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Web-only Exclusives
November 30, 2000

From Our Correspondent: Hirohito and the War
A conversation with biographer Herbert Bix

From Our Correspondent: A Rough Road Ahead
Bad news for the Philippines - and some others

From Our Correspondent: Making Enemies
Indonesia needs friends. So why is it picking fights?

Asiaweek Time Asia Now Asiaweek story

BHUTTO'S HEIR TO VIOLENCE

The farce and tragedy of a man of terror

By Anthony Davis


ZULFIQAR ALI BHUTTO IS remembered as much as Pakistan's first popularly elected prime minister as the leader ousted in a coup by General Zia ul-Haq. Murtaza, Bhutto's eldest son, saw himself as political heir. But he will probably be remembered less as the politician he sought to become and more as the man who once led a terrorist group dedicated to overthrowing Zia's military dictatorship. Murtaza's death all but guaranteed that: he died in 1996 in a gun battle with police outside his Karachi home. He was 42.

Because of Pakistani press censorship during the martial law years from 1977 to 1985 - and Murtaza's understandable reluctance to discuss his terrorist past - little was known of the activities of the Al-Zulfiqar group he set up in Kabul in 1979. Until now, that is. Raja Anwar gives a fascinating insider's view of Murtaza's career in The Terrorist Prince (Verso Books, New York, 241 pages, $25). Superbly translated by Khalid Hasan, the account shatters romantic illusions about Pakistan's premier political dynasty, and will doubtless be denounced by the Bhutto clan as malicious fabrication.

Anwar served as an adviser on youth and labor affairs to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. After the elder Bhutto was executed in 1979, Anwar, like scores of other idealistic Pakistanis, followed Murtaza to exile in Afghanistan and took up a quixotic struggle against the Zia regime. In 1980, he fell victim to Murtaza's growing paranoia and was thrown into Kabul's notorious Pul-I-Charkhi prison for more than two years.

The man who emerges from Anwar's pages is not an attractive one. Murtaza is impetuous, arrogant and convinced of a right to lead conferred by birth. The dubious glamour of the Kalashnikov mesmerizes him. But he comes across as a dabbler in terror rather than Carlos the Jackal material, a would-be revolutionary without political vision or intelligence.

Nor is Murtaza inclined to lead from the front. Loyal young followers are dispatched on suicidal missions into Pakistan while he and his "intelligence chief," younger brother Shahnawaz, are safely ensconced in residences in Kabul, Delhi or on the French Riviera. "He could sit back and dream up daredevil schemes that other men would hazard," writes Anwar. Many of those "others" are eventually arrested, tortured and executed. One quality that Murtaza does not lack is ruthlessness - with his own followers as well as his enemies. As Al-Zulfiqar turns on itself, those suspected of disloyalty are simply murdered by Murtaza's henchmen.

The Kabul-based outfit is first presented as the armed wing of his father's Pakistan People's Party. As Al-Zulfiqar, it springs to international prominence with the 1981 hijacking of a Pakistani airliner en route to Kabul. But even at its height, the group never had more than 100 members. Training for these volunteers - "nearly all ill-educated, unemployed lower-middle-class youths full of enthusiasm" - is laughably inadequate. For example, an attempt to bring down Zia's jet with a surface-to-air missile in 1982 is bungled because the would-be assassin has never used the weapon before. It is only when Al-Zulfiqar relocates to India later that year that the recruits benefit from some real training - courtesy of Indian's external intelligence agency.

For most of Al-Zulfiqar's brief existence, farce and tragedy go hand in hand. What is supposed to be its finest hour - the 1984 kidnapping of foreign diplomats at a Canadian National Day celebration at a Vienna hotel - turns into dark comedy. The terrorists arrive to discover there is no celebration. True to form, Murtaza is not among them - he had left for the Riviera. The team wanders the streets taking snapshots and drinking beer until they are finally arrested by Austrian police on suspicion of drug smuggling. Murtaza gets a payback of sorts. On his return to Pakistan in 1993, he is arrested and jailed for about half a year on murder and sedition charges.

The sub-text to these misadventures is that terrorists, whether "bungling amateurs or lethal professionals," require sustenance. The book is colorfully peopled with spy chiefs from Damascus to Delhi only too willing to provide sanctuary and operational support to Bhutto and his band. It would be comforting to think that such clandestine forces died away with the end of the Cold War. But on the Indian Subcontinent at least, intelligence agencies of more than one nation continue to wage covert wars by training and financing terrorists whose bombs claims scores of innocent lives each year (significantly, they do not appear on the U.S. State Department's annual list of countries sponsoring terrorism).

The Terrorist Prince is an eminently readable account of an important episode in Pakistan history. Based on interviews with survivors from the Al-Zulfiqar years, the book carries the ring of truth. At a deeper level, it stands as a bitter indictment of the Subcontinent's perennial flirtation with dynastic politics. At the time of his death, Murtaza was trying to oust the then Pakistan premier: his sister Benazir.


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