Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto Assassinated
Blasted hope: Benazir Bhutto, who had twice been Pakistan's prime minister and was campaigning for a third try, was assassinated in Rawalpindi on Dec. 27, two months after returning home from exile. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
On Oct. 17, as she was readying to end her latest exile from Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto told supporters in Dubai, where she'd been living, that she expected a "sea of people" to greet her in Pakistan. Masses of people were already gathering in jubilation in Karachi, the southern Pakistani city where she was born.
And those recurrent death threats?
“I do not believe that any true Muslim will make an attack on me because Islam forbids attacks on women, and Muslims know that if they attack a woman they will burn in hell,” she said. “Secondly, Islam forbids suicide bombing.”
A Promised Greeting of Bombers
But Baitullah Mehsud, A pro-Taliban Pakistani militant commander, had made it explicit. He'd greet her with suicide bombers in retaliation for Bhutto's support for the "war on terror." That support is a reversal for Bhutto, who in the 1990s had been an advocate of the Taliban: it was during her second stint as prime minister of Pakistan, from 1993 to 1996, that the Taliban emerged out of Afghanistan's civil war and imposed its totalitarian regime on that country, beginning in 1996. Only two countries recognized the new regime: Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the two countries that had militarily and financially backed the Taliban).
To Meshud's threats, Bhutto responded with warnings of her own about what is and isn't permissible within Islam, which likely infuriated her fanatic enemies further. The government of Pervez Musharraf, which has been unable to control the Taliban in its northwestern tribal areas, and looked at Bhutto's return suspiciously, promised to ensure her safety. But barely 10 hours after she'd landed in Karachi on Oct. 19, two suicide bombs exploded in her vicinity, narrowly missing her but killing 134 people.
“I am not accusing the government, but I am accusing certain individuals who abuse their positions, who abuse their powers,” she said at a news conference at her Karachi home. “I know in my heart who my enemies are. There is a poem that says that even if you hide yourself behind seven veils, I can still see your hand.”
The Military's Complicity?
On Thursday, at a campaign rally Benazir Bhutto was leading in Rawalpindy--where the powerful Pakistani military has its headquarters, and where little happens, presumably, without the military's knowledge--gunfire erupted, then a suicide bomb exploded. Bhutto was reportedly struck and killed by a bullet in the neck.
"Hundreds of supporters had gathered at the rally," the Times was reporting, "which was being held at Liaqut Bagh, a park that is a common venue for political rallies and speeches, in Rawalpindi, the garrison city adjacent to the capital. The site was littered with pools of blood. Shoes and caps of party workers were lying on the asphalt, and shards of glass were strewn about the ground."
Bhutto was 54 years old.
Implications for Pakistan
Her death has many implications for the future of Pakistan. Her return had further shaken the mostly discredited regime of Pervez Musharraf. Parliamentary elections were due in January. Bhutto, herself the daughter of a former president and prime minister (Zulfikar Ali Bhotto, executed after a shady trial in 1979), was a leading candidate, aiming to be prime minister for the third time in her career. Her death doesn't strengthen Musharraf's hold on power so much as it amplifies Pakistan's severe drift toward chaos.
Islamists are only part of the problem. The absence of viable, strong, creditable political candidates is the other. Nawaz Sharif, also a former prime minister vying for leadership, himself recently returned from exile but under a lingering cloud from his earlier, corruption-ridden tenure. Just this month Musharraf ended his latest bout of martial law. It is entirely possible that he'll suspend the Constitution again and use Bhutto's assassination as his latest excuse to impose "emergency rule," and thus extend his hold on power.
For the United States and the ongoing battles with the Taliban and against returning chaos in Afghanistan, Pakistan's accelerating slouch toward chaos does not bode well at all.
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Comments
Thanks for providing this much-needed background information on Bhutto. What a terrible loss, and what a terrible mess.
Wow! What a horrific situation, on all sides.
Do you happen to have any solid information about the division of political opinion in Pakistan, and the basic options? Everybody is pointing out that there is deep division and chaos, but I still don’t know what the rough map of the foes looks like…
(I realize nobody may know that.)
Michael, chaos is the operative word right now, although public opinion’s last known addrss was miles away from anything Musharraf and eagerly hitched to Bhuotto. What happens next is anybody’s guess. Mine is that the immediate beneficiary is Musharraf, since he represents, ironically, the one known entity that can be relied on as such. This assassination taking place where it did will forcibly point culpability fingers at him. True or not, it’s difficult to see how he’s benefiting in the long run, except from the absence of a clear alternative of Bhutto’s charismatic caliber.
Thanks.
I don’t know what coverage this event is getting outside of where I live (north of San Francisco), but there is a lot of coverage of Bhutto, her assassination, and her controversial life in my local papers. Surprisingly, The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa-based) has the most coverage with seven different good articles in Section A.
And there’s an interesting open forum commentary in the San Francisco Chronicle:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/12/28/EDEVU5HNF.DTL
Thanks Linda. This assassination is striking an unusual chord around the nation (and the world), maybe because Bhutto’s background and potential gave her a glamor of the Diana sort.
A truly horrible, albeit predictable, turn of events. I can’t see any clear beneficiary to this, then again, I’m not that familiar with Pakistani dynamics. As if right on cue, however, Musharraf blames the Taliban and Al-Qaida for the assassination, stirring the pot of this repugnant stew called the global war on terror. Regardless of the outcome or ramifications for Pakistan and the rest of the world, one thing is very clear: Benazir Bhutto has joined the ranks of the martyred, and a martyr cannot be silenced.
Here is an accurate description of Banazir’s political legacy:
“I felt a similar shock on reading of the assassination (not to mention the deaths and soundings of many around her).
Then I went to http://www.counterpunch.org and searched for back articles. I found several that persuaded me that she was not just corrupt, but a politician who played footsie with the U.S., the Talliban, and now Mussharaf, discrediting genuine grass-roots democrats (who, unlike her, were jailed).
Her niece–Pakistani poet and writer Fatima Bhutto–wrote in “Aunt Benazir’s False Promises–The Dismantling of Pakistani Democracy” that Benazir Bhutto recognized the Taliban government next door and was more than an innocent bystander in the assasination of Mir Murtaza Bhutto (Fatima’s father Benazir’s brother) in 1996.
Murtaza Shibli, editor of Kashmir Affairs, writes ” After her return from self-exile, Benazir went beyond all decency and decorum to appease the US and other Western powers. Her assertions that she was not opposed to the American operations in the Pakistan’s tribal areas to fight “terrorism’ and would allow disgraced scientist AQ Khan to be interrogated by the US showed her desperation for power. Power was all that mattered and she showed no regard to the public feelings or her country’s integrity. She even talked tough about Jihadis and was willing to follow the course of General Musharraf’s military response to the crisis rather than any political negotiation to rid the country of growing extremism.”
This isn’t the whole story. But I think the broader picture has to include these elements. It may be easier to idolize those who are victims of high-profile violence, particularly the famous and powerful.
Posted by: Robert Norse
| December 27, 2007 at 04:46 PM”
http://susiebright.blogs.com/susie_brights_journal_/2007/12/benazir-bhutto.html