there was a man named Major Iftikhar Ahmad who had been kept inside a military unit in Rawalpindi for several months and was about to be tried by court martial for desertion and treason, carrying a sentence of death. Mostly by virtue of being my father, this man had become the dearest Major to me (or officer of any rank for that matter) in the entire Pakistan army. Whilst we were in exile, I had strategically planned the downfall of the Empire with the aid of a handful of Star Wars figures and the twist of losing a father so early in the rebellion was not something I had ever countenanced. However, by the summer of '88, the likelihood of Major Iftikhar facing death was actually much greater odds than the mard-e-momin meeting his own Maker. This was especially so, given that it had been the General's own personal wish for many years that this officer be made an example of for an unacceptable act of rebellion.
In order to understand how this perilous state of affairs in my life came to be in the first place, we must go further back in time still to the pre-Zia landscape. A somewhathappier time for the people of Pakistan. We've all seen those pre-Instagram generation vintage photographs of women wearing Western-style maxi skirts, men sporting bellbottom denim flares or, in my odd case, a baby boy posing in a doll-like printed frock.
However, there are other images from that time as well.
The '71 veteran had promised to himself never to keep a gun in the house again and the Bhutto brothers treated guns like exciting new playthings
My father was thrown into the 1971 war in erstwhile East Pakistan at the tender age of twenty-one, having already lost a father in his teens. After a short stint as one of Pakistan Television's first young actors, he joined the military academy in the hope of securing a steady income and a long-term career. If there was any further motivation needed for his decision, it was found in the stirring voice of iconic singer Noor Jehan, who elevated a generation of young army officers to the status of national heroes through her melodious and hypnotic vocals.
But the music faded quickly. Lieutenant Iftikhar suddenly found himself sitting with a helmet and rifle on a plane to Dhaka, then in an armoured vehicle into Sylhet and onwards still, until he reached his final destination. The abyss. Having been thrust onto the front-lines of Pakistan's disastrous 1971 military incursion into would-be Bangladesh, the following eight months of chaos, fear, violence, suffering and inhumanity crushed this young man's soul. There was a terrifying daily struggle to stay alive and survive the violence, and alongside this there was also the challenge to stay human. This was so that there might be the hope of a dignified and moral existence after the hell of war. In East Pakistan, my father's field of vision was marked by the mutilated corpses and severed limbs of women and children. And just like on a celluloid negative, these images could not be erased and were imprinted forever.
An army officer questions a Bengali civilian in East Pakistan
In East Pakistan, my father's field of vision was marked by the mutilated corpses and severed limbs of women and children
As it turned out, escape from the battleground of Bangladesh meant a two-and-a-half year period of imprisonment inside an Indian military prison camp, as my father joined the ninety thousand Pakistanis that surrendered to India as part of the deal to end war.
After the PoW finally returned to Islamabad, Captain Iftikhar got married, had a baby boy, and tried to pick up the pieces to resume his career as a rising army officer. As a welcomed war veteran, his future looked promising as one of the brightest stars of the military establishment. Outwardly, he looked a lot like the stuff that army chiefs are made of. But there were unaccounted-for inner images from that time not visible to the Pakistani establishment; the fact that this officer's mind was plagued by the horrors of war and that he found it increasingly difficult to sleep at night.
After languishing in a prisoner-of-war camp for years, my father was casually greeted by a General in charge of Operation Searchlight '71 at a token welcoming function for the released 'heroes'. On this occasion, he asked his boss about something that had been really bothering him during his time spent as a guest of the Indian military. It was a point about how, during the war campaign, the troops had waited endlessly on the front-lines for an announced strategy command that never actually came. My father requested that, if the General didn't mind this imposition, could he now divulge what that plan was. The General gave a blustering reply about how his actual strategy was to push across the borders into India and seek control over Bengal. Upon hearing these words and registering that the General was indeed serious, this particular hero of the evening placed his glass of orange juice down on a table and walked quietly out of the hall.
