The assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has sent shock waves around the world, and rightly so. She symbolized the struggle of all secular-minded Muslims who are fighting for democratic and non-religious rule in Muslim countries. Her opponents, Al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Ladin and all of his followers, are fighting for a suffocating form of leadership where dissent is not allowed and where women are treated as second-class citizens.
This is why all democratically-minded people, including Filipinos, should be shocked by her violent death, and should be concerned about what happens next in Pakistan. That country is at a strategic crossroads between East and West, and the battle between tolerance and intolerance.
I found out about the tragic death of Benazir in a text message on the evening of Dec. 27 while in a taxi going home from a mall in Abu Dhabi.
I was shocked and saddened. I had always been a supporter of Benazir and of the whole Bhutto family. To me they, and the Pakistani People’s Party that Benazir’s father the late Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto founded in 1967, represented progressive and secular ideals that would help propel Pakistan from the ranks of dysfunctional Third World countries to that of developing nations that were successful such as Brazil and Malaysia. This hope in a bright future for Pakistan perhaps reached its peak in me when Benazir was elected the first-ever female prime minister of a Muslim country in 1988.
Benazir ruled until 1990 when the president ousted her. She won re-election in 1993, but was again dismissed in 1996 for alleged incompetence and corruption.
Benazir unfortunately never really was a good leader while in office, due I think to her imperious attitude and a coalition of conservative Pakistanis, both in the government and military, who did not want to see a woman succeed in governing a Muslim nation. To them having Benazir lead them was both horrible and shameful.
In 1995 I went to Karachi for a week on assignment from Arab News to interview politicians and businessmen about the raging violence in that city that Benazir was not able to control. The resulting series was called “Karachi: City of Death.”
Two American employees of the US Consulate were shot dead at a traffic crossroads in Karachi when I was there. I remember rushing to the scene with Pakistani journalist colleagues and then attending a press conference given by Benazir to talk about what had happened. She literally sneered at the gathered press and it was quite clear that she was not being successful (nor was she happy) at governing Karachi and the rest of Pakistani.
That week, I visited the Bhutto family home at 70 Clifton in Karachi and met Benazir’s mother, Nusrat, and brother Murtaza, who had just launched a splinter group of the PPP. The house was steeped in the ghosts of Benazir’s father who had been hung by Gen. Zia ul-Haq in 1979, with pictures of him everywhere.
In the interview, which appeared in Arab News on March 16, 1995, Murtaza sharply criticized Benazir for failing to govern the country wisely, and most importantly, for surrounding herself with people who had helped bring their father down. Tragically, a year later in 1996, Murtaza was shot and killed outside the very same home where I had interviewed him.
When I asked him why Benazir was seemingly not doing anything for Karachi, he replied: “I don’t know. She doesn’t listen to people. She doesn’t listen to advice or any report that is contrary to her thinking. ...She forgot the only lesson that she learnt. She doesn’t ask, doesn’t seek advice.
“Her choice of people is bad, her judgment of people is wrong. Her policies are wrong. She’s surrounding herself with those people who opposed her father, who are responsible for his overthrow, who celebrated at his hanging. She’s just inept,” he said.
People who knew Benazir well have said that if she had been re-elected for a third time in the elections originally scheduled for Jan. 7, but which have now been postponed to the end of February, perhaps she would have been a better leader, having learned from her previous mistakes.
We will never know now that she is dead, but we can only hope that her son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, will be able to carry her on her legacy of trying to build a fairer and more democratic Pakistan for all of its citizens, both male and female.
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