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Benazir Bhutto

Benazir Bhutto 2004

Timeline: The Turbulent Life of Benazir

Timeline: The Turbulent Life of Benazir Bhutto Compiled from The Associated Press and NPR research | December 27, 2007, NPR {USA’s National Public Radio}

Benazir Bhutto, who became the first woman to serve as prime minister of a Muslim country, was assassinated Thursday when an attacker opened fire and then blew himself up after a political rally in Pakistan. Here, a look at key moments in her often stormy life in politics:

June 21, 1953: Benazir Bhutto is born into a wealthy family in southern Pakistan.

1973: Bhutto's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a former Pakistani president, begins serving as prime minister. Benazir Bhutto graduates from Harvard's Radcliffe College.

1976: Bhutto graduates from Oxford University.

April 4, 1979: Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is executed for the murder of a political opponent, two years after his ouster as prime minister in a military coup.

April 10, 1986: Benazir Bhutto returns from exile in London to lead the Pakistan Peoples Party, founded by her father.

December 1988: Bhutto, age 35, becomes the first female prime minister of a Muslim nation after winning parliamentary elections.

Aug. 6, 1990: President Ghulam Ishaq Khan dismisses Bhutto's government, citing corruption and a failure to control ethnic violence.

Oct. 19, 1993: Bhutto takes oath for a second term as prime minister.

1996: Bhutto's brother Murtaza dies in a gun battle with police in Karachi. Her brother Shahnawaz had died under mysterious circumstances in France a decade earlier.

Nov. 5, 1996: President Farooq Leghari dismisses Bhutto's second administration amid accusations of nepotism and undermining the justice system.

April 14, 1999: A court finds Bhutto guilty of corruption while she is out of the country. The conviction is later quashed, but Bhutto remains in exile.

Oct. 12, 1999: Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the head of the armed forces, seizes power from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in a bloodless coup.

Oct. 5, 2007: Musharraf signs an amnesty covering cases against Bhutto, opening the way for her return and a possible power-sharing agreement.

Oct. 18, 2007: Bhutto returns to Pakistan after more than eight years of exile. She narrowly escapes a suicide bombing that kills nearly 140 people during a homecoming procession in Karachi.

Nov. 9, 2007: Police throw barbed wire around Bhutto's house to keep her from speaking at a rally to protest Musharraf's imposition of emergency rule.

Nov. 13, 2007: Authorities put Bhutto under house arrest again. She urges Musharraf to resign.

Dec. 1, 2007: Bhutto launches her election campaign.

Dec. 27, 2007: Minutes after Bhutto addresses thousands of supporters in Rawalpindi, she and at least 20 others are killed when a gunman opens fire and a suicide bomb explodes.

10 Things You Didn't Know About Benazir Bhutto

Stephanie Salmon | Dec. 27, 2007 | 10 Things You Didn't Know About Benazir Bhutto | Compiled by the U.S.News & World Report library staff | U.S.News & World Report

Bhutto was assassinated in Rawalpindi, the city in which her father was hanged in 1979.

1. Benazir Bhutto was born June 21, 1953, in Karachi, Pakistan. Her name means "one without equal."

2. Bhutto was known to her friends as Pinkie, a childhood nickname given to her by her family because she was an unusually pink baby.

3. She attended Catholic schools in Pakistan. She entered Harvard University's Radcliffe College at age 16 and earned a cum laude degree in comparative government in 1973. She went on to Oxford University where she was the first Asian woman to be elected president of the Oxford Union, an elite debating society. Following her 1977 graduation from Oxford, Bhutto returned to Pakistan hoping to enter the foreign service in the government headed by her father, who was prime minister.

5. Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was the founder of the Pakistan People's Party. He served as president and then prime minister of Pakistan from 1971 to 1977. He was deposed in a 1977 coup by Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and executed in 1979.

6. In 1986, when Bhutto returned to Pakistan from exile in Britain, she was greeted by such large crowds that it took her motorcade 9 ½ hours to travel the 8 miles from the airport to a rally site in Lahore.

7. Bhutto was married on Dec. 18, 1987, to Asif Ali Ardari, a wealthy businessman who would later be jailed on corruption charges. The marriage was arranged by her mother; Bhutto did not meet her future husband until five days before their engagement. She opted to keep her name, saying, "Benazir Bhutto doesn't cease to exist the moment she gets married. I am not giving myself away. I belong to myself and I always shall."

8. In 1988, Bhutto was the first woman ever elected to govern a Muslim country. In the weeks prior to her election, Islamic scholar Mohammed Amin Minhas quoted the prophet Mohammed, saying "a nation that elects to be governed by a woman will not prosper," according to the Los Angeles Times. However, after she took her oath of office, Minhas reconsidered. "Allah has given us this woman as our leader, and Miss Benazir has acknowledged that this new power she possesses is, indeed, Allah's gift," he said.

9. Bhutto once mentioned that former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Britain's "Iron Lady," was her role model but noted: "As a Muslim woman, I have great respect for Khadija, wife of the prophet of Islam, because she was a working woman."

10. Bhutto was assassinated in Rawalpindi, the city in which her father was hanged in 1979.

Sources

U.S.News & World Report

The New York Times

The Los Angeles Times

Newsweek

Life

Newsmakers 1989

Marquis Who's Who

Time

Deutsche Presse-Agentur

Biographical sketches

The New York Times: I

[www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/world/asia/28bhuttocnd.html Jane Perlez and Victoria Burnett | Benazir Bhutto, 54, Lived in Eye of Pakistan Storm DEC. 28, 2007 The New York Times]

Charismatic, striking and a canny political operator, Benazir Bhutto, 54, was reared amid the privileges of Pakistan’s aristocracy and the ordeals of its turbulent politics. Smart, ambitious and resilient, she endured her father’s execution and her own imprisonment at the hands of a military dictator to become the country’s — and the Muslim world’s — first female leader.

A deeply polarizing figure, Ms. Bhutto, the “daughter of Pakistan,” was twice elected prime minister and twice expelled from office in a swirl of corruption charges that propelled her into self-imposed exile in London for much of the past decade. She returned home this fall, billing herself as a bulwark against Islamic extremism and a tribune of democracy.

She was killed on Thursday in a combined shooting and bombing attack at a rally in Rawalpindi, one of a series of open events she attended in spite of a failed assassination attempt against her the day she returned to Pakistan in October.

A woman of grand aspirations with a taste for complex political maneuvering, Ms. Bhutto was first elected prime minister in 1988 at the age of 35. The daughter of one of Pakistan’s most charismatic and democratically inclined prime ministers, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, she inherited the mantle of the populist Peoples Party that he founded, and which she came to personify.

Despite numerous accusations of corruption and an evident predilection for luxury, Ms. Bhutto, the pale-skinned scion of a wealthy landowning family, successfully cast herself as a savior of Pakistan’s millions of poor and disenfranchised. She inspired devotion among her followers, even in exile, and the image of her floating through a frenzied crowd in her gauzy white head scarf became iconic.

In October, she staged a high-profile return to her home city of Karachi, drawing hundreds of thousands of supporters to an 11-hour rally and leading a series of political demonstrations in opposition to the country’s military leader, President Pervez Musharraf.

But in a foreshadowing of the attack that killed her, the triumphal return parade was bombed, killing at least 134 of her supporters and wounding more than 400. Ms. Bhutto herself narrowly escaped harm and shouted at later rallies, “Bhutto is alive!”

Despite her courageous, or rash, defiance of danger, her political plans were sidetracked from the moment she set foot in Pakistan: She had been negotiating for months with Mr. Musharraf over a power-sharing arrangement, only to see the general declare emergency rule instead.

The political dance she has deftly performed since her return — one moment standing up to President Musharraf, the next seeming to accommodate him — stirred hope and distrust among Pakistanis. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, she brought the backing of the governments in Washington and London, where she impressed with her political lineage and considerable charm and was viewed as a palatable alternative to the increasingly unpopular Mr. Musharraf.

But her record in power left ample room for skepticism. During her two stints in that job — first from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996 — she developed a reputation for acting imperiously and impulsively. She faced deep questions about her personal probity in office, which led to corruption cases against her in Switzerland, Spain and Britain, as well as in Pakistan. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, was jailed for eight years in Pakistan on corruption charges before his release on bail in 2004.

During her years in office, as during those of her rival, the former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan ran up enormous and unserviceable foreign debts and billions of dollars in foreign aid went unaccounted for. Ms. Bhutto, though progressive in her approach to Islam, was not above bending to the will of religious conservatives for when politically expedient.

Ms. Bhutto grew up in the most rarefied atmosphere the poor, turbulent country had to offer. One longtime friend and adviser, Peter W. Galbraith, a former American ambassador to Croatia, recalled meeting Ms. Bhutto 1962 when they were children: he the son of John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist and American ambassador to India; she the daughter of the future Pakistani prime minister. Mr. Galbraith’s father was accompanying Jacqueline Kennedy to a horse show in Lahore.

The two met again at Harvard, where Mr. Galbraith remembered Ms. Bhutto arriving as a prim, cake-baking 16-year-old fresh from a Karachi convent.

Ms. Bhutto often spoke of how her father encouraged her to study the lives of legendary female leaders, including Indira Gandhi and Joan of Arc, and as a young woman, she observed his political maneuvering up close.

