Songs of Blood and Sword

Fatima Bhutto with her father, Murtaza, who was killed in Karachi in 1996

Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir, by Fatima Bhutto, Jonathan Cape £20, 408 pages, FT Bookshop price: £16

Towards the end of Benazir Bhutto’s political career she was reviled at home in Pakistan as corrupt and ineffectual, while being simultaneously perceived in the west, and especially in the US, as the great champion of democracy and women’s rights in a part of the world dominated by bearded men waving Korans and burning American flags.

In a strange twist of fate, her niece Fatima – for long Benazir’s most trenchant critic – now finds herself in a not dissimilar position. Having just written a passionate memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword, in which she accuses her aunt of complicity in the murder of Murtaza Bhutto (Benazir’s younger brother and Fatima’s beloved father) the author has now found herself being feted in the west – and featured like Benazir before her in glossies such as Vogue and Vanity Fair – while being severely criticised in her native country for telling a one-sided version of events.

The Bhuttos’ acrimonious family squabbles have long borne a strong resemblance to the bloody succession disputes that plagued South Asia during the time of the Great Mughals. In the case of the Bhuttos, they date back to the moment when Benazir’s father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, was arrested by General Zia following a military coup on July 5 1977. Benazir and brothers were at first determined to defend their father’s legacy peacefully, and formed the Save Bhutto committee; but in 1979, after two futile years her brothers turned to armed struggle.

Murtaza Bhutto and his younger brother Shahnawaz formed the Pakistan Liberation Army, later renamed Al-Zulfiqar or The Sword. Al-Zulfiqar became involved in two failed assassination attempts on Zia and, allegedly, the hijacking of a Pakistan International Airways flight in 1981.

Zia used the hijacking as a means of cracking down and got the two boys placed on the FIA’s most-wanted list. Benazir was forced to distance herself from her two brothers even though they subsequently denied sanctioning the hijack.

When in 1994 Murtaza returned to Pakistan from self-imposed exile in Damascus at the beginning of Benazir’s second term as prime minister, he was arrested at the airport on charges of terrorism and only released on bail after 18 months. Shortly afterwards, he was shot dead in deeply suspicious circumstances. One might have expected the assassins would have faced the most extreme measures of the state for killing the prime minister’s brother. Instead, it was the witnesses and survivors who were arrested.

Benazir always protested her innocence over the death of Murtaza. But Murtaza was clearly a threat to Benazir’s future, and she gained the most from the murder. The tribunal set up to investigate concluded that Benazir’s administration was “probably complicit” in the assassination. Six weeks later, when Benazir fell from power, partly as a result of public outrage at the killings, her husband Asif Ali Zardari was charged with Murtaza’s murder.

Fourteen years on, Murtaza’s daughter Fatima is now a beautiful 28-year-old, who shares the same forceful and determined personality as her aunt – and like her aunt takes no prisoners. And at the moment, Zardari, the man Fatima Bhutto holds responsible for her father’s death is not only out of prison, but president of the country. The bravery of writing a memoir like Songs of Blood and Sword, and taking on such a man at the peak of his power is self-evident.

Songs of Blood and Sword is moving, witty and well-written. It is also passionately partisan: this is not, and does not pretend to be, an objective account of Murtaza Bhutto, so much as a love-letter from a grieving daughter to her father and an act of literary vengeance and account-settling by a niece who believes her aunt had her father murdered.

Future historians will decide whether Murtaza deserves to be vindicated for the hijacking in Kabul and will weigh up whether or not he would have made a better leader than his deeply flawed sister. They will also judge whether the equally inconsistent Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto deserves the adulation heaped on him by his granddaughter; again many would argue that Bhutto senior shared the family trait of authoritarianism. It was he who first promoted General Zia, the man who did more damage to Pakistan than anyone else, first unleashing the demon of Jihadi Islam that is now devouring the country.

But where the book is unquestionably important is the reminder it gives the world of Benazir’s many flaws. Since her death, Benazir has come to be regarded in the west as something of a martyr for peace and freedom. Yet the brutality of Benazir’s untimely end should not blind anyone to her astonishingly weak record as a politician. It is misleading and simplistic to depict her as dying for freedom; in reality, Benazir’s instincts were not so much democratic as highly autocratic.

Within her own party, she declared herself the lifetime president. She colluded in wider human rights abuses and extra-judicial killings and during her tenure government death squads murdered hundreds of her opponents. Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world’s worst records of custodial deaths, abductions, killings and torture.

It was under her watch that Pakistan’s secret service, the ISI, helped install the Taliban in Pakistan; she did nothing to rein in the agency’s disastrous policy of training up Islamist jihadis from the country’s madrasas to do the ISI’s dirty work in Kashmir and Afghanistan. Benazir’s administration, in other words, helped train the very assassins who are most likely to have shot her.

Benazir’s reputation for massive corruption was gold dust to these Islamic revolutionaries, just as the excesses of the Shah were to their counterparts in Iran thirty years earlier. Benazir Bhutto may have been a brave, gutsy, secular and liberal woman. But this should not mask the fact that as a corrupt feudal who did nothing for the poor, she was a central part of Pakistan’s problems. Songs of Blood and Sword is a timely reminder of this.

Readers of Fatima Bhutto’s book can savour a uniquely fascinating, wonderfully well-constructed memoir from the heart of the most violent and Borgia-like of the South Asian dynasties. Witty, passionate and angry, it may not be objective history, but it is still the closest-focused political despatch yet written from Bhuttodom.

William Dalrymple’s ‘Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India’ is long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize