Fatima Bhutto: Negotiating Nobility

Kate Lamb ,  Contributor ,  Ubud, Bali   |  Mon, 10/19/2009 9:03 AM  |  People

Courtesy of Neal Hornaffer

Perhaps there is nobility in saying no. Discussing US President Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize and her rising political stardom in Pakistan, Fatima Bhutto, the niece of assassinated Pakistani prime minister Benazir, suggested prematurity on both fronts.

With the nomination coinciding with the anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan, where the US president has pledged to send 40,000 more troops, and with American drones continuing to fly over the heads of Pakistanis, Fatima is clearly not impressed.

“I think it would have been the right thing [for Obama] to say no, not yet,” she says.

The journalist and writer was in town to speak at the Ubud Writer’s and Readers Festival, and caused a stir at every event.

“It is a shame that a country, which as a nation is not linked with peace, seems to keep producing Nobel Peace Prize winners. Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger – who is the personification of all evil – and now Obama,” reels Fatima in disgust.

Resistance and politics are in her blood, but it is a lineage that has been marred by a string of bloody political assassinations.

Her grandfather, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, formed the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and was elected prime minister in 1973. Following a political crisis, Zulfiqar was imprisoned by General Zia-ul-Haq who imposed martial law on the country. Zulfiqar was hanged in 1979, after the High Court found him guilty of murdering the father of a dissident PPP politician.

Her father, Murtaza, formed Al Zulfikar, an armed revolutionary movement in the late 1970s, which sought to overthrow Zia’s military dictatorship.

Fatima was born in Afghanistan, where her father fled in exile, and spent her childhood in Syria. A family feud erupted after her father’s return to Pakistan 16 years later, where his sister Benazir had just been elected prime minister for the second time running.

Murtaza was seeking a powerful position in her party, but Benazir resisted her brother’s grab for a prominent role in the party founded by their father. He formed an opposition party in response, but it lacked popularity and more blood was shed when he was suspiciously killed in a gunfight with police in 1996.

Fatima publicly speculated that her aunt Benazir was involved in her father’s death. Just over a decade later, in 2007, Benazir was murdered at an election rally when a gunman shot her in the neck and set off a bomb. The current prime minister, Asif Ali Zadari, is the widower of Benazir and is widely accused of rampant corruption.

For decades, Pakistani politics has been plagued by instability, corruption and violence, and in some way Fatima has always been in the wings.

After completing her masters at London’s School of African and Oriental Studies, and writing her thesis on the resistance to Zia’s dictatorship, 27-year-old Fatima has established herself as a well-respected voice on Pakistani politics, both at home and abroad.

Her writing is polemic, unforgiving and brutal about the hypocrisy of Western governments and their continued support of the corrupt Pakistani regime. In a sarcastic mock letter addressed to British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, published on an online blog in January, Fatima writes:

“It was such a lovely surprise to have you over. It warmed our hearts, really it did. I especially enjoyed your faith in our new government (you know, the one headed by two former ex-cons?).

The CIA and NATO have both praised Pakistan’s new regime for its enthusiastic assistance in the war on terror, and now you’ve chimed in. I find it’s always nice to have supportive friends when you’re at war with your own citizens.”

Fatima’s writing is always labelled “controversial”, but she says, “I never think about that when I write”. Although she denies she is frightened about what she writes, she does say that what she writes is frightening. Pakistan has recently passed an ambiguous and draconian cyber crimes law that can sentence people to death for “cyber terrorism”.

“There are so many horror stories,” she sighs, “you don’t even have to look for them anymore.”
For Fatima, it is not the country but the government that has failed.

“Bucket-loads of billions of dollars” in loans from the US and the IMF have perpetuated government and military corruption, impunity and healthy Swiss bank accounts for the Pakistani elite, she says.

Between 2001 and 2008, Pakistan received more than US$10 billion in aid that was never accounted for by then president Pervez Musharraf’s administration.

In the lush surroundings of Ubud — talking about the Taliban in the Swat valley and middle-class Pakistanis in Karachi that adopted out their children because they couldn’t afford to feed them during last year’s food crisis — the failed state seems a world away.

“The History of Love and The Great Gatsby are my favorite books,” she tells me, “because they were so powerful and seem to follow their own rules.”

That’s not surprising because she seems to set her own rules too. It is these fiercely independent opinions that characterize her columns in Pakistani papers, The New Statemen and The Guardian, railing against a country she describes as beautiful but dispossessed.

It is clear why Pakistan has become beguiled by her beauty and bolshie-ness. Fans dedicated to Fatima have been pleading for her to lead the country; on Facebook thousands of Pakistanis have asked for her to restore justice and become Pakistan’s next prime minister.

But Fatima says she has no plans to enter the messy world of Pakistan’s government any time soon, preferring instead to contribute to political resistance through her writing. She is currently working on a third book, a history of the Bhutto family, set to be published in 2010.

“I have always been a Bhutto, and this pressure is new,” she says.

“My name precedes anyone being interested in me. I never sought power with my name. I think it
is positive to have this name, and say no.”


Fatima’s writing is always labelled “controversial”, but she says, “I never think about that when I write”.

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