After her father’s death — he was hanged by another general who seized power, Zia ul-Haq — Ms. Bhutto stepped into the spotlight as his successor. She called herself chairperson for life of the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, a seemingly odd title in an organization based on democratic ideals and one she has acknowledged quarreling over with her mother, Nusrat Bhutto, in the early 1990s.

Until her death, Ms. Bhutto ruled the party with an iron hand, jealously guarding her position, even while leading the party in absentia for nearly a decade.

Members of her party saluted her return to Pakistan, saying she was the best choice against President Musharraf. Chief among her attributes, they said, was her sheer determination.

But her egotism and her proclivity for back-room deals provoked distrust among detractors and some supporters.

“She believes she is the chosen one, that she is the daughter of Bhutto and everything else is secondary,” said Feisal Naqvi, a corporate lawyer in Lahore who knew Ms. Bhutto.

Ms. Bhutto’s marriage to Mr. Zardari was arranged by her mother, a fact that Ms. Bhutto has often said was easily explained, even for a modern, highly educated Pakistani woman. To be acceptable to the Pakistani public as a politician she could not be a single woman, and what was the difference, she would ask, between such a marriage and computer dating?

Mr. Zardari, 51, is known for his love of polo and other perquisites of the good life like fine clothes, expensive restaurants, homes in Dubai and London, and an apartment in New York. He was minister of investment in Ms. Bhutto’s second government. And it was from that perch that he made many of the deals that haunted Ms. Bhutto, and him, in the courts.

There were accusations that the couple had illegally taken $1.5 billion from the state. It is a figure Ms. Bhutto vigorously contested.

Indeed, one of Ms. Bhutto’s main objectives in seeking to return to power was to restore the reputation of her husband, especially after his prison term, said Abdullah Riar, a former senator in the Pakistani Parliament and a former colleague of Ms. Bhutto’s.

“She told me, ‘Time will prove he is the Nelson Mandela of Pakistan,’” Mr. Riar said.

The New York Times: II

Benazir Bhutto, the Muslim World’s First Female Leader, June 21, 2016, The New York Times

Her rosy complexion as a toddler gave her the nickname Pinky. That’s what she was called in convent schools and later in the halls of Oxford and Harvard, where as a student she was a campus tour guide, listened to Carly Simon and looked like Joan Baez.

After graduating from Harvard, the lyrics from Peter, Paul and Mary’s version of the 1960s song — “I’m leavin’ on a jet plane/Don’t know when I’ll be back again” — were stuck in her head as she boarded a plane for home. She returned to the United States 16 years later, in 1989, not as Pinky but as Benazir Bhutto, the new prime minister of Pakistan — the first woman elected to lead an Islamic country.

Her time in office would be as tumultuous as her childhood had been idyllic, ending in her assassination by the Pakistani Taliban on Dec. 27, 2007, just days before general elections, which her populist party was expected to win.

“I didn’t choose this life,” Bhutto said. “It chose me.”

Ms. Bhutto was born on this day in 1953 to a wealthy family whose lands were once so extensive it took days to appraise them. In a country where families dominated business and politics in an almost feudal manner, the Bhuttos seemed destined to rule. As Ms. Bhutto grew up, her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, rose in power, from a post in Pakistan’s United Nations delegation to prime minister. He imparted lessons to her along the way.

But her political education went into overdrive when a top army general, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, overthrew her father and imprisoned him. She was 24. Ms. Bhutto visited him often, absorbing one-on-one political seminars in the grimmest of settings. Her father encouraged her to study other female leaders, including Indira Gandhi and Joan of Arc.

Mr. Bhutto was hanged in 1979, charged with orchestrating the murder of a political rival. Ms. Bhutto was forbidden to attend his funeral.

She and her mother were soon given leadership of her father’s People’s Party. But as the opposition to a military regime, Ms. Bhutto spent half her time in prison or under house arrest, sometimes in solitary confinement.

When the ruling general’s plane mysteriously fell from the sky in 1988, much of the nation rejoiced, and elections were set. Ms. Bhutto seized her moment, campaigned as the “daughter of Pakistan” and, at 35, reclaimed the office of prime minister for her family.

She was elected twice, serving from December 1988 to August 1990 and again from October 1993 to November 1996.

“Charismatic, striking and a canny political operator,” The Times said in an appraisal after her death. “She ruled the party with an iron hand, jealously guarding her position, even while leading the party in absentia for nearly a decade.”

Ms. Bhutto could be imperial in bearing, charming and also ruthless. At one point she ousted her mother from the party’s leadership, provoking the elder Ms. Bhutto to remark, “She talks a lot about democracy, but she’s become a little dictator.”

After accusing her government of corruption, her younger brother Murtaza, a member of the provincial legislature, was gunned down outside his home in a police ambush. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, whom she had named minister of investment, was indicted in the murder but exonerated. Witnesses were either arrested, intimidated or killed.

Each of her terms as prime minister ended when she was dismissed by the president on graft charges. When she and her husband left office in 1996, they were worth hundreds of millions of dollars, though the source of their wealth was unclear. Pakistan was named one of the world’s three most corrupt countries.

“In her mind, she was Pakistan, so she could do as she pleased,” her former adviser, Husain Haqqani, said.

Ms. Bhutto spent most of the last nine years of her life in self-imposed exile, much of it in a palatial estate in Dubai. After receiving amnesty on the pending charges, she returned in late 2007 to seek a third term.

A close ally of the Afghan Taliban — which her government supported in its infancy in 1996 — killed her at a rally outside the capital. It happened in a park where Pakistan’s first prime minister was also assassinated, in 1951.

Pakistan still waits today for a real democracy to emerge, and an elected leader from outside the few feudal families that have ruled the country, alternating with the military, since its birth.

TIME magazine

Howard Chua-Eoan| Benazir Bhutto (1953–2007) Thursday, Dec. 27, 2007, TIME

Benazir Bhutto excelled at asserting her right to rule. In a male-dominated, Islamic society, she rose to become her slain father's political successor, twice getting elected as Prime Minister of Pakistan. She would also be exiled twice. In the end, Bhutto was better at rallying people to the idea of her power than at keeping them inspired by her use of it.

She was a child of privilege, and took the mantle of power from her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the fiery and magnetic founder of the Pakistan People's Party, who himself would become a martyr for democracy when he was executed in 1979 by the military dictatorship of General Zia ul Haq. She inherited her bearing and physical presence from her mother Nusrat Ispahan, from a distinguished Kurdish family from Iran. Educated at Radcliffe and Harvard, she would also study law at Oxford. Her family and close Western friends knew her as "Pinky."

As a Muslim woman leader, Bhutto was almost an iconic figure in the West. But her actual career in office was one of great populist spectacles and little governmental achievement. It was a personna she parlayed. "I am not one of those leaders who sell lies and buy time," she told TIME in the mid-1990s. "No leader, no dictator could do what I have done."

However, in the final analysis, her career was an almost tawdry cycle of exile, house arrest, ascent into power and dismissal, much sound and fury and signifying little. Jailed and then exiled after her father's fall, Bhutto returned to campaign for office in 1986 after Zia's military government gave in to international pressure to slowly restore democracy. (Despite his dictatorship, Zia was a key ally of the West, supporting the Mujaheddin against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.) In a scene reminiscent of her second coming in October 2007, she was greeted in April 1986 by hundreds of thousands of frenzied supporters, who enveloped her motorcade and staged a daylong demonstration that was the largest display in memory of discontent with Zia's government. "Zia is a dog," chanted the demonstrators again and again. "We love Benazir."

Zia's death in a plane crash in August 1988 helped to further loosen the military strictures around the country, and Bhutto became Prime Minister by December of that year. As a ruler, Bhutto got few favorable reviews in Pakistan. Her government passed no legislation except a budget during its first 14 months in power. Much of its energy was squandered feuding with the opposition. Among the first acts of Bhutto's party after coming to power was a campaign to bribe and threaten legislators in Punjab. The goal: to overthrow Bhutto's nemesis, Mian Nawaz Sharif, Punjab's chief minister, a wealthy industrialist and a close associate of Zia's. Worse yet, her Cabinet stank with corruption scandals, including allegations against her husband Asif Ali Zardari and her father-in-law Hakim Ali Zardari, who was chairman of the parliamentary public-accounts committee. With so much fractiousness and scandal, Bhutto's first government lasted only until August 1990, dismissed by the country's President for "horse-trading for personal gain." Soon after, in November 1990, Nawaz Sharif, campaigning on an anti-corruption platform, became Prime Minister.

Bhutto returned to power in 1993, after Sharif was felled by his own corruption scandal. "This is my victory. It is a clear and decisive victory," she declared after a bitter name-calling campaign between herself and Sharif. But despite her claims, she did not have a working majority in parliament and had to wobble through her next few years in office as head of a fractious coalition, beholden to contentious blocs of power. At the same time, Pakistan owed huge amounts to the International Monetary Fund as part of servicing its enormous $28.6 billion in foreign debts. Bhutto had raised taxes, which raised the level of discontent in the country. But even so, her government did not collect enough revenue. In an effort to appease the IMF, Bhutto gave up the finance portfolio she had held since retaking the government. "The debt servicing is breaking our backs — debt that I didn't incur," she told TIME. "But as Prime Minister, I have to pay it back." Rumors soon spread that her government would be dismissed. "Rubbish," she said. But that is exactly what happened. Soon, Nawaz Sharif was Prime Minister again.

