May 11, 1998
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Power and
the Gun A racy account of Murtaza Bhutto's life by his former aide reveals a psychotic man. By Mani Shankar Aiyar JOURNEY OF ILLUSION: THE TERRORIST
PRINCE
Over the next 12 years, with Anwar in tow as a young and besotted aide, Bhutto, who formed the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), captured power in Pakistan, won another election in 1977, then called out the army against his political opponents, only to end as the army's most celebrated victim. With the blessings of the Bhutto ladies, Anwar launched a clandestine but doomed movement to spring the imprisoned former prime minister from Zia ul Haq's clutches. He then escaped to Murtaza Bhutto in Kabul. Murtaza was both paranoiac and psychotic, killing even his closest aides with cold-blooded pleasure, whimsically hatching madcap plans, callously despatching his minions to certain death. After a year of camaraderie with his mentor's son, Anwar found himself thrown into the dreaded Pul-I charkhi jail on a peevish order from Murtaza. He was plucked from deathrow by a miracle and has survived to tell this racy and very readable biography of the aptly titled Terrorist Prince. What amazes one is that the Indian diplomatic establishment, in common with most foreign offices around the world, should have invested this bunch of demented thugs with any hope of success. Yet they apparently did, for raw, claims Anwar, imparted some "training" to "20 or 30" of Murtaza's men. Murtaza himself, we are told, spent several furtive years, pointlessly despatching squads of assassins across the border. But there are so many howlers in the account of Murtaza's India connection that its veracity is rendered suspect. Anwar tells us that Zia did, in fact, almost fall to Murtaza twice: once when, owing to Murtaza's cursory training, "the inexperienced and nervous" Anwar pressed the trigger of his SAM-7 "without waiting for the heat-seeking missile to lock into the aircraft's engines"; and next at Delhi's Nizamuddin Aulia when PIA hijacker, Salamullah Tipu, got within 13 ft of Zia, enough to take 24 close-range pictures with his camera but not to kill the visiting Pakistan president. All because his accomplice, Pervez Shinwari, had failed to reach Delhi with the Kalashnikov. Furious, Tipu returned to Kabul and murdered Shinwari, as he had many others at Murtaza's command. For his pains, he was jailed and later shot, Murtaza refusing to save him. In the end, Murtaza met the fate one cannot help but think he deserved -- shot in a gun battle with his sister's police at the instance, many believe, of his brother-in-law Asif Zardari. Murtaza had, after all, hung a photograph of Zardari in one of his lavatories. "Guests," says Anwar, "were encouraged to use that particular facility." The journey of illusion has ended. The PPP has been left, in Anwar's telling phrase, a party of "widows, divorcees and ex-wives".
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On June 20, 1966, Pakistani student
leader Raja Anwar set out on what was to become his personal "journey of
illusion". He clambered at midnight aboard the Khyber Mail carrying Ayub Khan's just
dismissed foreign minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto from Rawalpindi to Lahore. 
