This is what she set out to do in Paris as she checked into a suite in one of its most elegant hotels — the Plaza Athenee — on the Avenue Montaigne which is chock-full of glittering fashion houses. Tending to her meticulously was her younger sister. A bright and energetic woman. Behjat fusses over the frail and angular Nusrat. But there was little bitterness. She speaks lucidly and with a daunting precision for dates.
Her illness causes her to pause frequently and only once during the interview, when she referred to her final moments with her late husband, did she seem close to losing her composure.
What emerged is a resolute. All power to the people. She speaks about conditions inside Pakistan with little inhibition, but shows no analytical appetite for issues loaded with political implications — Pak-US relations. Ever since Nusrat and Behjat moved into the Athenee, French echoes in its tasteful foyer along with the hushed cadences of mellifluous Urdu and Sindhi, spoken by handsome Pakistanis.
Watching the proceedings from a polite distance are two French Secret Servicemen sporting tell-tale dark glasses. Your doctors seem optimistic about curing you.
Are you planning to return to Pakistan after your treatment? Yes, I have to go back to Pakistan. But we want to have another test in four or five months to see how effective the medicines and my treatment have been.
Then the doctors will tell me what to do next. Right now I feel a little better. There has been some speculation about what finally convinced the Pakistani authorities to let you go abroad — the worsening of your physical condition or increasingly strident international pressure. There was pressure building up inside Pakistan.
The Pakistan Medical Association had seen my report. Then there were sympathizers and well-wishers both at home and abroad. And Mrs. She was the only head of state who openly suggested I should be allowed to go abroad to have access to better medical facilities. According to reports in the international press, there seems to have been an immense crowd of well-wishers at the airport to see you off. This happens due to my illness. You have been under detention during years of martial rule.
Did you spend most of the time under house arrest or in prison? You mean in the last five and a half years?
Well out of this period, four years I have been under detention, both in prison and under house arrest. What were the conditions like in prison? Inevitably, in the first few days, they would treat us badly. We were kept in second class cells. Then gradually they would relax certain conditions, by which you could get your own food, beds, clothes. But their cruelty took other forms. None of our friends or our relations were allowed to come and see us, like other prisoners were entitled to.
Did you ever spend time with other criminals? There were 35 other women prisoners who were singers, dancers, kidnappers, prostitutes…. What was the hardest part in all these years of incarceration you have had to endure? More than anything else, it was solitary confinement. You were completely alone in solitary confinement. Their method was to take over our house and then convert it into a jail. They would then impose all the rules of a normal jail like bringing their own locks, opening and closing the gates at a certain hour.
They refused permission for anybody to come and see us. We would then request them to grant us at least the facilities available to common criminals. This they consistently refused to do. The Amnesty International Report makes disturbing reading. It alleges several thousand political prisoners inside Pakistan. Many of them are flogged; there is systematic use of torture and a few have died as a result.
Pakistani officials have denied all this. The Amnesty report is entirely true. Political prisoners have been tortured. I repeat: political prisoners have been tortured and some have died. They have been flogged so severely that they have been maimed. When Zia orders hogging, it is not to punish someone for his crime, but to maim him.
For punishments, Islam, sets out conditions: thin canes have to be used, the skin of the person should not turn red and get cracked due to the flogging.
If that happens, the floggers ought to be flogged. Your daughter Benazir — how did she face up to all this? Benazir spent an entire year in solitary confinement. Besides the loneliness in prison, it can be unbearably hot — as high as degrees Fahrenheit. Once when some close friends took some cold water for her, the jail superintendent returned it.
Under any sort of rules, this should not have been allowed to happen. After the crackdown on the political parties following the hijacking last year, the Opposition seems to have no sense of purpose or cohesion. It seems to have been unable to find an issue to rouse the people to back demands for return to civilian rule. It seems to have been unable to generate the kind of mass upsurge that brought down Ayub Khan.
At that time there was no martial law in the country. Ayub Khan had martial law for only three and a half months. General Zia has ruled under martial law regulations for more than five and a half years. Since he is hated and is unpopular in the country, Zia knows full well what will happen if tomorrow there is no martial law…. Well, what will happen if tomorrow there is no martial law? If there are elections will the PPP win? The PPP is the only party in Pakistan which can be called a national party, and if there are elections tomorrow, we will win easily, even if I have to say it.
Prior to his US visit in the last fortnight, President Zia promised in interviews to the American medic that elections will be scheduled in in Pakistan. He will never hold elections under the rules of the Constitution.
