LETTER FROM RAWALPINDI

 

 

Bhutto Legacy

 

April 4th was the 31st death anniversary of ZAB and the electronic media gave it quite an elaborate and extensive coverage. Every Jiala appearing on the mini screen rightfully praised the charismatic leader and vowed to take his mission forward. Their such avowed dedication looked, at least to me, quite amusing, superficial and perfunctory in the wake of the treatment being meted out to the masses by them.

Kindly allow me to ask them (and the politicians of other political parties as well) a simple question through the courtesy of your columns. Can anyone of them swear by his/her mother that he/she spent the millions to contest the elections just for serving the masses, the masses and nothing else but the masses only?

Col. Riaz Jafri (Retd)

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Mumtaz Bhutto blames Zardari for Benazir's death

Posted on April 3, 2010 by The Editors: Code of conduct: We request Civil discourse. No Abuse, profanity, or CAPS. Read this before commenting

• 'Zardari tampered with evidence of Benazir assassination'
• He also lamented that two years after the assassination, neither had the killers been arrested nor had a case been registered.

Karachi, Dec 26 - A close relative of slain Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto has accused her widower President Asif Ali Zardari of tampering with evidence relating to the assassination.

Mumtaz Bhutto, a cousin of Benazir's father and former president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, made the remarks while speaking to reporters in Tandojam, in Sindh's Hyderabad's district.

He also lamented that two years after the assassination, neither had the killers been arrested nor had a case been registered.

Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in a gun and bomb attack Dec 27, 2007 as she left a political rally in the garrison town of Rawalpindi adjacent to federal capital Islamabad.

Investigations by Pakistani authorities, as also Scotland Yard, failed to make any headway into the killing. A specially-appointed UN team is currently conducting a probe but is unlikely to unearth very much as the assassination site was washed clean soon after the incident, destroying whatever evidence might have existed.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Mumtaz Bhutto had, in March 1967, jointly founded the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) that currently leads the ruling federal coalition.

Mumtaz Bhutto, who has served as the governor and chief minister of Sindh, had in 1989 floated the Sindh National Front. He has been a vocal critic of Zardari, accusing him of corruption and usurping the PPP by using the Bhutto family name.

 

'Real' Bhutto heir denounces family business

 

When Fatima Bhutto heard that her estranged aunt had been assassinated she put aside decades of family feuding to mourn with her relatives at the ancestral home in Pakistan.

Three days later, when Benazir Bhutto's 19-year-old son, Bilawal, was anointed head of the Pakistan People's Party, Fatima maintained a respectful silence, despite whispers that she was the real Bhutto heir.

But now, two weeks on, she has broken that silence to launch a blistering attack on her cousin's appointment, accusing those around him of perpetuating dynastic politics and trying to cash in on his mother's blood.

In an interview with The Times - her first with the Western media since Benazir's death - the 25-year-old newspaper columnist also rejected her own claim to the Bhutto legacy, calling for a new era of politics based on platforms rather than personalities.

"That's the problem - it's a field that's held hostage by so few and it's become in a sense the family business, like an antique shop, where it's just 'So and So and Sons' and then grandsons and great grandsons. It just gets handed down," she said.

"The idea that it has to be a Bhutto, I think, is a dangerous one. It doesn't benefit Pakistan. It doesn't benefit a party that's supposed to be run on democratic lines and it doesn't benefit us as citizens if we think only about personalities and not about platforms." At a news conference in London this week, Bilawal denied that the party had been handed to him "like some piece of family furniture".

Fatima's remarks are unlikely to dent his support, but they reflect the concerns of many about his party's democratic credentials ahead of parliamentary elections on February 18. And while she says her doors are "always open" to Bilawal and his sisters, her criticism is almost certain to dash hopes of a family reunion and carry the epic feud into the next generation.

"We were there for those three days of mourning," she said. "So it's up to them now." Fatima's father was Murtaza Bhutto, Benazir's younger brother and the eldest son of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who was Pakistan's first populist Prime Minister until he was deposed in a coup in 1977 and executed.

