BHUTTO'S FATEFUL MOMENT - hanging

 

BHUTTO'S FATEFUL MOMENT

By Mary Anne Weaver

September 26, 1993

 

At 1:45 A.M. on April 4, 1979, four wardens entered the prison cell of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a waifishly thin man, nearly wasted away by malaria, dysentery, and hunger strikes. Two of them lifted him by the arms and two by the feet, and he was carried out. His back was so low that it sometimes brushed the floor. He had insisted on shaving and bathing earlier that night—and had done so, with some difficulty—and he had changed into fresh clothes. He had always been fastidious about his appearance. But now the tail of his blousy shirt, ensnarled in the cleats of one of the wardens’ boots, became tattered and soiled.

Outside, in the courtyard of the Rawalpindi District Jail, Zulfi Bhutto, the first popularly elected Prime Minister in the history of Pakistan, was deposited on a stretcher, and his wrists were manacled. There was no guard of honor, and no military salute. As he was carried two hundred yards or so to a wooden scaffold, he raised his head slightly, but he said nothing. Otherwise, he didn’t move. The wardens led him up the scaffold, onto a wooden plank, and there a hangman put a hood over Bhutto’s head, completely covering his face, and a rope around his neck

“Ye mujhai?” (“This to me?”) According to a book by the chief of his security detail, Colonel M. Rafiuddin, who stood two feet away, Bhutto said this in a faint voice, and the Colonel believes he also heard him say, “God help me, for I am innocent!”

At four minutes after two, three hours ahead of schedule, and contrary to the prison code, the hangman pulled a lever, releasing the wooden plank, and Bhutto’s body plunged into a well.

“The bastard’s dead!” General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan’s military ruler, gleefully told his generals when the news came.

The only family members who had been permitted to see Bhutto in the hours before he died were his daughter Benazir, his firstborn and favorite child, who was then in her twenties, and his wife, Nusrat. They had been taken under guard from a deserted police-training camp where they were imprisoned and driven the few miles to the jail. Unlike previous visits, they had not been permitted inside his cell, and Benazir had sat cross-legged on a concrete floor as they received his final instructions through a thick, barred door.

“I pleaded with the jailers, I begged them to open the cell door, so that I could embrace him, and say a proper goodbye,” Benazir told me this summer. “But they refused. When I left him, I couldn’t look back; I knew that I couldn’t control myself. I’m not even sure how I managed to walk down that corridor, past the soldiers and past the guards. All I could think of was my head. ‘Keep it high,’ I told myself. ‘They are all watching.’ ”

Some fourteen hours later, Benazir remembers, she awoke suddenly at precisely two o’clock in the morning and sat bolt upright in bed. “No! No!” she screamed. “Papa! Papa!”

Five years ago, in her autobiography, she went on:

**{: .break one} ** I felt so cold, so cold, in spite of the heat, and couldn’t stop shaking. There was nothing my mother and I could say to console each other. Somehow the hours passed. . . . We were ready at dawn to accompany my father’s body to our ancestral graveyard. “I am in Iddat [mourning] and can’t receive outsiders. You talk to him,” my mother said dully when the jailer arrived. . . . I walked into the cracked cement-floored front room that was supposed to serve as our sitting room. It stank of mildew and rot. “We are ready to leave with the prime minister,” I told the junior jailer standing nervously before me. “They have already taken him to be buried,” he said. I felt as if he had struck me. “Without his family?” I asked. . . . “They have taken him,” he interrupted. “Taken him where?” The jailer was silent. “It was very peaceful,” he finally replied “I have brought you what was left.” ** 

Courtesy Newyorker.com