Sharif himself would be overthrown in a coup by General Pervez Musharraf in 1999. Musharraf would become an indispensable ally of the U.S. after Sept. 11, 2001, when he became the guarantor of the stability of nuclear-armed Pakistan against the tide of Islamic radicalism.

And that is where Bhutto's final chapter picks up — as the popularity of the Musharraf regime collapses and the world looks warily at the future of Pakistan and the threat of radicalism. In exile once again and with corruption charges against her, Bhutto struck a deal with Musharraf, who was under pressure to restore democracy. Washington smiled on it and Bhutto, now anointed as the West's favorite to restore democratic credibility to a moderate Pakistani government, returned to retake what she always believed was hers. Thousands showed up to welcome her and more than 100 died when that welcome-back parade was attacked by still unknown bombers. The last quarter of 2007 was filled with political maneuverings between herself, Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif, who had also returned from exile. After one more stint under house arrest while Musharraf imposed a brief emergency rule, she seemed set for another triumph at the polls. But in the end, the violent cycle of Pakistani politics claimed another victim. And once and for all, Benazir Bhutto will rally people to her cause without being able to deliver on its promise.

Voice of America

Catherine Maddux | This Day in History: Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto | December 02, 2016 VOA News

In 1988 Benazir Bhutto was sworn in as prime minister of Pakistan, not only becoming the first woman to head a Muslim country, but at the age of 35, its youngest.

Her charismatic father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, served as both Pakistan's president and prime minister, and founded the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). Born into a wealthy and educated family, Benazir was groomed by her father to be his political successor.

A populist who was recognized internationally as an skilled diplomat and impressive leader, he ultimately was deposed in 1977 by his army chief General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq. Ali Bhutto was tried and convicted of authorizing the murder of a political opponent in 1979. He was executed by hanging later that year.

Zia, an conservative Islamist, ruled Pakistan with an iron fist. Benazir Bhutto and her siblings spoke out often against the military government, becoming the de facto political opposition. Wary of her influence, Zia jailed Bhutto for several years. After her release, she lived in London in exile. By the time she returned to Pakistan in 1986, Benazir had become a beloved opposition politician, and frustration with Zia's dictatorship offered Bhutto the chance to politically challenge the military government.

By then, she had becpme a symbol of women's empowerment in a deeply religious society.

Benazir's first return from exile

Benazir Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People's Party, arrives in Lahore on April 10, 1986. Benazir Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People's Party, arrives in Lahore on April 10, 1986. She won the post of prime minister in 1988, running as a moderate Muslim, who pledged to provide basic services and education to Pakistan's poor and illiterate. And Bhutto made good on some of those promises, bringing electricity, housing and other necessities to parts of rural Pakistan.

But as a young and inexperienced woman in conservative Muslim country, she faced intense backlash by the political remnants of Zia’s dictatorship and conservative Islamist. Bhutto lost the 1990 election and was charged, along with her husband, of corruption.

Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto with her husband Asif Zardari during dinner party at the state guest house in Islamabad, April 19, 1990. Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto with her husband Asif Zardari during dinner party at the state guest house in Islamabad, April 19, 1990. She returned to power in 1993, but lost her second term just three years later.

While in self-imposed exile in Britain and Dubai, she was convicted in 1999 of corruption and sentenced to three years in prison.

She directed the PPP from abroad, she was reaffirmed its leader in 2002.

Five years later, Bhutto was determined to return to Pakistan to challenged the military government, then led by President Pervez Musharraf, who had granted her amnesty on the corruption charges. That very day she narrowly escaped an assassination attempt.

Less than two months later in December 2007, she was assassinated during a gun and suicide bomb attack after a political rally. She was 54 years old.

Quotes

I

Brainy Quote.com

Military dictatorship is born from the power of the gun, and so it undermines the concept of the rule of law and gives birth to a culture of might, a culture of weapons, violence and intolerance.

Benazir Bhutto

I found that a whole series of people opposed me simply on the grounds that I was a woman. The clerics took to the mosque saying that Pakistan had thrown itself outside the Muslim world and the Muslim umar by voting for a woman, that a woman had usurped a man's place in the Islamic society.

Benazir Bhutto

Democracy is necessary to peace and to undermining the forces of terrorism.

Benazir Bhutto

As a woman leader, I thought I brought a different kind of leadership. I was interested in women's issues, in bringing down the population growth rate... as a woman, I entered politics with an additional dimension - that of a mother.

Benazir Bhutto

A people inspired by democracy, human rights and economic opportunity will turn their back decisively against extremism.

Benazir Bhutto

America's greatest contribution to the world is its concept of democracy, its concept of freedom, freedom of action, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought.

Benazir Bhutto

The military wants a system that protects its policies and privileges.

Benazir Bhutto

Whatever my aims and agendas were, I never asked for power.

Benazir Bhutto

I seek to lead a democratic Pakistan which is free from the yoke of military dictatorship and that will cease to be a haven, the very petri dish of international terrorism.

Benazir Bhutto

Pakistan is heir to an intellectual tradition of which the illustrious exponent was the poet and philosopher Mohammad Iqbal. He saw the future course for Islamic societies in a synthesis between adherence to the faith and adjustment to the modern age.

Benazir Bhutto

I've never had a bank account in Switzerland since 1984. Why would the Swiss do this to me? Maybe the Swiss are trying to divert attention from the Holocaust gold scandal.

Benazir Bhutto

Pakistan's future viability, stability and security lie in empowering its people and building political institutions. My goal is to prove that the fundamental battle for the hearts and minds of a generation can be accomplished only under democracy.

Benazir Bhutto

Extremism can flourish only in an environment where basic governmental social responsibility for the welfare of the people is neglected. Political dictatorship and social hopelessness create the desperation that fuels religious extremism.

Benazir Bhutto

In 1988, when democracy was restored, the military establishment was still very powerful. The extremist groups were still there. And when the aid and assistance to Pakistan was cut, we had to adopt harsh economic policies. So in a way, it showed that democracy doesn't pay, and the military was able to reassert itself.

Benazir Bhutto

The United Nations charter gives every nation the right to self defence, therefore when the American embassies were bombed it was a matter of time before the Americans responded by going for what they suspected were the causes of the attack.

Benazir Bhutto

I am planning to return and contest the October elections in Pakistan.

Benazir Bhutto

It's true that General Musharraf opposes my return, seeing me as a symbol of democracy in the country. He is comfortable with dictatorship. I hope better sense prevails.

Benazir Bhutto

I am constitutionally competent to contest the elections.

Benazir Bhutto

General Musharraf needs my participation to give credibility to the electoral process, as well as to respect the fundamental right of all those who wish to vote for me.

Benazir Bhutto

Military hardliners called me a 'security threat' for promoting peace in South Asia and for supporting a broad-based government in Afghanistan.

Benazir Bhutto

The military destabilised my government on politically motivated charges.

Benazir Bhutto

The political parties have unanimously rejected the one-man constitutional changes.

Benazir Bhutto

Given the right to a free ballot, the people would support my return.

Benazir Bhutto

The government I led gave ordinary people peace, security, dignity, and opportunity to progress.

Benazir Bhutto

Right now, they feel they have lost their voice, and their miseries have increased since my departure.

Benazir Bhutto

The next few months are critical to Pakistan's future direction as a democratic state committed to promoting peace, fighting terrorism and working for social justice. Benazir Bhutto

II

Benazir Bhutto Quotes | AZ Quotes.com

You can imprison a man, but not an idea. You can exile a man, but not an idea.

You can kill a man, but not an idea.

Benazir Bhutto

Democracy needs support and the best support for democracy comes from other democracies. Democratic nations should come together in an association designed to help each other and promote what is a universal value - democracy.

Benazir Bhutto

Being nice should never be perceived as being weak. It's not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of courtesy, manners, grace, a woman's ability to make everyone...feel at home, and it should never be construed as weakness.....

Benazir Bhutto

Freedom is not an end. Freedom is a beginning.

Benazir Bhutto

I dream ...of a world where we can commit our social resources to the development of human life and not to its destruction

Benazir Bhutto

It's quite difficult for me not to be able to return to my country, but in my country justice has been murdered.

Benazir Bhutto

A people inspired by democracy, human rights and economic opportunity will turn their back decisively against extremism.

Benazir Bhutto

In distinguishing between Islamic teachings and social taboos, we must remember that Islam forbids injustice; Injustice against people, against nations, against women. It shuns race, color, and gender as a basis of distinction amongst fellowmen. It enshrines piety as the sole criteria for judging humankind.

Benazir Bhutto

Clearly it's not easy for women in modern society, no matter where they live. We still have to go the extra mile to prove that we are equal to men. we have to work longer hours and make more sacrifices. And we must emotionally protect ourselves from unfair, often vicious attacks made on us via the male members of our family.

Benazir Bhutto

Ultimately, leadership is about the strength of one's convictions, the ability to endure the punches, and the energy to promote an idea. And I have found that those who do achieve peace never acquiesce to obstacles, especially those constructed of bigotry, intolerance, and inflexible tradition.

Benazir Bhutto

Whatever my aims and agendas were, I never asked for power.

Benazir Bhutto

Purusing peace means rising above one's own wants, needs, and emotions.

