Petty, mean and vindictive

They say you mustn’t speak ill of the dead. But when an officer’s 25-year brilliant career is almost destroyed because he refuses to testify against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, should the truth not be revealed? Syed Munir Husain has aptly named his memoir Surviving the Wreck. He’s broken away from the ranks of fellow bureaucrats given to filling their memoirs as happy warriors sharing their ‘feats’ with the world. Munir’s book, instead, lays bare his ordeal at the hands of one man: the then chief martial law administrator, General Ziaul Haq.

“If I were to save my skin, I should disclose his [ZAB’s] illegal acts,” writes the author, pressured by Zia’s flunkies after Bhutto’s arrest in September 1977. As chief secretary NWFP, Munir tells his inquisitors that Bhutto never instructed him to rig the March elections. Displaying a hideously hostile growl on his face, Zia makes his anger abundant when he confronts the author at a wedding. “What an irony,” Munir writes, “the same Zia, as Chief of Army Staff, had passed a chit to me in a meeting presided over by Bhutto in Balochistan, conveying that he was at my beck and call.”

To save their careers, some officers caved in by giving false evidence against Bhutto. Zia never forgives Munir for his just one act of defiance. He can’t sack this incorruptible officer with a sterling service record, but he wrecks his remaining years in service by shunting him to the boondocks where he’s further chastised by Zia’s appointees. Then governor Sindh General Abbasi snubs and humiliates Munir who is responsible for the 1981 population census collection. This is the same Abbasi, who in pre-Martial Law days kowtowed to Munir, then chief secretary Balochistan, with a request to allot him two air conditioners for his home in Sibi.

“There was no dearth of evidence of what martial law bred in the behaviour of people in authority,” writes the author. Zia let loose his intelligence hounds on him, watching his every move. His malice and pettiness comes through when Munir’s work with the rehabilitation of Afghan refugees wins profuse praise from the UN Under-Secretary General, Diego Cordovez, at a dinner in Rawalpindi hosted by President Zia. The visitor gets a shut-up call from his host. Everyone is stunned. The dinner ends abruptly. Two months after his plane crashes, Zia must have turned in his grave when Munir is awarded in 1988 the prestigious Nansen Refugee Award. Past recipients include US first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere and French president Giscard d’Estaing. Munir generously donates the $50,000 prize money to Sudan’s refugees.

The spicy parts in Surviving the Wreck are at the end when Prime Minister Junejo handpicks Munir as information secretary. President Zia’s blood boils over. Hungry for publicity nonetheless, Zia takes to calling Munir at midnight accusing him of deliberately ordering the media to sideline him. “The President rang me up at midnight, his usual time to call,” the author writes, “and said cynically: ‘I think I am no longer the President of Pakistan in your eyes?’” Later, Zia sends his notorious press secretary Brigadier Siddiq Salik with a directive to immediately prepare a green booklet containing his leader’s wise sayings “to be immortalised for his [Zia’s] profound thoughts”. He obviously was attempting to compete with Mao’s famous red book. While Junejo trashed this ludicrous proposal, Munir, as information secretary, suffered the rough end of Zia’s fury. Desperate to kick out the popular Junejo, the president’s camp gets its media toadies to defame the prime minister. Soon thereafter, Junejo is history. Two months later Zia is killed.

Enter Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Officers claiming loyalty to her father bagged prized jobs. The one who put his neck on the line for ZAB is bypassed, left to spend his remaining years in forsaken jobs. The unkindest cut comes from BB’s minister Shafqat Mahmood, who once served under Munir. “I am no longer your deputy secretary!” he shouts when Munir refuses him an undue favour. Munir Husain’s Surviving the Wreck spotlights one brave officer’s defiance to become Zia’s ‘yes-man’.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 5^th, 2015.

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