Today, 31-years ago, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged. It reminds me of an email I received on another Sunday morning. It was from ‘Benazir’s brother.’ He had just finished reading my column on Benazir Bhutto’s second death anniversary. “ZAB was my best friend. I was to write his biography,” wrote the e-mailer. “His beloved daughter Benazir gave her life for the restoration of democracy. I was supposed to be killed with her when she arrived in Karachi. In our last meeting in New York we had agreed to adopt each other as sister and brother. But that is another story… I know who killed her.”
The next day we met at an Indian restaurant (in the US). It was an uncanny coincidence that he happened to be in the area I was in. Seated around were American diners blithely unaware of a land called Pakistan and the mysteries it holds. I found it even more surreal to hear the Bhutto ghost being resurrected by this stranger who dropped out of the blue as I sat thousands of miles away from Pakistan.
Dr Thomas B Manton was the mystery man. He was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s “best American friend.” In the fall of 1966 a dear friend of his in New York, the Dawn Correspondent at the United Nations, set up a meeting with Bhutto. The four-hour meeting was a “wonderful tour de force of what really happened during the 1965 war between India and Pakistan.” In the 95-page transcript of his interview which the US government wanted to see, “but I never gave it to them,” ZAB revealed that the war would not have ended if UN Secretary-General U Thant (whose biographer Tom was) had not intervened. “Bhutto was not the reckless young foreign minister often portrayed by the press. He was very realistic and visionary as to what the available options for Pakistan were.”
Tom invited ZAB to a conference on the future of the UN in June 1967 at Burgenstock, Switzerland. “By that time I had finished my 350 pages book on U Thant (whom ZAB knew well) and he read the 85-page chapter on the 1965 Indo-Pak War. He was so impressed that he asked me to edit his book The Myth of Independence.
Tom says that Bhutto was targeted both at that time, and especially later, as an anti-America foreign minister. He became a “pariah” because he brought Pakistan close to China in 1963. “Ayub Khan was told by President Lyndon Johnson to get Bhutto out of the cabinet.” The US was in the middle of a Cold War with USSR and China. Tom was fighting against the Vietnam war here in the US, backing Senator Robert F Kennedy for president. “I had arranged for Bhutto to be a guest of the Kennedy campaign and travel with the senator for a day or two in the US. Then Kennedy was assassinated, as so many in the Bhutto family have been, advocating change for their people.” (Tom Manton shares his suspicions about the elimination of ZAB and BB… but that is for another time…)
“For the US government, Bhutto had committed the cardinal sin of making peace with one of America’s enemies — China. The irony was that the US used Pakistan as their entry to the Chinese a short five years later. Without Bhutto’s change in Pakistan’s China policy, that would never have been possible. A dear friend, the late PIA Captain Azim Jan, told me the details of the highly secret VVIP flight of PIA from Pindi to Peking in which he took Henry Kissinger to make the opening to China in the early summer of 1971 before the world-changing announcement of President Nixon going to China in February 1972.”
ZAB was carrying out what he felt was in the best interests of his country. “I saw, with my own young eyes, how the pro-western, military-oriented elite of Pakistan colluded with the US. Mr Bhutto was the first politician in Pakistan who strongly advocated populist rule in the country rather than the rule of the then 22 families. He made the people of Pakistan feel that they were important! That is the essence of democracy.”
Tom was a journalist with solid connections on the Hill and Harvard. BB had been rejected by Radcliffe. In his letter of recommendation for ‘Pinkie’ to his friend and president of Radcliffe College, an affiliate of Harvard, he predicted, “You will be admitting someone who one day will be the prime minister of Pakistan.” After ZAB’s death, Benazir asked him several times to write her father’s biography. “The last time I met BB at her home in New York before she went to Pakistan in 2007, she again reminded me. As one of BB’s last wishes, I cannot now let her down. Besides, the truth must be told, even after 31 years.”
Tom’s revelations have the makings of a Hollywood blockbuster, if only actor/producer Tom Hanks (of Charlie Wilson’s War) can be tapped.
Mohammed Abbasi 