Murtaza led a resistance movement from Afghanistan, returning to Pakistan to challenge Benazir's leadership of the PPP. He was killed in a police shootout in Karachi in 1996, while she was Prime Minister. Murtaza's Lebanese-Syrian wife, Ghinwa, has always blamed Benazir and has run a splinter faction of the PPP ever since. Benazir, meanwhile, derided Ghinwa as a "belly dancer" and disputed her inheritance of the family homes in Karachi and Larkana. "It was not a pleasant relationship we had at all," Fatima said.

The PPP says that Benazir left a will appointing her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, as party chief and that he stepped down in favour of Bilawal, a history student at Oxford. Bilawal added "Bhutto" to his surname and said his father would run the party until he completed his studies. Mumtaz Bhutto, leader of the 700,000-strong Bhutto tribe, has disputed that, saying Bilawal's name change did not make him a "real Bhutto".

Fatima said that neither she nor her 17-year-old brother were the rightful heirs - even though they are the offspring of the male line. The issue, she said, was whether Bilawal was a suitable choice, given that by law he must wait another 6 years to run for Parliament - and 16 years to stand for Prime Minister. "Ultimately the party workers believe that nobody can head the party but a Bhutto, but I don't think the workers believe that on whomever you put the Bhutto name can lead," she said.

"They seem to be a party in a hurry and they seem to be desperate to cash in on her blood. There was a certain coterie around her that benefited richly from her Government and they plan, it seems, to benefit richly from her death as well."

Fatima, like Mr Zardari, rejected the Government's claim that Islamist militants were behind Benazir's assassination, but she also questioned Mr Zardari's motives. "I think at some point the will should be made public, if indeed there was one," she said.

The parallels between Fatima and her aunt are striking: Benazir studied at Harvard and Oxford before returning to Pakistan and taking over the PPP aged 24. Fatima returned to Pakistan two years ago after completing a BA in Middle Eastern studies at Columbia University and an MA in South Asian government and politics at SOAS in London.

Fatima has also published a book of poetry aged 15 and another on the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir.

So far, she has resisted the urge to run for Parliament, confining herself to campaigning for her mother and writing her weekly columns. She admits, though, that politics is in her blood. "If there was an opportunity for new faces to come up and new voices to be heard and if I could be of service in some way, I wouldn't say no," she said. "But I'm not interested in being a symbol for anyone."

Voice of dissent

"[Benazir] Bhutto's political posturing is sheer pantomime . . . 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
Opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times November 14, 2007

 

January 13th, 2008

Jeremy Page in Karachi 

Source : Times

 

Pakistan's Flawed and Feudal PrincessWilliam Dalrymple January 11, 2008

Tags: Benazir Bhutto , feudalism , assassination

One of Benazir Bhutto's more dubious legacies to Pakistan is the Prime Minister's house in the middle of Islamabad.

 

The building is a giddy pseudo-Mexican ranch house with white walls and a red tile roof. There is nothing remotely Islamic about the building which, as my minder said when I went

there to interview the then Prime Minister Bhutto, was "P.M's own design." Inside, it was the same story. Crystal chandeliers dangled sometimes two or three to a room; oils of sunflowers and tumbling kittens that would have looked at home on the Hyde Park railings hung below garishly gilt cornices.

 

The place felt as though it might be the weekend retreat of a particularly flamboyant Latin American industrialist; but in fact it could have been anywhere. Had you been shown pictures of the place on one of those T.V game-shows where you are taken around a house and then have to guess who lives there, you might have awarded this hacienda to virtually anyone except, perhaps, to the Prime Minister of an impoverished Islamic Republic situated next door to Iran.

 

Which is, of course, exactly why the West has always had a soft spot for Benazir Bhutto. Her neighbouring heads of state may have been figures as unpredictable and potentially alarming as President Ahmadinejad of Iran and a clutch of opium-trading Afghan warlords, but Bhutto has always seemed reassuringly familiar to Western governments- one of us. She spoke English fluently because it was her first language. She had an English governess, went to a convent run by Irish nuns, and rounded off her education with degrees from Harvard and Oxford.

 

"London is like a second home for me? she once told me. "I know London well. I know where the theatres are, I know where the shops are, I know where the hairdressers are. I love to browse through Harrods and W. H Smith in Sloane Square. I know all my favourite ice cream parlours: I used to particularly love going to the one at Marble Arch: Baskin Robbins. Sometimes I used to drive all the way up from Oxford just for an ice cream, and then drive back again. That was my idea of sin." It was difficult to image any of her neighbouring heads of state- even India's earnest Sikh economist, Manmohan Singh, talking like this.