Benazir Bhutto

Every dictator uses religion as a prop to keep himself in power.

Benazir Bhutto

Democracy is necessary to peace and to undermining the forces of terrorism.

Benazir Bhutto

I am planning to return and contest the October elections in Pakistan.

Benazir Bhutto

Democracy is the best revenge.

Benazir Bhutto

The best hijab is in the eyes of the beholder.

Benazir Bhutto

As a woman leader, I thought I brought a different kind of leadership. I was interested in women's issues, in bringing down the population growth rate... as a woman, I entered politics with an additional dimension - that of a mother.

Benazir Bhutto

Extremism can flourish only in an environment where basic governmental social responsibility for the welfare of the people is neglected. Political dictatorship and social hopelessness create the desperation that fuels religious extremism.

Benazir Bhutto

To make peace, one must be an uncompromising leader. To make peace, one must also embody compromise.

Benazir Bhutto

My father always would say, "My daughter will go into politics? My daughter will become prime minister", but it's not what I wanted to do. I would say, "No, Papa, I will never go into politics." As I've said before, this is not the life I chose; it chose me ... But I accepted the responsibility and I've never wavered in my commitment.

Benazir Bhutto

We learned at an early age that it was men's interpretation of our religion that restricted women's opportunities, not our religion itself. Islam in fact had been quite progressive toward women from its inception ...

Benazir Bhutto

I don't fear death. I remember my last meeting with my father when he told me, You know, tonight when I will be killed, my mother and my father will be waiting for me. It makes me weepy... but I don't think it can happen unless God wants it to happen because so many people have tried to kill me.

Benazir Bhutto

No, I am not pregnant. I am fat. And, as the Prime Minister, its my right to be fat if I want to.

Benazir Bhutto

America's greatest contribution to the world is its concept of democracy, its concept of freedom, freedom of action, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought.

Benazir Bhutto

Ian Buruma’s 1989 review of BB's autobiography

Ian Buruma | The Double Life of Benazir Bhutto, MARCH 2, 1989 | The New York Review of Books

Daughter of the East

by Benazir Bhutto

Simon and Schuster, 394 pp., $21.95

Political autobiography, as a genre, tends to produce tiresome, self-serving, ghost-written works. But once in a while a book stands out; not necessarily because it is better written than the usual stuff, but because it is the closest thing we have to classic mythology. The message is moral; the characters stand for Good and Evil; the story is a variation of the quest for a holy grail, involving not just hardship—“tests”—but exile of one kind or another. The authorship is often anonymous—ghostwriters seldom reveal their names.

When the heroes and villains come from countries where pure myths still cast their spells, where, as a Pakistani politician recently put it to me, “words have magic,” these political fairy tales follow the traditional patterns more closely than in the modern West, where the drama tends to get lost in media buzzwords, earnest political analysis, academic jargon, or a ghastly combination of all three. Besides, the complexity of modern life leaves little room for mythical feats of heroism. Good and evil are not so clear-cut. Our politics, as puritans of all persuasions keep telling us, has lost its moral dimension.

We can be just as much enchanted by myths of course, and sometimes something approaching classic myth will occur: Winston Churchill emerging from “his years in the wilderness” (exile) to save the world from evil dragons in the name of freedom and democracy (the grail). But this could only happen in a war, and Churchill was rather exceptional in that he was the greatest narrator of his own myth—no ghostwriters for him. Today’s great leaders, the Iron Lady, the Gipper, even Gorby, might aspire to mythical status, but cannot really pull it off convincingly.

No, for the truly inspiring tales we must turn to that mythical land called The Third World. That is where we can escape from not so much the decadence as the banality of Western life, and be enchanted once again, like children, our disbelief suspended. More than that, in the third world we can retrieve the pure moral order that we feel is lost to us in the West. The story of Cory Aquino—already made into a TV miniseries, by Australians I believe—was perfect: she, a religious paragon of modesty and virtue, her opponents, symbols of villainy and greed. How enchanting it must have been in 1986 for American senators and congressmen to take a break from their daily affairs and don yellow ribbons for St. Cory of Manila.

Kim Dae Jung tried his hardest to be a mythical hero, and many Western reporters did their best to help him, but he never quite made the grade. His story had all the makings of the real thing: evil generals, exile, heroic hardship, the quest for freedom…. But then something went wrong: Kim suddenly appeared less heroic, more like his opponents, aggressive, intransigent, hungry for power. Perhaps South Korea is too prosperous now, not third world enough, in a word, too modern for fairy tales.

Pakistan, on the other hand, is about as third world as you can get, and the story of Benazir Bhutto’s quest to avenge her father’s death at the hand of the wicked General Zia ul-Haq fits all the requirements of the classic myth. Her book, clearly written to enchant Western readers, does not disappoint. The heroes are saintly, the villains drip with poison. There is excruciating hardship; there are years of exile; there is the wonderful combination of Western high life and ancient Oriental culture (at one point in the story, our heroine is “enthused with a sense of Asian identity”); and, finally, there is victory, made all the sweeter for the difficulties of the quest.

Miss Bhutto’s prose, though satisfyingly breathless and emotional in parts, shows the dead hand of the ghost in others. Those interested in the true language of myths should turn to a collection of Benazir’s speeches, interviews, and assorted public utterances, aimed at her domestic supporters, entitled The Way Out.1 There we find the “clarion calls,” the “night of the tyrant,” the “streets painted in blood.” To quote one typical clarion call:

We must face the oppressor, the Tyrant, the Usurper, the unjust in whatever fashion or manner he manifests himself. The martyr is the life of history and history is woven of the threads of revolution….

But how fragile it is. How easily it is crushed. How easily the crystal that dazzled the rainbow color in the morning light vanishes.

The martyr is of course Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was hanged for murder in 1979, on orders of General Zia, who had ousted Bhutto two years before in a military coup. But that is getting ahead of the story. Let us begin at the beginning.

Benazir Bhutto was born in 1953 in Karachi, “my skin evidently so rosy that I was immediately nicknamed ‘Pinkie.”‘ Very soon Pinkie began to lead what can only be called a bicultural life. There was Miss Bhutto, educated in English, first at Lady Jennings’s nursery school and later by Irish nuns at the Convent of Jesus and Mary. The older students were divided into houses with such inspirational names as “Discipline,” “Courtesy,” “Endeavour,” and “Service.” This was the same Miss Bhutto who later went to Radcliffe, where she savored the delights of peppermint ice cream, apple cider, Joan Baez, and peace marches. It was also the Miss Bhutto who moved on to Oxford, her father’s alma mater, where she drove a sports car, sharpened her wit at the Oxford Union, and was squired around town by dashing young men in velvet jackets. Let us, for the sake of simplicity, call this stylish young woman the Radcliffe Benazir.

There is another Miss Bhutto, however, one who expresses herself better in the mythical language of The Way Out. This is the Benazir, sitting adoringly at her father’s feet at the family estate in Larkana, listening to his tales of heroic ancestors, “directly traceable to the Muslim invasion of India in 712 AD.” One of these heroes, her great-grandfather, defied the British by taking an English lover. Rather than hand her back to the outraged officers of the raj, his retinue killed the woman. This, said the hero, was a matter of honor.

We might call this romantic lady the Larkana Benazir. She was the one who, as she writes in her autobiography, “loved hearing these family stories, as did my brothers Mir Murtaza and Shah Nawaz, who naturally identified with their namesakes. The adversities faced by our ancestors formed our own moral code, just as my father had intended. Loyalty. Honour. Principle.”

Here, clearly, is a family born to rule. The Bhuttos are landowning grandees, in the desertland of Sindh, a backward part of the subcontinent, a kind of sandy Sicily, where politics consist of murky family feuds. Benazir’s grandfather, Sir Shah Nawaz, founded the first political party in Sindh in the days of the British raj. He was, as his title suggests, a very grand personage indeed. Benazir tells us nothing much about her paternal grandmother, Sir Shah Nawaz’s second wife, for she, a humble Hindu from Bombay who converted to Islam just before her marriage, does not fit in so neatly into the illustrious family annals—something, by the way, which Z.A. Bhutto’s political opponents exploited in their campaigns against him: he was, they said, not a “real” Pakistani, but the son of an Indian, and a Hindu Indian to boot.

Just as there are two Benazirs (who sometimes get mixed up: only the Radcliffe Benazir could be “enthused” by her Asian identity), there are two Bhutto families: one is compared to the Kennedys; the blessed clan destined to deliver the people from poverty and oppression, but punished by political martyrdom. Like Kathleen Kennedy, “who had worn her father’s parka at Radcliffe long after the Senator had been killed,” Benazir “tried to keep my father near me by sleeping with his shirt under my pillow.” And then there is the family inspired by Muslim martyrdom. Benazir calls her father shaheed, a martyr for Islam. In The Way Out she finds the appropriate words:

The same dedicated workers whose courage is higher than the mountains and whose dedication is deeper than the oceans are even now ready to come forward and to sacrifice inspired by Shaheed Bhutto and in the manner of sacrifice known only to the political descendents of Muslim Martyrs.

