Benazir Bhutto (1953-2007)

Benazir Bhutto, 54, Lived Through Political Storm

Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated at age 54 on Thursday in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, spent three decades navigating the turbulent and often violent world of Pakistani politics, becoming in 1988 the first woman to lead a modern Muslim country.
Benazir Bhutto at a press conference in Islamabad in November. More Photos »
A deeply polarizing figure, the self-styled “daughter of Pakistan” was twice elected prime minister and twice expelled from office amid a swirl of corruption charges that ultimately propelled her into self-imposed exile in London and Dubai for much of the past decade. She returned home only two months ago, defying threats to her life as she embarked on a bid for election to a third term in office, billing herself as a bulwark against Islamic extremism and a tribune of democracy.
The combined bombing and shooting attack that killed her as she left a political rally, standing through the open roof of her car to greet milling crowds of supporters, came as Ms. Bhutto staged a series of mass meetings across Pakistan. She did that despite her aides’ appeals for caution in the wake of a double suicide bombing that narrowly failed to kill her on the night of her return from exile in October. That attack, which killed more than 130 people, came as she drove from the airport in Karachi to her home on the city’s seafront, and provoked a characteristic response.
“We will continue to meet the public,” she said as she visited survivors of the bombings at a Karachi hospital. “We will not be deterred.”
When asked to explain the courage — or stubbornness, as some of her critics saw it — that she displayed at critical junctures in her political career, Ms. Bhutto often referred to the example she said had been set by her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He was a charismatic and often demagogic politician who was president and prime minister from 1971 to 1977, before being hanged in April 1979 on charges of having ordered the murder of a minor political opponent.
Mr. Bhutto was the founder in 1967 of the Pakistan Peoples Party, the political vehicle that he, and later his daughter, rode to power. Like his daughter, Mr. Bhutto battled for years with Pakistan’s powerful generals. He was ousted from office, and ultimately executed, on the orders of Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, one of the long succession of military rulers who have dominated Pakistan for most of the 60 years since it emerged as an independent state from the partition of British India.
Under house arrest at the time, Ms. Bhutto was allowed to visit her father before his execution in the death cell at Rawalpindi’s central prison, only a short distance from the site of the rally where she was killed nearly three decades later. In a BBC radio interview in the 1990s, she said seeing her father preparing to die steeled her for her own political career, which some biographers have suggested was driven, in part, by a determination to avenge him by outmaneuvering the generals.
“After having to go through that last meeting with him in the death cell, I don’t think anything they could do would be worse than that,” she said.

A History of Violence
Violence ran like a thread through her family life, to an extent that caused her admirers to compare the Bhuttos, in the contribution they made to Pakistan’s political life, and in the price they paid for it, to the Kennedys — and her enemies, pointing to the Bhuttos’ bitter family feuds, to compare them to the Borgias. The younger of Ms. Bhutto’s two brothers, Shahnawaz, died mysteriously of poisoning in 1995, in an apartment owned by the Bhuttos in Cannes, France. French investigators said they suspected that a family feud over a multimillion-dollar inheritance from Zulfikar Bhutto was involved, but no charges were filed.
Ms. Bhutto’s other brother, Murtaza, who along with Shahnawaz founded a terrorist group that sought to topple General Zia, spent years in exile in Syria beginning in the 1980s. When Murtaza finally returned to Pakistan, in 1993, he quickly fell into a bitter dispute with Ms. Bhutto over the family’s political legacy — and, he told a reporter at the time, over the money he said had been placed in a Swiss bank by their father when he was prime minister. In 1996, Murtaza was gunned down outside his home in Karachi, and his widow, Ghinva, blamed Asif Ali Zardari, Ms. Bhutto’s husband.
Born on June 21, 1953, Ms. Bhutto, the first child in her family, reveled in telling friends that she was her father’s favorite. One of her most cherished anecdotes about her childhood involved her father’s encouraging her to set aside traditional Muslim views of a woman’s role and to have ambitions beyond the home, a message she said he conveyed with stories about Joan of Arc and Queen Elizabeth I.
Later in life, Ms. Bhutto counted Margaret Thatcher, who was Britain’s first female prime minister, among her heroes.
After attending a private Christian-run school in Karachi, where the family maintained a luxurious mansion in the oceanfront neighborhood of Clifton, Ms. Bhutto studied at Radcliffe College, earning a Harvard B.A. in 1973, and later at Oxford, where she gained a second B.A. in 1976. At Oxford, she was the first woman to become president of the Oxford Union, the prestigious debating society that nurtured several British prime ministers.

In her memoir, she described what life as a young woman at Harvard felt like. “I was amongst a sea of women who felt as unimpeded by their gender as I did,” she wrote. At Oxford, she adopted a distinctly westernized way of life, commuting to classes in a yellow MG sports car, and spending her winters at the Swiss ski resort of Gstaad. She said later that her passions at the time included reading royal biographies and “slushy” romances, and browsing at the London department store Harrods — a habit she maintained throughout the rest of her life.
From Oxford, Ms. Bhutto was thrust abruptly into the heart of Pakistani politics by General Zia’s arrest and execution of her father.
From that moment on, Ms. Bhutto said in later years, she resolved to oust General Zia from power. But in August 1988, the general and the American ambassador, Arnold L. Raphel, were killed when their plane exploded and crashed in southern Pakistan. Three months later, when she was 35, Ms. Bhutto won a general election and formed her first government, only to be ousted by Pakistan’s president in 1990. In 1993, she won a second election, but was again dismissed in 1996.
Her accomplishments in office were few. She claimed in later years that she had clamped down on Islamic militants, established a strong basis for democracy by paring away many of the restrictions on civil liberties imposed by the generals, and provided a boost to the economy, especially in her second term, by attracting a flow of foreign investment. But in both terms, she was dismissed on charges of corruption, and her ouster, on both occasions, sparked only sporadic protests across Pakistan.

