| Notes |
Involvement with Zia-ul-Haq
Herring is well known and remembered for her long association and political engagement with president of Pakistan Zia-ul-Haq. Her contacts with Zia dated back to the early 1970s, when he, as brigadier-general, was a contingent commander of Pakistani military formations in Jordan. In 1980, President Zia convened and held a dinner in honor of Robert and Joanne Herring in Islamabad. About the military intelligence program run against the prime minister Zulfikar Bhutto, Herring reportedly defended Zia's action. She also wrote that [Zulfikar] Bhutto "was tried by his own judges and convicted of murder. The Koran serves as the unofficial constitution of Pakistan. It exacts an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. If you murder, you must die. The only thing Zia did was to not commute Bhutto's sentence. In a country whose constitution demanded capital punishment for murder, Zia could not violate the Law." |