In This Article
30-Second Summary
Headline Link: Bhutto assassinated
Background: The prior assassination attempt
Analysis: Questions of probity
Obituaries: Benazir Bhutto (1953–2007)
Historical Context: Pakistan
Reference Material: The Pakistan Peoples Party
Related Links: In her own words
Opinion: What now for Pakistan?
Subscribe to International Updates
Bhutto's Death Cuts Down Options for Pakistan
by
findingDulcinea Staff
Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is killed campaigning in Rawalpindi. Only a few weeks ago, Washington had negotiated her return, hoping she would bring political stability.
30-Second Summary
Benazir Bhutto was shot dead on Dec. 27, having just addressed a rally held by her supporters.
She was hit by a sniper while waving from the sunroof of her car. The car traveled a further 50 yards before being stopped by an explosion apparently set off by a suicide bomber. According to the BBC’s correspondent, at least 15 bystanders are believed to have died.
Another suicide attack on Bhutto was attempted in October, on her return to Pakistan after eight years in exile. More than a hundred were killed in that incident.
Bhutto served twice as Pakistani prime minister, and was sacked both times. She spent five years in prison and left the country in 1999 dogged by charges of corruption.
The corruption allegations were dropped on her return in a deal overseen by the United States. Washington hoped a power-sharing agreement between Bhutto and the beleaguered President Pervez Musharraf would prevent the country slipping towards extremism.
However, since her return and Musharraf’s declaration of a state of emergency in November, Bhutto's relationship with the president had deteriorated.
Educated at Harvard and Oxford, Bhutto was, as London's Daily Telegraph observes in its obituary, an Islamic leader that the West felt it could do business with. But to some observers, her "glamorous good looks and fluent English" led to Bhutto being overvalued by America and its allies.
She was hit by a sniper while waving from the sunroof of her car. The car traveled a further 50 yards before being stopped by an explosion apparently set off by a suicide bomber. According to the BBC’s correspondent, at least 15 bystanders are believed to have died.
Another suicide attack on Bhutto was attempted in October, on her return to Pakistan after eight years in exile. More than a hundred were killed in that incident.
Bhutto served twice as Pakistani prime minister, and was sacked both times. She spent five years in prison and left the country in 1999 dogged by charges of corruption.
The corruption allegations were dropped on her return in a deal overseen by the United States. Washington hoped a power-sharing agreement between Bhutto and the beleaguered President Pervez Musharraf would prevent the country slipping towards extremism.
However, since her return and Musharraf’s declaration of a state of emergency in November, Bhutto's relationship with the president had deteriorated.
Educated at Harvard and Oxford, Bhutto was, as London's Daily Telegraph observes in its obituary, an Islamic leader that the West felt it could do business with. But to some observers, her "glamorous good looks and fluent English" led to Bhutto being overvalued by America and its allies.
Headline Link: Bhutto assassinated
The United States, the United Kingdom and Russia have condemned the assassination. A state department official said, “The attack shows that there are still those in Pakistan trying to undermine reconciliation and democratic development in Pakistan.”
Source: The BBC
Benazir Bhutto was killed in Rawalpindi, where she had been addressing supporters in the run-up to the January elections. As of Dec. 28, The New York Times wrote that though the circumstances of her death were still uncertain, reports said that she had been shot by a sniper while waving to crowds from the sunroof of her car. The car traveled a further 50 yards before being halted by the explosion of a suicide bomber.
Source: The New York Times
Background: The prior assassination attempt
On Oct. 18, 2007, more than a hundred people were killed amid the crowds of supporters celebrating Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistan after eight years in exile. Two explosions occurred around midnight, shortly after Bhutto had retired into the vehicle carrying her through the thousands who had turned out to see her.
Source: The Times of London
Analysis: Questions of probity
In 1998, The New York Times conducted a special report investigating the corruption charges brought against Bhutto and her husband. Many of the allegations centered on a collection of family documents that Bhutto’s political rivals purchased for $1 million from an unnamed intermediary source. According to the Times, “The documents leave uncertain the degree of involvement by Bhutto … But they trace the pervasive role of her husband, Asif Zardari, who turned his marriage to Bhutto into a source of virtually unchallengeable power.”
Source: SamSloan.com (reprinted from The New York Times)
In an Aug. 15, 2007, discussion with Council on Foreign Relations president Richard N. Haass, Bhutto said that her country was in crisis: “A crisis that has its roots almost half a century ago, when the military in my country first seized power, in 1958 … I plan to return later this year to Pakistan to lead a democratic movement for the restoration of democracy. 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.”