It is sometimes tempting to sneer at the Radcliffe Benazir, shocked at army thugs “lolling on one of Mummy’s delicate blue and white brocade Louix XV chairs,” trying to act as the daughter of a Muslim martyr. So much about the Larkana Benazir smacks of kitsch; so much of the Radcliffe Benazir strikes one as half-backed. But to reconcile the two roles, or, indeed, to forgo the sports cars and May Balls and risks torture or death, took extraordinary courage. After her father’s execution in 1979, Ms. Bhutto spent much of the next five years under appalling conditions in Zia’s jails. And having braved the worst at the hands of a military dictator, her political success has given hope to millions. It all makes one feel a little churlish to challenge some of her more cherished myths. But, as Benazir herself remarks, when describing some fraud perpetrated by General Zia’s government, “what matters is the truth.” And the truth, however enchanting and moving Benazir’s own tale may be, is an elusive thing.

But let us return to the story. When Benazir was still with the Irish nuns, her father was foreign minister in the government of General Ayub Khan. In 1966 the general and Z.A. Bhutto parted ways, one year after India and Pakistan had fought over Kashmir. Bhutto thought Ayub Khan had been soft on the Indians. Benazir appears to agree: “During the peace negotiations held in the southern Russian city of Tashkent, President Ayub Khan lost everything we had gained on the battlefield.” But, according to Benazir, her father’s resignation was a matter of democratic principles: “After my father broke with Ayub Khan in 1966, the words ‘civil liberties’ and ‘democracy’ were the ones that came up most, words that were mythical to most Pakistanis.”

The general’s rule, in Benazir’s account, was marked by lawlessness, violence, corruption, and economic failure. Only Ayub’s “family and a handful of others had become rich.” But now, with Z.A. Bhutto on the loose, the first crusade for democracy, that mythical word, was about to begin. The first clarion call, so to speak, had sounded.

This is not entirely the way less partisan observers saw things. Shahid Javed Burki,2 for example, has some interesting things to say about the Ayub years. First of all, he argues, Ayub’s rule made far more people rich than his family and friends. Tax incentives and land reforms created a new middle class of small businessmen, entrepreneurs, and middle-sized farmers. The ones who suffered were big industrialists, unskilled urban workers, and the landed aristocracy. The aristocracy was Bhutto’s traditional constituency. The new middle class would turn against him, as did the industrialists when Bhutto nationalized their assets. This left him with the support of landowners and the urban poor, whose interests were by no means always identical.

Burki also mentions the fact that in 1962 Bhutto wrote a long memorandum to Ayub outlining his idea for a one-party state in which the roles of the judiciary and the legislative branches of government were to be completely subservient to the all-powerful central authority. China and the Soviet Union were to be the models. When Ayub demurred, Bhutto called him timid and soft.

Z.A. Bhutto talked a lot about democracy, to be sure, but his instincts were those of the man of iron. The only hint of this in Benazir’s account is a reading list he thoughtfully prepared for his daughter, when he was detained by Ayub in 1968 for inciting riots. His recommended reading included anything about Napoleon Bonaparte, “the most complete man in history.” This is not surprising, since Napoleon has long been a subcontinental hero. But the rest of the list included Bismarck, Lenin, Ataturk, Mao Zedong, and, looking a little lost in this group of iron men, Abraham Lincoln. What they all had in common was their fatherhood of nations. That was how Bhutto saw himself.

Benazir was at Radcliffe, reading Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, protesting against the Vietnam War, and imbibing Western concepts of law and politics from Professor John Womack, when her father ran his highly successful campaign in 1970 as a populist man of the left. The urban workers, many of them dislocated, bewildered, and left behind by Ayub’s high-speed economic development, loved Bhutto’s message of deliverance from bourgeois greed. Bhutto won the elections in West Pakistan, while Sheik Mujib ur-Rahman, banking on the Bengali middle class disaffected with Punjabi domination, won in East Pakistan, not yet Bangladesh. Differences between the two were never resolved, something Benazir blames entirely on Mujib, who “showed an obstinacy the logic of which to this day defies me.” The Pakistani army quelled Bengali unrest with extraordinary cruelty. India intervened. Pakistan split in half. Bhutto, Benazir informs us, did his utmost to stop the tragedy and avert the generals from their slaughter. (Benazir compares the massacre of tens of thousands of Bengalis to My Lai—this is the Radcliffe Benazir speaking; and to General Zia’s suppression of his opponents in the province of Sindh—thus the Larkana Benazir; both comparisons are absurd.)

Again, this is not the way other people saw the same events. Tariq Ali, a leftwing writer in London, who helped Benazir with her speeches for the Oxford Union, clearly no friend of the generals, blames Bhutto 3 for unleashing “a hysterical campaign” of denouncing Mujib’s position, for whipping up “an atmosphere of frenzied chauvinsim in the Punjab,” and for “colluding with the generals” in crushing the Bengalis. “Thank God! Pakistan has been saved,” he quotes Bhutto as saying after the butchery was done.

And so the stage was set for the Bhutto years, that mythical Golden Age which our heroine set out to revive through trials and tribulations. Yahya Khan, the general in power during the crisis in East Pakistan, lost so much face that he had to appoint Bhutto as chief martial law administrator and president. A new constitution was promulgated in 1973: “The people of Pakistan enjoyed the first constitution in Pakistan’s history to introduce fundamental human rights and ensure their protection…. The first representative government of Pakistan finally had the legal framework within which to govern: the sanctioned authority that Professor Womack had brought home to me so clearly in his seminar.”

So speaks the Radcliffe Benazir. The Larkana Benazir finds more inspirational words to describe the heady excitement of hearing masses of people shout, “Jeay Bhutto!, Long live Bhutto!” Here is a sample from The Way Out:

Jeay Bhutto. It’s a lovely word. It’s warm and wonderful. It lifts the heart. It elevates the spirit…. It means so much to us it drives us on. It makes us reach for the stars and the moon.

Or this:

In 1972, we climbed the highest mountains and built the biggest bridges because of our leadership. We had a brilliant leader, a popular leader, a strong leader, a man who for his principles and his motherland would fight and fight and fight.

Bhutto did not read Napoleon for nothing. Like Sukarno in Indonesia, a man he resembled in many ways, he had a personalized view of nation building: the strong leader, the great man, who would fight and fight and fight, the erector of stadiums and phallic monuments, the chief cock of the country—only this kind of steely superhero could father a great nation. Those who opposed him were obstacles to progress: greedy merchants, selfish tribal chieftains, evil generals, reactionary politicos, uppity bureaucrats, obstinate judges, and so forth. And so, to build the great nation and foster progress, the power of such selfish reactionaries had to be curbed. Burki quotes from one of Bhutto’s speeches made a year before his downfall:

In 1970, I promised you democracy. In 1973, I gave you democracy…. You and I have trusted each other, worked together. We understand each other. But there are people in this country that don’t approve of our association. These people have attempted to put obstacles in our way; to stop us from building a new Pakistan. They can do this because we have allowed them to do so. Should we continue to permit them this freedom? Mustn’t we change the rules of the game so that our progress towards a new and dynamic Pakistan is not continuously thwarted?

In fact, according to Burki, as well as many others, the rules had already been changed long before Bhutto made that speech in 1976. The tragedy of Bhutto is that he set in motion the very forces that brought him down. He curbed the bureaucracy by withdrawing constitutional guarantees from civil servants and concentrating more power in his own hands. Civil servants he considered hostile were jailed or dismissed. More serious, as far as his own ultimate fate was concerned, was his tampering with the constitution to limit the power of the law courts. They were denied jurisdiction over government decisions taken under the Defense of Pakistan Rule, an emergency measure enforced during the crisis over Bangladesh, and retained by Bhutto for political purposes. The government appropriated the power to dissolve political parties by adopting the so-called Suppression of Terrorist Activities (Special Courts) Ordinance. The main opposition party in Baluchistan, the National Awami Party, was banned under this rule and many of its members were jailed. (Soon after her own election as prime minister, Benazir ran into trouble in Baluchistan herself; her followers allowed the Baluchistan provincial assembly to be dissolved.)

Four months after Bhutto promised freedom of the press, three periodicals were banned and their editors and publishers arrested. According to Tariq Ali, “The bulk of the media at all events was kept firmly under government control, serving the Bhutto régime as loyally as it had done its predecessors.”

Most damaging of all were his maladroit dealings with the army. The first thing he did upon attaining power was to put the commanders in chief of the army and air force under house arrest. Protective custody, he called it. (General Zia used the same term when he had Bhutto arrested in 1977.) Then he appointed General Tikka Khan, known as the “Butcher of Dacca” for his zeal in crushing the Bengalis, as his chief of staff. Bhutto chose him for his loyalty, which turned out to be correct. (Tikka Khan is still close to Benazir.) In the case of General Zia, whom he appointed as chief of staff some years later, he was wrong.

Benazir describes Zia variously as a stage villain and an ignorant, unscrupulous, unintelligent, tin-pot dictator. This is as it should be in a myth. In fact, however, he was a rather intelligent and effective dictator and, though he looked like a villain, he had a softspoken charm. Like General Suharto, who has ruled Indonesia since the demise of Sukarno, Zia was a “smiling general,” with all the steel but none of the flamboyance of the Napoleonic populist he replaced. He was certainly not a democrat. He set himself up to be a Muslim leader who would turn Pakistan into a real Muslim state, based on Muslim law—adultery, consumption of alcohol, gambling would result in cut limbs, whippings, or death by stoning. Some of these punishments took place but, in fact, he never went as far as the mullahs wanted. Aside from Pakistan’s crippling national debt, perhaps Zia’s worst legacy sprang from the source of his greatest political strength: the guns, drugs, and general corruption of Pakistan society wrought by the Afghan war.

