ISLAMABAD: A confidant of President Asif Ali Zardari, who came very close to him during his long years in prison and is now a powerful man of the Aiwan-e-Sadr, takes the lid off some engaging episodes.
“Clap as much as you want because this is the most befitting occasion for putting your hands together,” was how Zardari reacted when an ecstatic Dr Qayyum Soomro expressed his thrill as Pervez Musharraf announced his resignation in a televised speech on August 17 last year.
But in sharp contrast, Zardari had stopped a rejoicing Soomro, then a prison doctor in the Central Jail Karachi, to clap when Musharraf had declared the imposition of military rule in an address to the nation, dismissing the Nawaz Sharif government a decade back on October 12, 1999.
“Democracy will now be away from Pakistan for around ten years while we were going to pull down Nawaz Sharif in a year or so,” Zardari had then remarked, asking Soomro to stop rejoicing over Nawaz Sharif’s sacking.
They had heard both the speeches together, the second at the Zardari House Islamabad in the company of some others. Three police officers including Wajid Durrani, Rai Tahir and another senior cop, all implicated in the Mir Murtaza Bhutto murder case of September 20, 1996, had sat with them in Karachi’s Central Jail to hear Musharraf’s address.
They used to meet every evening in Zardari’s jail room where they would discuss everything under the sun, according to Dr Soomro, who was named as “B Complex” by one of the police officers for always bucking them up so as they face the worst circumstances with courage. His encouraging remarks were meant to boost their morale.
Another important disclosure made by Dr Soomro during a chat with our sources was that he had told Zardari 72 hours before the 1999 coup that the Nawaz Sharif government would be sent packing. He claimed that he based his information on the clue provided by a friend from Rawalpindi, who had got it from his son, studying with a child of an important officer of 111 Brigade of the Pakistan Army that springs into action on orders from the top to take control of the Prime Minister’s office and house at the time of proclaiming martial law.
Dr Soomro says Zardari was stunned when he came to know about the information regarding the sure ouster of the Nawaz Sharif government. At the outset, he shrugged it off, saying Nawaz Sharif has not yet become so vulnerable and shaky that he could be shown the door so easily. But the doctor insisted on the authenticity of the source of his information. The three police officers, present in the room at the time, also doubted it, and dubbed it as the doctor’s “B Complex” to keep their morale high.
When Zardari finally accepted the information with a pinch of salt, he asked Dr Soomro to immediately relay it to Benazir Bhutto in Dubai, by putting his finger at his nose, the signal meant for the lady, but without uttering her name. He used to do so to refer anything to Benazir Bhutto to avoid eavesdropping of his conversation by the intelligence gadgets.
“Doctor, you are not in your senses?” Benazir Bhutto said as she heard the disclosuare. “I was firm in stressing during my telephonic conversation with her that my information will prove correct after two days, and it did,” he said.
Dr Soomro said that contrary to the daily appointed evening time when he and the police officers would be mostly with Zardari, he had a meeting with him a bit earlier, around 4 pm, on October 12 to break the news that his 72-hour deadline was to expire today, and after a few hours the government would be toppled. And it so happened.
He quotes Zardari as saying off and on that the biggest revenge that he is now taking from Musharraf every day is that he is sitting on the president’s chair that the former general occupied for nine years. “I don’t need to do anything more tortuous to him.”
During his incarceration, Soomro said, he and others often asked Zardari not to be photographed smiling in his court appearances as this sends a negative message. But he would say every time that his smiles were a slap on the face of those who have kept him in jail. “I want to tell all of them that I have not been intimidated or broken by their excesses and persecution.”
Dr Soomro said that when, during Zardari’s detention, Nawaz Sharif and his family members opted to go into exile to Saudi Arabia after an understanding with Musharraf, Zardari remarked to him in the Karachi jail that they have committed the biggest blunder of their political life. “Had Nawaz Sharif remained steadfast and stayed in prison for another six months, he would have been freed and Musharraf would have been behind the bars.”
All the three police officers, who were in jail at the time and spent long time with Zardari, are now serving in different important positions and have got their due promotions as well. And Dr Soomro, who later quit as the jail doctor, never looked back and emerged as the most trusted man of Zardari even before the latter was elected President of Pakistan.
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