Complexity and Contradictions
A woman of complex and often contradictory instincts, Ms. Bhutto was a politician who presented herself on public platforms as the standard-bearer for Pakistan’s impoverished masses, for civil liberties, and for an unfettered democracy, while at the same time she often behaved in an imperious manner in private, and in her dealings as prime minister with government officials, diplomats and reporters.
She once rebuked a reporter who was awaiting an interview at the prime minister’s residence for having the temerity to look at family photographs on the mantel shelf. “Where do you think you are?” she asked.
In “Daughter of Destiny,” her memoir, she rebuked reporters for calling attention to her dress style, almost always the traditional loose-fitting robe favored among Pakistani women, saying she did not care about matters like dress because “fashions are a bourgeois pastime.” But among her aides and Pakistani diplomats, who often accompanied her on her trips abroad, she gained a reputation for buying expensive jewelry and shoes and at elite stores in Beverly Hills, London and Paris.
Her critics often attributed her flushes of haughtiness and her expensive tastes to a sense of entitlement, as Zulfikar Bhutto’s daughter and as the pre-eminent member of a wealthy land-owning family from the cotton-growing southern province of Sindh. The egalitarian credo Ms. Bhutto preached as a politician found little echo in the lives of the impoverished men and women, many of them indentured workers, who worked the family’s ancestral lands.
After her second dismissal from office in 1996, a friend said Ms. Bhutto’s sense of herself as inseparable from the fate of Pakistan contributed to actions that led Pakistani investigators to accuse her and Mr. Zardari of embezzling as much $1.5 billion from government accounts.
The investigators produced thick volumes of documents tracing what they said were multimillion-dollar kickbacks paid to the couple in return for the award of government contracts, and a web of bank accounts across the world that were used to hide the money. Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Zardari vehemently rejected the allegations, saying their accusers had fabricated the accusations and documents as a means of driving her from power.
Criminal probes of the couple’s financial dealings were opened in Britain, Spain and Switzerland, among other places. But the cases against the couple in Pakistan languished for years in the courts, and the cases against Ms. Bhutto were ultimately quashed by an amnesty granted by Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, as part of an American-brokered deal that cleared the way for Ms. Bhutto to return to Pakistan in the fall to participate in elections that Mr. Musharraf set for January.
The American bid to restore her to power in Islamabad reflected her tireless efforts to maintain a network of powerful friends among the political and media elite in Washington and in London, through years when many, even among her friends, believed that her prospects of again serving as prime minister were slim. Before returning to Pakistan in October, she recalled with obvious pleasure how one senior Bush official dealing with Pakistan stayed away from a dinner given for her in Washington two years ago, only for the administration to begin courting her again intensively over the past year.
A moment of particular satisfaction came shortly before she flew back to Pakistan, when Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to the United Nations, shared an executive jet with Ms. Bhutto on their way from New York to a conference in Aspen, Colo. Though participants who had not seen her in several years said her years in exile appeared to have taken a physical toll — always slim in her years in power, she had gained weight and appeared pallid — she seemed to revel in the attention lavished on her by the conference participants, including some of the most powerful figures in the United States.
Among her friends, Ms. Bhutto’s marriage to Mr. Zardari, who was in Dubai when she was killed, was seen as central to understanding much that went awry in her life in the years after her father was hanged. The marriage in 1987 was an arranged one, in the Muslim tradition, with the role of marriage broker performed by Nusrat Bhutto, Ms. Bhutto’s Iranian-born mother. Mr. Zardari came from a modest business family that owned a cinema in Karachi.
Ms. Bhutto herself spoke soberly of what an arranged marriage entailed, saying that her five years under house arrest — and, briefly, in prison — under General Zia, had left her with little opportunity for courtship. But friends watched with fascination as her relationship with Mr. Zardari developed. Handsome, with a macho style that Ms. Bhutto told friends she thought at first was ridiculous, he became an important figure in her two governments, serving in her cabinet in her second term in a role that gave him a major role in attracting foreign investment.
Mr. Zardari’s nickname among Pakistanis, Mr. 10 Percent, spoke for the widespread sense that he had led Ms. Bhutto into the financial irregularities that played an important role in her decision to go into exile. Mr. Zardari, arrested before she left, spent eight years in jail but never faced trial and was freed by Mr. Musharraf and allowed to leave Pakistan. The couple had two sons, Bilawal and Bakhtwar, and a daughter, Aseefa. Bilawal, 19, began studies in the fall at Oxford. The two younger children have remained with their father in Dubai.

this article copy from The New York Times.

~ by မုတ္သုန္ေလ on December 28,07.