In hindsight one must conclude that Bhutto asked for trouble. He should never have called out the army to control the turbulent opposition after he was accused of rigging the 1977 elections. Once out of the barracks, and faced with a country running out of control, the generals did what came naturally to them: they took over.

Bhutto was arrested and in confinement read one of his books about Napoleon. Certainly he and his family were cruelly treated by Zia. He was sentenced to hang for murder in a farcical trial and spent his last years in filthy jails, his only comforts his favorite cologne and the odd Havana cigar. At that point Benazir strode to the center stage. Bhutto, in his fetid cell, grabbed his daughter’s hand and said: “My daughter, should anything happen to me, promise me, you will continue my mission.”

I have dwelled at some length on the rule of the father, because the daughter took his mission seriously; it is as Bhutto’s daughter that she challenged her political opponents; in every campaign poster showing her face it was the image of the father that loomed behind her, like a guardian god. What she felt as she walked away from the prison is summed up in The Way Out:

If the people of Pakistan ever saw their leader kept in such a disgusting and disrespectful manner their blood would boil and from Khyber to Karachi a fierce fire would rage which no guns could wipe out.

Benazir slipped into her new role with great aplomb. The way it is described suggests the mystical transfusion of a spirit, or sacred flame. Such is often the nature of dynastic politics in Asia. The same process was described by Cory Aquino, who, kneeling in prayer, felt the flutter of her husband’s spirit entering her soul, enabling her to carry on the struggle. It is impossible to pinpoint the precise moment when the visitation took place in Benazir’s case. Was it the jail scene evoked above? Or did it happen earlier perhaps, the first time Zia’s thugs entered the family house in Karachi (the famous 70 Clifton) and lolled about on the Begum’s Louis XV chairs? This is how she tells it in Daughter of the East:

Once again I watch my father being driven away, not knowing where he is being taken, not knowing if I will ever see him again. I waver for a moment, half of my heart breaking, the other half turning to ice. “Pinkie,” I hear a voice call. I turn to see my brother Shah Nawaz lined up with the staff in the courtyard. “Usko choro! Leave him!” I shout at the soldiers holding him. I am frightened myself at the new tone of my voice. But the soldiers step away.

The new tone of voice; perhaps that was it. It seems, from her own telling of the story, as though her entire life was a kind of dress rehearsal for the main act, the crusade to avenge her father, to return the Bhutto family to power. This is as true for the Larkana Benazir as for the Radcliffe one. The day she left for America, her father spoke of her debt to the people of Pakistan, “a debt you can repay with God’s blessing by using your education to better their lives.”

There is nothing wrong with this sentiment; in fact, it is a noble one. But it is important to know just how Benazir sees the nature of her political power, or, indeed, not just her own power, but political power in general. The Radcliffe Benazir realizes that politics must be divested of mythology to be lawful and subject to reason. Does the Larkana Benazir know this? Or, to make things even more complicated, are the Radcliffe Benazir’s political ideals perhaps part of the Larkana Benazir’s myth? This particular confusion is encouraged by the Western taste for exotic morality tales, casting her as the fairy queen. Are her politics, and by extension the politics of Pakistan, to be a matter of compromise, regular elections, and the same rules applying to all? Or will it remain a contest between Good and Evil, between great leaders and reactionary, obscurantist, wicked, uneducated thugs? Will the same rules apply to those who are born to lead as to those deemed beyond the pale? Her political opponents have given her little cause to feel conciliatory. Even as she toned down her fiery rhetoric during the elections, her rivals, a combination of big businessmen, Muslim fundamentalists, and former protégés of General Zia, mostly from Punjab, often used highly provocative language about her, hinting at Western decadence and Communist connections. Although her Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) did well all over Pakistan in the national elections, it did less well in the provincial elections. One of her rivals for the prime ministership, Mian Nawaz Sharif, a former Zia man, still controls Punjab, the richest and largest province in Pakistan. Another strong opponent, Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, once a close associate of Miss Bhutto’s father, was elected to the National Assembly. An opposition party, the MQM, controls Karachi and Hyderabad, the two biggest cities in Sindh.

It will be interesting to see how she deals with her opposition. Will she be accountable as a leader, or will she carry out her mission with the arrogance of a dynastic ruler or the messianic zeal of those who think they represent that mythical concept: the will of the people? So far, she has done well; she has compromised, played by the rules, kept her cool. But these are still important questions because it was precisely that zeal, that Napoleonic hubris which destroyed her father.

Her book, admittedly written with a campaign in mind against the man she rightly holds responsible for her family’s grief, is not entirely reassuring, because it is so full of myth, and because the heroes are above the rules which are applied to the villains. The treatment of her two brothers, for example. While Benazir and her mother were taken from jail to jail to stop them from agitating against the Zia regime, her brothers, Mir Murtaza and Shah Nawaz, were in Kabul organizing a group called AI-Zulfikar to carry on the struggle by violent means. There was the hijacking of a passenger plane, there were bomb attacks, and Mir promised to “turn Pakistan up and down.” Zia tried to link mother and daughter Bhutto to these violent acts, but never produced any evidence. Indeed, both women suffered greatly on account of the two brothers. Benazir was locked up in solitary cells where she received criminally inadequate treatment for an ear disease that could have killed her.

Nonetheless, Benazir writes about them with reverence. Shah, a spoiled and handsome playboy—Swiss school, frequent attendance at Regine’s in Paris, flat in Monte Carlo—“was so generous you never knew what he would do…. He had empathized with the poor since childhood. He had built a straw hut in the garden at 70 Clifton and slept in it for weeks, wanting to feel the deprivations of the poor.”

Shah was interested in intelligence work: “Just remember you have a little brother who can help you if you give him a high post in intelligence.” It was not to be. During a family holiday in Cannes he died of poisoning. His Afghan wife, who sounds an even worse brat than her late husband, was recently found by a French court to have been criminally negligent in letting Shah die. The marriage, by all accounts, including Benazir’s, was not a happy one. The exact cause of his death is still mysterious, except to the Bhuttos, who are all convinced that he was murdered by Zia’s agents. Or, as Benazir suggests, “had the CIA killed him as a friendly gesture towards their favorite dictator?” But whatever the cause of his death, it is clear that Shah was playing dangerous and nasty games.

Which makes Benazir’s sentimental description of his funeral sound nauseating: “I wanted to take him past the lands where he had hunted with Papa and Mir, past our fields and ponds, past the people he had tried to defend in his own way. The people, too, deserved the chance to honor this brave son of Pakistan. The Martyr’s son has been martyred.” Note the “in his own way.” Zia ruled Pakistan in his own way too. But he was evil; he was not a Bhutto. The Larkana Benazir has taken control. But there is more to come:

In every generation, Shiite Muslims believe, there is a Karbala, a reenactment of the tragedy that befell the family of the Prophet Mohammed PBUH [Peace Be Upon Him], after his death in 640 AD. Many in Pakistan have come to believe that the victimisation of the Bhutto family and our supporters was the Karbala of our generation.

Many in Pakistan probably do believe it, but, more significantly, so does Benazir, or at least everything points to that conclusion. Power still has magic in Pakistan; people want to be near it, touch it, feel it. When Benazir was paraded through Pakistan, from morning until late at night, perched on top of a truck, lit by a spotlight, proud, aloof, every inch the aristocratic leader, people fought each other to touch the vehicle. Many treat her like a divine ruler. It is to be hoped that she knows better. Honor has been served; she has restored power to her family. But her cause is to restore democracy. That cause would be ill-served by perpetuating the dynastic myths of Larkana.

Footnotes

1 Benazir Bhutto, The Way Out: Interviews, Impressions, Statements and Messages (Karachi: Mahmood Publications, 1988). ↩

2 Shahid Javed Burki, Pakistan Under Bhutto, 1971–1977 (Macmillan, 1980). ↩

3 Tariq Ali, Can Pakistan Survive: The Death of a State (Penguin, 1983).

Biographer claims (but Imran denies) Khan’s romance with Benazir

Biography claims Imran Khan and Benazir Bhutto were romantically involved 19 Aug 2009 Telegraph.co.uk

A new biography of Imran Khan has claimed the former international cricketer and Benazir Bhutto, the assassinated former Prime Minister of Pakistan, were romantically involved while they were both students at Oxford University.

Author claims Benazir Bhutto and Imran Khan were an item at Oxford University Photo: AFP

The respected author, Christopher Sandford, has claimed that Bhutto became infatuated with Khan and the pair enjoyed a "close" and possibly "sexual" relationship.

He also alleges that Khan's mother tried, unsuccessfully, to organise an arranged marriage between the pair.

Until now, it had always been believed that Khan and Bhutto had always been at loggerheads both politically and personally. Khan openly criticised the former prime minister just days before her death.

However, Sandford, who interviewed both Khan and his ex-wife Jemima for the book, claims a source told him that Bhutto was 21 and in her second year of reading politics at Lady Margaret Hall when she became close to Khan in 1975.

The source told Sandford she had been "visibly impressed" by Khan and may even have been the first to call him the "Lion of Lahore".