Source: Council on Foreign Relations
In a Nov. 14 Los Angeles Times op-ed titled “Aunt Benazir’s False Promises,” Fatima Bhutto derides her aunt’s democratic rhetoric: “By supporting Ms. Bhutto, who talks of democracy while asking to be brought to power by a military dictator, the only thing that will be accomplished is the death of the nascent secular democratic movement in my country. Democratization will forever be de-legitimized, and our progress in enacting true reforms will be quashed. We Pakistanis are sure of this.”
Source: Los Angeles Times (free registration required)
Tariq Ali, a British political activist heralding from Pakistan, recently wrote on the different perspectives on Bhutto that exist in Pakistan and in the West. According to Ali, the deal that returned Bhutto to her home country and led to the investigation into charges of political corruption being dropped “repelled” many moderate Pakistanis. He writes that coverage of the agreement “in the Pakistan media was universally hostile, except on state television. The ‘breakthrough’ was loudly trumpeted in the West, however, and a whitewashed Benazir Bhutto was presented on U.S. networked and BBC TV news as the champion of Pakistani democracy.”
Source: The London Review of Books
Obituaries: Benazir Bhutto (1953–2007)
Benazir Bhutto was born in 1953 in the Pakistani province of Sindh, and later attended Harvard and Oxford. She was the last politically active member of her family: both of her brothers—having been active in Pakistani politics—were murdered, Shahnawaz in 1985 and Mir Murtaza in 1996. The BBC provides a short obituary.
Source: The BBC
London newspaper The Daily Telegraph observes, “In Pakistan she was often far less popular than her foreign press made out.” The Telegraph obituary describes a politician who presented a face of an Islamic nation that the West found sympathetic. Among her assets were “a pronounceable name and a tolerant religious outlook.” However, to her enemies, the Oxford- and Harvard-educated scion of Pakistan’s foremost political party “was more English than Pakistani, more Western than Eastern.”
Source: The Daily Telegraph
Author Christopher Hitchens focuses on what he sees the “extraordinary degree of physical courage” that Bhutto possessed. Hitchens observes that it is hard to construct any analysis that would show Musharraf benefiting from her death. Instead, the writer concludes, “The likeliest culprit is the al-Quida/Taliban axis."
Source: Slate
Historical Context: Pakistan
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan was founded in 1947, and has since seen numerous military coups. In fact, Gen. Musharraf first came to power in the October 1999 coup that ousted the government of then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The Economist provides historical, political and economic information about Pakistan.
Source: The Economist
Reference Material: The Pakistan Peoples Party
The Pakistan Peoples Party was founded by Benazir Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in 1967. According to the PPP’s official Web site, the party’s founding principle “places a responsibility on each PPP supporter to reach out in a spirit of accommodation and tolerance to all faiths, to prevent the state from interfering in the religious rights of the citizens (which breeds sectarianism) and to treat people of all faiths with respect enabling them to enjoy religious freedom and equality before the law.”
Source: The official Web site of the Pakistan People’s Party
Related Links: In her own words
In August 2007, Benazir Bhutto discussed the political and military situation in Pakistan with the Council on Foreign Relations. A recording is available online.
Source: The Council on Foreign Relations
Shortly after her election as Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto released an autobiography titled Daughter of Destiny. In the book she details the brutal killing of her father by General Zia ul-Haq and her own imprisonment under the dictator. Visit Amazon.com for book reviews and publishing information.
Source: findingDulcinea Bookstore
Opinion: What now for Pakistan?
Washington has only one course of action now that Bhutto is gone, according to The New York Times: "the principled, if unfamiliar, option of using American prestige and resources to fortify Pakistan's badly battered democratic institutions." Musharraf will have to be brought into line to ensure a fair election, and the supreme court members he removed in October will need to be reinstated.
Source: The New York Times
French author Bernard-Henri Levy opines that Bhutto was killed "because she was a woman, because she had a woman's face … because she was living out her destiny and refusing the curse that, according to the new fascists (the jihadists), floats over the human face of women." The response to this outrage from the West's leaders, according to Levy, has been woefully inadequate. Her funeral, he writes, should have collected "the largest possible number of government leaders and heads of state, to make the funeral a global demonstration on behalf of the values of democracy and peace."
Source: The Wall Street Jouranl
Most Recent Beyond The Headlines
© 2012 Dulcinea Media, Inc.
