ISLAMABAD/KARACHI, 17 October 2007 — The party of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto predicted yesterday that more than one million people will take to the streets when she returns from exile this week.
The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) also rejected speculation that the two-time premier would delay her planned flight to the southern port city of Karachi tomorrow.
“We have estimated that more than one million people will be coming,” Qaim Ali Shah, the PPP president for Sindh province, told a news conference in Karachi.
“People have talked about a million-man march before but we will show them in reality.” Shah said Benazir’s loyalists were coming “by foot, by car, by bus, by train” from all over Pakistan to Karachi, a metropolis of more than 15 million people from which Benazir draws the strongest support.
Raja Pervez Ashraf, another PPP leader, announcing the schedule of Benazir’s return, said in Islamabad, “a slight change has been made in her return plan. Instead of boarding from London she will begin her journey from Dubai and land at the Karachi airport at 1 p.m. From the airport she will proceed to Quaid-e-Azam’s mausoleum in a procession and later go to Bilawal House in Clifton.
Ashraf and Shah criticized Sindh Chief Minister Arbab Ghulam Rahim and Punjab Chief Minister Chaudhry Pervez Elahi who had ordered PPP banners welcoming Benazir removed from main highways.
“There has been propaganda about the fact that she will not come. But I can confirm that she will come on Oct. 18,” Shah said.
The party official also said that moves by the chief minister of Sindh province to remove giant billboards of Benazir from Karachi were “unconstitutional and illegal.”
The PPP warned the government yesterday of retaliation if party workers were stopped from welcoming their chief on her arrival.
‘We are for reconciliation with the government, but if our workers are stopped from reaching the (Karachi) airport, the rulers will be responsible for any untoward incident,” PPP Punjab chief Shah Mahmood Qureshi told IANS.
Qureshi said hundreds of thousands of workers from across the country had started their journey toward Karachi.
“It will be a record and historic welcome, more than the one in 1986,” Ashraf said, referring to the estimated half-a-million crowd that greeted her 21 years ago when she ended her first exile and landed in Lahore.
“I didn’t choose this life, it chose me,” she writes in the introduction to the latest edition of her memoir. “Born in Pakistan, my life mirrors its turbulence, its tragedies and its triumphs.” Benazir is now set to fly back to Karachi after eight years in the political wilderness in London and Dubai.
Showing characteristic toughness, she has extracted a US-backed amnesty from President Musharraf on the corruption charges that forced her into exile.
But while Benazir can rely on her party faithful for a rousing welcome, there is discomfort elsewhere that the graft claims have been brushed under the rug.
Even some supporters are outraged that after campaigning for so long against the army, Benazir is prepared to join forces with Musharraf, who led a coup in 1999.
“Her deal with Musharraf could fragment her party and jeopardize her future political prospects,” political analyst Hasan Askari told AFP.
Benazir was born in Karachi on June 21, 1953, the scion of a powerful landowning dynasty. She was the oldest of four children of her Westernized father and an Iranian Shiite mother.
After attending convent schools in Pakistan, she studied at Oxford, becoming the first Asian woman to head the prestigious Oxford Union debating society.
But months after her return to Pakistan in 1977 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, by now prime minister, was deposed by Gen. Zia and she and her family were detained.
She later recounted the night of her father’s execution on April 4, 1979 in harrowing detail, saying she woke in the middle of the night screaming “No!” Benazir remained under detention until 1984 when Zia allowed her to go to England, where she became the leader in exile of her father’s Pakistan People’s Party.