"In any event, it seems fairly clear that, for at least a month or two, the couple were close. There was a lot of giggling and blushing whenever they appeared together in public," Sandford told the Daily Mail.

He added: "It also seems fair to say that the relationship was "sexual", in the sense that it could only have existed between a man and a woman. The reason some supposed it went further was because, to quote one Oxford friend: 'Imran slept with everyone.'"

However, Khan strongly denies that he ever had a sexual relationship with Bhutto.

He agrees he was interviewed for the book, but has not yet read it.

He told the Daily Mail: "Yes, I was interviewed, but I know nothing about the rest of what has been written. So it is not official.

"It is absolute nonsense about any sexual relationship or my mother and an arranged marriage. We were friends – that's all."

Legacy

Bina Shah on BB's Legacy

The Legacy of Benazir Bhutto, Bina Shah, DEC. 26, 2014, The New York Times

KARACHI, Pakistan — Seven years have passed since Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s former prime minister, was assassinated in Rawalpindi, on Dec. 27, 2007. Her legacy and significance in world history continue to hold a special place in the hearts of the millions of Pakistanis who mourn her death as much as they mourn the death of the dream of what Pakistan might have been had she lived to rule the country just one more time.

As with that of many political icons, Ms. Bhutto’s sudden death left a void in both leadership and inspiration; no politician in Pakistan has been able to fill it. She also left behind a checkered past, with allegations of corruption that still linger, unproved in court for lack of evidence. The two governments she led were dismissed on corruption charges, and she was accused of amassing a large personal fortune for her own family while doing far too little to alleviate the burdens of Pakistan’s poor.

In her own life, she carved out a brilliant academic career at Harvard and Oxford, and political achievements of undeniable import as the daughter of an assassinated prime minister battling to restore democracy in Pakistan; later, she became the first woman elected to lead a Muslim country. She inhabited a marriage that puzzled people as much as it fascinated them — to a controversial man who ruled Pakistan in her name for years after her death. She raised a son and two daughters, who now strive, with mixed results, to serve the Pakistani people she claimed to have lived for.

Yet Ms. Bhutto left behind more than success or scandal. In her wake are the millions of Pakistani girls and women who look at her life, her determination, her perseverance in the face of all odds. They appropriate even the smallest part of these elements of her life and add it to the blueprint they envision for their own. And they thrill to the idea, still radical in Pakistan 40 years after Ms. Bhutto began her political career, that gender doesn’t have to stop them from achieving their dreams.

One of the more literal examples of Ms. Bhutto’s legacy that helps Pakistani women is the Benazir Income Support Program, which distributes cash, without conditions, to low-income families throughout Pakistan. These poorest of the poor, 5.5 million families in 2013, receive 1,200 Pakistani rupees — about $12 — twice monthly, most of which is spent on food. Ms. Bhutto worked on the vision, concept and design of the program with a renowned Pakistani economist, Dr. Kaiser Bengali. After her death, the initiative was enacted by Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, but named after Ms. Bhutto by her widower, President Asif Ali Zardari, as a tribute to her.

The program isn’t without flaws; critics have said that it is meant to influence voters at election time, that political influence skews which families are eligible to be recipients, and the fact that most of the assistance is nonconditional renders it ineffective (a subprogram gives families more cash if they enroll their children in primary school).

But there is also a revolutionary side to the scheme: The cash is transferred into the bank account of a woman in the family, not a man. Placing spending power directly into the hands of poor Pakistani women empowers them on many levels: They become decision makers within the family, and their respect and value increase in the community. To obtain the cash, they are required to get national identity cards and bank accounts; as a result, they achieve a level of citizenship and fiscal identity denied to previous generations, when the births and deaths of women were rarely registered in official records.

While mothers are being helped by the program, their daughters are going to school in even greater numbers than before, thanks to the many awareness campaigns and education drives underway in Pakistan. Many of these girls regard Benazir Bhutto as an inspiration for their own educational paths. Malala Yousafzai, Pakistan’s most famous schoolgirl, cites Ms. Bhutto as her personal idol, and wore Ms. Bhutto’s white shawl when she addressed the United Nations in 2013.

Young women attend classes at the Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology, which Ms. Bhutto established in her father’s name, in Karachi, Islamabad, Hyderabad and Larkana. There, they study law, media, computer engineering and more. Ms. Bhutto’s university-educated daughters, Asifa and Bakhtawar, today publicly encourage Pakistani girls to go to school so that they, too, may one day serve the nation as educated, empowered women.

The daughter of a privileged landowning family, Ms. Bhutto nevertheless fought against the conservative social mores of her environment, in which rich girls could go to school but grown women were expected to run a house and raise a family, no matter how educated they were. She herself returned to Pakistan after her studies, and entered politics, heading the Pakistan Peoples Party in its now-celebrated struggle in the 1980s against the dictator Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq.

She endured house arrest and exile throughout her political career, overcame the powerful mullahs’ objections to a woman’s ruling an Islamic nation, and won admirers all over the world for her political skills and compassion. Even after her death, she serves as the ultimate mentor to Pakistani girls and women who want to set the course of their lives for themselves, instead of having it dictated to them.

What might have happened in Pakistan had Ms. Bhutto been elected for a third term will remain an unanswerable question. Her personal and political legacy is full of contradictions and complexities that will continue to be examined by earnest historians, mined by rapacious politicians, venerated by her supporters and picked apart by her detractors.

Yet she emboldened the heart of every girl and woman in Pakistan who was ever told that being a woman precluded her from a lifetime of accomplishment, service and worth. This was her greatest legacy.

Bina Shah is the author of several books of fiction, including, most recently, “A Season for Martyrs.”

Martyr: Ravez Junejo's detailed hagiography

Ravez Junejo | The Life and Legacy of Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Shaheed December 21, 2012 | Let Us Build Pakistan

In her autobiography, Mohtarma [the respected] Benazir Bhutto Shaheed writes of the time when she was allowed to travel to England in 1984 for medical treatment by the most brutal dictator in Pakistan’s history, General Zia ul Haq. When she entered Heathrow Airport, a large crowd of supporters and foreign journalists welcomed her. One of them asked whether she was in England for political exile. Her response was as representative of her love for the country as it was prophetic of her own destiny.

“I was born in Pakistan and I’m going to die in Pakistan. I will never leave my country. I will stay by your side until my last breath. The Bhuttos keep their promises1.”

When Mohtarma Shaheed ended a decade of exile and returned to Pakistan in October 2007, she had started whirlwind tours of many cities in the four provinces of Pakistan. Every city that she went to in Sindh, Balochistan, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the Punjab, she was welcomed by thousands of jiyalas chanting that timeless slogan that had become the war cry of the soldiers of democracy in Pakistan, “Jeay Bhutto (Long Live Bhutto)!” In every city she witnessed the love and loyalty of her supporters to not only her party but to the memory of her martyred father. In every city, she spoke of her aim of restoring true democracy in Pakistan and solicited the support of the people towards achieving that aim. Well aware of the threats to her life, Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto fearlessly charged on through the hinterlands of Pakistan…until finally she reached the cantonment city of Rawalpindi for her public rally at Liaqat Bagh.

THE DARK NIGHT OF DECEMBER 27

In the days leading up to the PPP rally, the whole city was dressed up in banners and billboards welcoming Mohtarma to the city. PPP supporters from all over the Punjab province were gathering in Rawalpindi for what was bound to be a historic political event. On the day of the rally, Liaqat Bagh, the garden named after Pakistan’s first Prime Minister and assassinated political leader Liaqat Ali Khan, was choke full of jiyalas, raising the slogans of “Jeay Bhutto!” and “Zinda hay Bhutto Zinda hay!”.

Her speech that day was like the roar of a lioness. Each word leapt off her tongue and seared itself in to the hearts and minds of those present in Liaqat Bagh. People listened in rapt attention as Mohtarma recounted her father’s and her own efforts at strengthening the armed forces of Pakistan. Once again, she taunted the dictator’s regime and it’s allied parties for their unpopularity and exhorted the masses present to reject them on Election Day and support democracy by voting for the Pakistan People’s Party. The resounding applause and adulation she received from the grounds of Liaqat Bagh probably made her confident that victory was hers. Alas, we shall never know what she felt now.

As she finally left the stage and settled into her Toyota Land Cruiser, she was told of the attack on former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s political rally in Lahore who had recently allied himself with the PPP. Although she asked an aide to call him so she could condole with him over the killing of a few of his workers in the attack, Providence had another act for her to fulfil. Some individuals chanting the party slogans and carrying party flags massed in front of her SUV. Not wanting to turn them back rueful, she laboured to stand out of the open top hatch of her SUV and waved to the excited supporters in response to their slogans.

As all eyes remained transfixed at the vision of contentment and humility on Mohtarma’s face, none watched a devilish cretin slithering through the crowds like a snake towards the SUV and Mohtarma. No one saw him lift his hand and shoot at Mohtarma before a bomb went off and killed scores of her supporters and maimed others. What followed was a mesh of consternation and confusion, as anger over the brutal attack mingled with concern for Mohtarma’s life. The sense of invincibility that surrounded Mohtarma like an aura was such that no one dared think the unthinkable even when signs started pointing towards the latter dark eventuality. That night, the sky fell on the people of Pakistan the very moment that PPP leader Dr Baber Awan made the tearful announcement of the martyrdom of Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Shaheed.