By , if he thinks that the PPP is going to disintegrate. Zia is sadly mistaken. For the last five and a half years he has caught to destroy our party, but has not got any-where. He has conjured up court cases against our senior leaders. Some of them are told if they left the party, their problems will be solved. Others are lured with the posts of chief ministerships.
He brazenly says he is using the carrot and stick treatment. The Pakistan President had some other interesting things to say too. He declared that elections in Pakistan are an anathema and create a crisis; and that a little while ago politics in Pakistan meant violence, character assassination, polarisation… A. Absolute rubbish. These are empty phrases by which he is defending himself and his martial law.
It is essential and vitally important that we have a Constitution. It will be a great tragedy if some such calamity occurs. Regarding Pak-US relations: Having been the mainstay of the US defensive strategy in South Asia, ever since Soviet troops moved into Afghanistan, do you think the large infusions of military and economic assistance have helped prop up the martial law regime? We accept this argument.
Do you have plans to go to Washington? There was some talk of an invitation from President Reagan. There was no invitation. But I have taken a visa for the United States. If I need a second opinion from American doctors, I may go there, and not necessarily to Washington. Do you think a highly coordinated international campaign could have probably saved his life?
There was considerable international pressure. Leaders from various countries of the world had made appeals. Ispahani joined a paramilitary women's force in , but left a year later when she married Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. She moved to Oxfordshire with her husband who then was pursuing his legal education. She returned to Pakistan alongside Bhutto who went on to serve as the Foreign Minister. After her husband founded the Pakistan Peoples Party , Ispahani worked to lead the party's women's wing.
After Bhutto was elected as the Prime Minister in , Ispahani became the First Lady of Pakistan and remained so until her husband's removal in Her daughter, Benazir Bhutto immediately succeeded her husband as the leader of the Pakistan Peoples party and, while under house arrest , fought an unsuccessful legal battle to prevent her husband's execution.
After Bhutto 's execution, Ispahani, along with her children, went into exile to London , from where in she co-founded the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy , a nonviolent opposition to Zia 's regime. Ispahani returned to Pakistan after her daughter Benazir made a comeback in After the People's Party's victory in , she joined Benazir's cabinet as a minister without portfolio while representing Larkana District in the National Assembly.
She remained in the cabinet until Benazir's government was dismissed in Afterwards, during a family dispute between her son, Murtaza , and her daughter, Benazir, Ispahani favored Murtaza leading Benazir to sack Ispahani as the party leader.
Ispahani stopped talking to the media and refrained from political engagements after the assassination of her son Murtaza in during a police encounter , during her daughter's second government. Ispahani moved to Dubai in , suffering from Alzheimer's disease , she was kept out of public's eye by Benazir until her demise on 23 October Nusrat Ispahani was born on 23 March in Kermanshah , Iran, hailing from the wealthy Ispahani family.
Her father was a wealthy Iranian Feyli Kurdish businessman who initially lived in Bombay and then moved to Karachi before the independence of Pakistan and the Partition of India in As first lady from to , Nusrat Bhutto functioned as a political worker and accompanied her husband on a number of overseas visits.
In , after the trial and execution of her husband, she succeeded her husband as leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party as chairman for life. Alongside her daughter Benazir Bhutto , she was arrested numerous times and placed under house arrest and in prison in Sihala. Nusrat Bhutto was attacked by police with batons while attending a cricket match at Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore, when the crowd began to raise pro Bhutto slogans.
In , ill with cancer, she was given permission to leave the country by the military government of General Zia-ul-Haq for medical treatment in London at which point her daughter, Benazir Bhutto, became acting leader of the party, and, by , the party chairman.
After returning to Pakistan in the late s, she served two terms as a Member of Parliament to the National Assembly from the family constituency of Larkana, Sindh. During the administrations of her daughter Benazir, she became a cabinet minister and Deputy Prime Minister. In the s, she and Benazir became estranged when Nusrat took the side of her son Murtaza during a family dispute but were later reconciled after Murtaza's murder.
She lived the last few years of her life with her daughter's family in Dubai , United Arab Emirates and later suffered from the combined effects of a stroke and Alzheimer's disease. With the exception of Sanam, she outlived her children.
Bhutto was suspected of suffering from cancer in , the year when she left Pakistan for medical treatment. For the last several years of her life, she had also been suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
In the mids, particularly after the death of her son Mir Murtaza Bhutto in , she withdrew from public life. Party sources suggest this may also have coincided with the time that she began to show symptoms of Alzheimer's. According to her senior party leader, Bhutto's disease was so advanced that she was even unaware of the assassination of her daughter, Benazir.
She used a ventilator until her last days.
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