One evening last December a Pakistani man, still shivering from the winter chill, slid into a booth at a quiet restaurant on Devon with his eight-year-old daughter. When the curry and rice arrived he ate slowly, his six-three frame hunched over the table, and half listened as the girl prattled on about friends, school, and life as the new kid on the block. The dark circles under his eyes reached to the frames of his glasses, and he moved wearily for a man of 43. As the waiter engaged the girl in some light banter, her father flashed a faint smile under his bushy black mustache. “She is my best friend these days,” said Kamran Rizvi.
Benazir Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was a left-leaning populist who led Pakistan from 1971 to 1978. The Pakistan People’s Party, which he founded, espoused socialism and democracy, though critics said that once in office he favored the former more than the latter. Rizvi’s father was a civil servant and supporter of the elder Bhutto who rose to the rank of deputy accountant general in Pakistan before his retirement. Rizvi recalls meeting the elder Bhutto when he was about 12. That encounter, he says, planted the seeds for his activism as a young man. “Bhutto was a very revolutionary person,” Rizvi says. “He was the voice of the people of Pakistan at that time.”
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Pakistan’s political scene changed with the ascent of General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, the army chief of staff under Bhutto who eventually became his primary opponent. Bhutto was hanged in 1979, and Zia-ul-Haq canceled promised elections and kept the country under martial law for years. Rizvi blames Zia for the increased Islamization of Pakistan, including the flourishing of madrassas, the strict Islamic schools recently accused by the U.S. of breeding terrorists.
In the mid-80s, protests against the abuses of Zia’s military regime led to improved conditions for political prisoners, and Rizvi was able to earn two master’s degrees in prison (taking his exams in shackles). Nevertheless the toll of his imprisonment on his family was enormous. Amnesty International launched a campaign on his behalf; in 1986 the Washington Post labeled him “one of the most prominent political prisoners in Pakistan.”
The death threats began almost immediately, and the Rizvis debated whether they should leave the country. They were loath to leave their elderly parents and well-established careers, but after armed men broke into their home and threatened their maid, they realized the threat had to be taken seriously. In May 2000 they and their daughter, Yumna, boarded a plane for the U.S., where all three of them could stay on Rizvi’s existing multiple-entry visa. The family landed in New York and eventually crowded into the apartment of some friends in Brooklyn.
Rizvi was invited to Chicago as a guest speaker during a visit to the U.S. in the mid-1990s and met prominent members of the Pakistani community at the time, but he says he got a restrained reception when he contacted them last fall, hoping that they might help him find a job. When I called local Pakistani leaders recently, they indicated they knew Rizvi was in Chicago and had spoken with him in the past, but they seemed unaware of his struggle to get established. “I think he’s trying to get something started,” said Hamid Ullah, a leading member of the Chicago chapter of the Pakistan Federation of America. “He seems to be in the planning stages now.”
Back in December, Rizvi was optimistic about President Musharraf’s crackdown on Islamic extremists in Pakistan. Although he said the way Musharraf took office was “totally undemocratic,” Rizvi admitted that “Musharraf is doing a good job, and he will get good support from the Pakistani people. They’ve supported antiterrorism measures, and that’s good for not only the U.S. but Pakistan as well. Now he can work to curb the Islamization of Pakistan. If he can’t do it now, no one can.” Since then the violence in Pakistan–the battles between Sunnis and Shiites, the assassinations of several prominent doctors, the kidnapping and murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl, the bombing of a Christian church near his neighborhood in Islamabad–has shaken Rizvi’s confidence. While he’s grateful for the safe haven provided him by the U.S., he says he’d go home in an instant if the Musharraf government could guarantee his safety. His father, who is in his 70s, continues to write articles and poems in favor of democracy. Rizvi believes that he, too, has much to contribute there–the national office of human rights that he once headed no longer exists.