Even surrendering oneself to the army authorities proved to have its fair share of military ineptitude and gallows' humour to it
Whether it was the increasing suffocation of his military uniform or the pervasive images of the dead limbs of dead children in Bihari villages, Major Iftikhar recognised that a fire was still raging inside of him. This is around the point at which General Zia came into my father's life. Though they had never physically met, Zia's 1977 coup d'etat and subsequent arrest of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was something that jarred terribly with this officer. He simply couldn't reconcile the idea of having to return to the role of being the khaki-wearing enemy of his own people. He had seen the devastation of an army at its worst and would be damned if he was going lead a repeat exercise of it in Rawalpindi or Peshawar. He vowed to get the hell out.
Recalling that all army officers had taken an oath to protect the constitution, which had since been abrogated under Martial Law, the major felt that he felt personally in the wrong to continue working in the army. He held a secret meeting with Bhutto's defence lawyer, Yahya Bakhtiar. A little taken aback, the pre-eminent counsel agreed with the legal theory my father was gambling his entire future on. Bakhtiar reassured my father that if he went ahead with his decision to resign, he was on principled ground, both legally and morally. He was more worried about what my father would do after the act. He also told him he would inform Mr. Bhutto about this courageous decision.
On the basis of what was constitutionally sound, but still quite un-military, logic, he handed in his letter of resignation to the Pakistan army. It was swiftly rejected.
At the age of three, I had no concept of a life outside our officer's accommodation, let alone on the other side of the world. But everything changed overnight. Almost entirely out of the blue, my father packed our bags and whisked both my mother and I out of our home, and took us to the airport. We were going on an indefinite vacation.
London was our destination, where our cushy army life was instantly replaced with no real home, friends or family for support, little money and a fugitive dad who was now able to sleep better, but would wake up with no career prospects or safety net.
One day, a phone call arrived from Mir Murtaza Bhutto, son of the imprisoned leader. His father, Mr. Bhutto had been told about my father's defiance and he had instructed his sons in London to seek him out. This sparked a friendship and camaraderie with both Murtaza and Shahnawaz Bhutto, as they campaigned together for Z.A Bhutto's release. However, as the Bhutto brothers decided to switch from organized protest (Free Bhutto Movement) to a more romanticized, militant version of guerrilla resistance (Al-Zulfiqar), my father shared their principles but not their modus operandi. The '71 veteran had promised to himself never to keep a gun in the house again and the Bhutto brothers treated guns like exciting new playthings.
It was when Benazir Bhutto arrived in exile that the movement for the restoration of democracy found fresh momentum and a defining voice. Having quickly surrounded herself with a close-knit group of activists, which basically meant my father and his buddies, she called all the leading feudals and influential leaders of her father's party to her Barbican flat - and unceremoniously sacked them all. With a ban on political activity in Pakistan, there was no party to speak of back home and, having removed the babas, Benazir Bhutto kick-started her own Harvard-style PPP operation out of her Barbican headquarter, with my father as her key political aide. His small band of exiled student-activists, journalists and workers organised protest rallies, mushairas and ran a counter-propaganda newspaper, all in the name of ending General Zia's rule.
My childhood was thus spent mostly helping design protest placards, squeezing under police barriers outside the Pakistan High Commission, playing with uncles like poet Ahmed Faraz and hanging out at weddings-cum-symposiums. I would record my voice on a cassette recorder and outline my own plans to take out the dictator with the use of one knife.
Benazir's struggle for Pakistani democracy had gained international attention and the PPP had managed to create enough pressure for General Zia to lift Martial Law. Sensing that the tide was turning back home, she called a party meeting and told everyone that they had achieved what they could in exile, but that the real battle to topple Zia had to be fought in Pakistan from hereon. She announced her decision to return home.