What followed was an expression of public anger that verged on rebellion against not only the dictatorial regime, but the entire state. Armed and angry supporters of the Mohtarma Shaheed trooped out of their cities and villages to wreak havoc on the symbols of the state. Police stations were attacked and burnt. Entire train buggies and engines were demolished. Rail tracks connecting the province of Sindh to the rest of Pakistan were uprooted as if to sever this link between the two. Billboards boasting of the “achievements” of the regime were burned. Banners of the dictator’s allied parties were burned and their party offices were attacked. Vehicles were burned on the streets and highways of Pakistan, not in the hundreds but in the thousands. In every city, village, town of Pakistan, angry demonstrators burnt tyres and chanted slogans against the dictator and his regime.

This violent mood would subside during only two events, the heart-rending burial of Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Shaheed and the press conference by her widower Mr Asif Ali Zardari and their 19 year old son, Bilawal. That press conference, which took place on December 30, was awaited by every individual within and outside Pakistan since it held significant importance for the immediate stability of the country. The PPP had lost it’s only leader. There was no visible candidate among the party’s senior leadership fit enough to hold the PPP together till even the forthcoming elections. More importantly, a viable and strong leader was required to quell the uprising of the masses that had begun on December 27. In such a foreboding environment, a press conference was held by Mohtarma Shaheed’s loved ones to settle these and many other issues.

The PPP leadership gave it’s supporters hope by vesting the chairpersonship of the party in the hands of Mohtarma Shaheed’s young and capable son, Bilawal, who also took on his maternal surname, along with his two sisters, to become Bilawal Bhutto Zardari. Mr. Asif Zardari was elected the Co-Chairperson of the party by the Central Executive Committee (CEC). In his very first speech, the Chairperson thanked the CEC before calling on the people of Pakistan to end the violence and direct their anger towards the aim for which Mohtarma Shaheed sacrificed herself, the restoration of democracy in Pakistan. His statement became a battle cry for the entire democratic opposition within Pakistan. “My mother always said, Democracy is the best revenge!”

A ‘BENAZIR’ [peerless, unequalled] LIFE

Intelligence. Charm. Eloquence. Wit.

Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Shaheed encapsulated all of these ethereal qualities in her personality. Apart from these human abilities, she also possessed superhuman traits like her endurance in the face of extreme tribulations, bravery in the face of brutal enemies and an always forgiving heart that never brooked intolerance or hatred for any soul save the most dastardly. Inspired by her legendary father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Shaheed, she also retained in her soul an unrequited love for her country and her people. It was this love that kept her spirits high as she single-handedly battled against the forces of intolerance not only in the 80’s but afterwards when the whole world had become it’s victim.

If one were to look at the life of Mohtarma Shaheed, the contradiction between what life she could have had and what she actually went through is extremely intriguing. She was born the daughter of a leading land lord of Sindh and political leader of Pakistan. She enjoyed every luxury and privilege that a child born in royalty receives. Her parents lavished her with love and care.

She received formal education from some of the most premier educational institutions of Pakistan such as the Convent of Jesus and Mary and Karachi Grammer School. After completing her A-levels, she was sent by her father, now the leading opposition politician in Pakistan, to study at the prestigious Radcliffe College in the USA where she did her graduation. She followed that up with a four year stint at Oxford University where she studied some post-graduate courses and was elected the President of the Oxford Union debating club, the first Asian woman to have this honour.

In Pakistan, her family homes in Karachi and Larkana were located in posh areas and were extremely luxurious. Her ancestral lands gave her access to significant wealth and a prosperous, comfortable life. Her servants numbered in the dozens and she never had to labour after herself in any way.

Yet, she chose the trials and tribulations of political activism in the darkest dictatorship to ever assail this country. Her persecution and mental torture at the hands of the Zia dictatorship are chronicled not only in her auto-biography but also in the reports of many international human rights organisations such as Amnesty International. After her father was removed in a military coup, she was kept in house arrest in total isolation from her family. She was denied medical care at times when she suffered from extreme physical pain and mental agony. She always had a choice to end it all. The agents of the dictatorship had wanted to get rid of her by sending her out of the country. But she persisted in staying in Pakistan and fighting along with her supporters in the righteous struggle for democracy. Her reversal of fortunes was succinctly summed up by Begum Nusrat Bhutto at a public rally in 1977.

“My daughter is used to wearing jewellery. Now she will be proud to wear the chains of imprisonment.”

As a political prisoner, she was shuttled for fours years from one dirty jail cell to another. She was insulted by lowly law enforcement personnel and almost slapped by an Army captain. These people wouldn’t have dared to even look her in the eyes when her father was the Prime Minister. How could the daughter of a former Prime Minister be kept in dark, dirty, rat-infested jail cells by men who proudly titled themselves “Mard-e-Momin” (Righteous Men)? How could a young lady be tortured like that by honourable men? More importantly, how could a young girl, who always lived a comfortable lifestyle, even survive through such hardships with her physical and mental capabilities intact?

It is due to the exemplary strength and character of Mohtarma Shaheed that she could do so. She had an iron will and determination bequethed to her as part of her family legacy and forged in the furnace of a brutal dictatorship. Her unconditional belief in democracy and the rights of the people made her realise the importance of her resilience in the face of stark adversity. Her steadfastness during these times of struggle gave the rest of the nation great hope.

There were people in Pakistan who saw democracy as a threat to their power. They felt that the people of Pakistan were simple-minded, too ignorant, and too stupid to be able to understand democracy. But the leadership of the PPP always proved them wrong. It proved them wrong in 1967 when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Shaheed created the party and involved the poor and downtrodden masses in the struggle for this great objective. It proved them wrong in 1970 when Mr. Bhutto Shaheed became the most popular politician in West Pakistan electorally and Pakistan’s first elected Prime Minister in 1973. Then, years later, Mohtarma Shaheed proved them wrong as she led the toiling masses of Pakistan in protesting and attacking the Zia dictatorship.

Sworn in as Pakistan’s youngest and Muslim World’s first female Prime Minister.

Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto’s struggle didn’t just end with the ending of the Zia dictatorship. After she was elected the youngest ever Prime Minister of Pakistan and the first female head of a Muslim country, Mohtarma had to safeguard that democracy against an establishment that not only prevented her from alleviating the suffering of the people but also spread rumours about her personality, her past and her financial honesty. When the rumours didn’t work in rousing the people against her, her first term was illegally and unjustifiably ended by Presidential edict in 1990. Mohtarma’s renewed struggle saw the establishment suffer another defeat in 1993 when she was re-elected as the Prime Minister of Pakistan for the second time. Again, the anti-people establishment used ethnic ploys and rumour mills to discredit Mohtarma Shaheed. In the end, the suspicious assassination of her only surviving brother, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, strengthened the anti-democracy forces which once again had her removed through the President. When she was told of the threats to her life similar to that faced by her martyred brother, she decided to leave Pakistan for Dubai along with her three children. Her decision was that of a mother of extremely young children. If something were to happen to her and her husband who was indefinitely incarcerated on trumped up and politically motivated charges, who would look after their orphaned children? It was with these concerns in mind that she made the tough decision of leaving her country and going into exile.

Her struggle for the people of Pakistan continued in exile. As she played the role of a single parent to her children, she continued to lead the PPP in it’s actions against PMLN’s Nawaz Sharif-led elected dictatorship of that time. Then, when Mr Sharif was himself removed from power by another military dictator, Mohtarma extended to him an offer of friendship and reconciliation in the larger interest of restoring and strengthening democracy in Pakistan. Her collaboration with Mr Sharif started from the constitution of the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy (ARD) and culminated in the signing of the Charter of Democracy in 2005. It was only her far-sighted political acumen and sagacity that achieved such political successes from a relationship that was known in Pakistan for it’s cutthroat rivalry.

Her return on October 18 was historic not only because of the millions who gathered to welcome her in Karachi but due to that crowd being the largest political procession in the history of Pakistan. It is the evil character of the anti-democratic forces that made itself apparent that night when two bomb blasts killed more than 150 supporters of the PPP as the caravan was slowly making its way through the raging sea of humanity massed before it on Shahrah-e-Faisal Road. Amid strewn limbs and wails of pain, Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto was safely moved out of the area and transported to Bilawal House. The next day, she decried the carnage that the city of Karachi had witnessed and called for action against the perpetrators of that heinious terrorist attack. In retrospect, the October 18 bombing was the very first assasination attempt on the life of Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Shaheed. Regretfully, it wasn’t the last.

Grief over the victims of the terrorist attack gave way to real world concerns as the political campaign was restarted. Mohtarma visited the far corners of the country to take to the people her message of tolerance, peace and democracy. Her trips to some of the most lawless areas in Pakistan were completely devoid of any other bloody incident. All those people who had resorted to criminal activities out of hopelessness and desperation saw the early rays of a new dawn in her words.

Any other individual in such a situation might have done what Mohtarma Shaheed’s enemies said she would do. They said that Mohtarma would end her public rallies. They said she would stop meeting the ordinary people of Pakistan who came to see her in the big cities from far-off villages at great expense. But Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Shaheed proved all of them wrong! She resumed her political activities and held rallies where thousands of people came to see and hear her. She continued her struggle for the restoration of democracy…until her untimely martyrdom on December 27, 2007.