This gave my father a fresh dilemma. As he watched his leader and fellow-comrades land in Lahore with a million people welcoming them, he knew he couldn't remain in exile indefinitely. Having qualified as a Barrister, he weighed up the potential charges against him in Pakistan and his defence case. He made a somewhat casual assessment of the prison time that might be spent. Looking back now, I find the idea of willfully seeking one's own imprisonment very hard to understand. But then, I have never fought a war or spent my youth as a prisoner. Sometimes I think he was willing to be a martyr for the greater cause.
When we arrived at Islamabad airport there was no immediate arrest and, as one might imagine in Pakistan, even surrendering oneself to the army authorities proved to have its fair share of military ineptitude and gallows' humour to it. At one point, when no-one really knew how to deal with this calmly surrendering rebel, my father found himself driving his own car, with a suitcase in the back, to look for where he could get properly arrested. He looked more like someone trying to check in at the Flashman's Hotel than persona non grata.
But when the military machine finally woke up and cranked into action, they reacted by throwing him in a solitary cell in a little known branch of the army, usually reserved for the kind of traitors who were particularly averse to confession. For five weeks, none of us knew where my father was, or whether he was even alive. He was shifted in custody to a military unit in Rawalpindi, where he would inevitably prepare to defend himself in a court martial.
It was a strange existence for a thirteen year old. Nothing gave me more joy than the weekly visits to see my father in his mess (no pun intended). However, I was also aware that the uncertainty of what lay ahead for our return prisoner was clearly marked by the lines of my mother's forehead. By this stage, General Zia was fully aware of the situation. There was insider talk coming through on the grapevine. I pretended not to eavesdrop on what they were saying would happen to my father. I certainly heard words like 'death' and 'example', though.
The blazing hot sun that shone on the third Wednesday of August felt like any other day to me. I remember idly strolling up to a local market in Islamabad with my cousin to pick up some rotis. As we stacked them up and munched off the end of a designated piece for ourselves, the man at the tandoor casually reeled off a few words whilst scooping up a final naan for us. He said something to the effect of, 'so General Zia has died then'. We quietly paid him and walked back, later cracking up over the tandoor man's random comment. I remarked how the sweltering forty-five degree heat, blended with the fire of the clay oven, must have sparked a dementia-inducing inferno in his brain. My cousin was more amused by the deadpan delivery of his mock elegy.
The same words were being uttered in an infinitely more serious manner to my father by a visiting Colonel. Upon hearing the news of a crashed C-130 plane and the very real news of the death of the President, Major Iftikhar was, rather uncharacteristically, lost for words. He couldn't exactly leap out of his seat and scream out in unbridled joy in front of the mournful Colonel who broke this life-changing news. He also couldn't bring himself to grieve, as many officers will have done, at the Zia's unfathomable vanishing act.
The chief's death didn't automatically result in free exit for my father, as a court martial still took place, where he was found guilty of desertion in active service. By this time, Benazir Bhutto had assumed office as the Prime Minister of Pakistan, and my father's case became a source of awkward contention between a still-powerful army and a fragile PPP government. The delicately negotiated 'remitting' of his sentence ultimately hinged upon the errant Major signing a formal apology for his actions to General Beg, the new chief.
From within a cell in Central Jail, Rawalpindi, my father refused to sign any such apology for his resignation. Instead, he offered a silent prayer to give him the strength to stick to his principles and see his family again as a free man.
Twenty-five years later, I remain eternally grateful that his prayer was heeded. However, I cannot remember the day General Zia died as any sort of crowning victory. Although it seemed as if one life had been martyred to allow another to breathe easier, General Zia has never truly departed from our lives.
Today, his legacy and ideology remain alive and kicking in Pakistan. Whether through the powerful influence of his protege ruler, the corporate-style dominance of his military or the continuing oppression of women and minorities through his infamous ordinances, the ghost of Zia roams freely. Therefore, as I mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Pakistan's great dictator, I cannot help but follow it up with yet another silent prayer of hope for the country that he left behind.
Hammad Khan is the director of the movie Slackistan
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