 

For the Americans, meanwhile, what Benazir Bhutto wasn't was possibly more attractive even than what she was: she wasn't a religious fundamentalist, she didn't have a beard, she didn't organise rallies where everyone shouts 'Death to America,' and she didn't issue fatwas against Booker-winning authors- even though Salman Rushdie went out of his way to ridicule her as the Virgin Ironpants in Shame.

 

However the very reasons that make the West love Benazir Bhutto are the same that leave many Pakistanis with second thoughts. Her English may be fluent, but you can't say the same about her Urdu which she spoke like a well-groomed foreigner: fluently but ungrammatically. Her Sindhi was even worse: apart from a few imperatives, she is completely at sea.

 

English friends who knew Benazir at Oxford remember a bubbly babe who drove to lectures in a yellow M.G, wintered in Gstaad, and who to used to talk of the thrill of walking down the Cannes lido with her hunky younger brother and being "the centre of envy: wherever Shahnawaz, went women would be bowled over". This Benazir- known to her friends as Bibi or Pinky- adored royal biographies and slushy romances: in her old Karachi bedroom I found stacks of well-thumbed Mills and Boons including An Affair To Forget, Sweet Imposter and two copies of The Butterfly and the Baron. This same Benazir also had a weakness for dodgy Seventies Easy Listening -Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree was apparently at the top of her frequent-play list. This is the same Benazir who had an enviable line in red-rimmed fashion specs, and who went weak at the knees at the sight of marron glacee

 

But there was something much more magestic- even imperial- about the Benazir I met when she was Prime Minister. She both walked and talked in a deliberately measured and regal manner, and frequently used the royal 'we'. During my interview, she took a full three minutes to float down the hundred yards of lawns separating the Prime Minister's house from the chairs where I had been told to wait for her. There followed an interlude when Benazir found the sun was not shining in quite the way she wanted it to: "The sun is in the wrong direction," she announced. Her hair was arranged in a sort of baroque beehive topped by white gauze dupatta. The whole painted vision reminded me of one of those aristocratic Roman princesses in Caligula.

 

This Benazir was a very different figure to that remembered by her Oxford contemporaries. This one was renowned throughout Islamabad for chairing twelve hour-long cabinet meetings and for surviving on four hours sleep. This was the Benazir who continued campaigning after the suicide bomber attacked her convoy the very day of her return to Pakistan last month, and who blithely disregarded the mortal threat to her life in order to continue fighting. This other Benazir Bhutto, in other words, was fearless- sometimes heroicly so- and as hard as nails.

 

More than anything, perhaps, Benazir was in the end a feudal princess with the aristocratic sense of entitlement that came with owning great tracts of the country, and the western-leaning tastes that such a background tends to give. It was this that gave her both the sophisticated gloss and the tough feudal grit which distinguished her political style.

 

In this, she was typical of many Pakistani politicians. Real democracy has never thrived in Pakistan in part because landowning remains the principle social base from which politicians emerge. The educated middle class-which in India gained control in 1947-in is Pakistan still largely excluded from the political process. As a result, in many of the more backward parts of Pakistan the local feudal landowner can expect his people to vote for his chosen candidate. As the writer Ahmed Rashid put it, "In some constituencies if the feudals put up their dog as a candidate, that dog would get elected with ninety-nine per cent of the vote?

 

Today Benazir is being hailed as a martyr for freedom and democracy; but far from being a natural democrat, in many ways Benazir was the person who brought Pakistan's strange variety of democracy- really a form of 'elective feudalism' - into disrepute, and who helped fuel the current apparently unstoppable growth of the Islamists.

 

For Bhutto was no Aung San Suu Kyi. During her first twenty-month long premiership, astonishingly, she failed to pass a single piece of major legislation. Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, killings and torture.

 

Within her own party, she declared herself the lifetime president of the PPP, and refused to let her brother Murtaza challenge her. When he persisted in doing so, he ended up shot dead in highly suspicious circumstances outside the family home. Murtaza's wife Ghinwa, and her daughter Fatima, as well as Benazir's own mother, all firmly believed that Benazir gave the order to have him killed.

 

As recently as this Autumn, Benazir did and said nothing to stop President Musharraf ordering the US and UK-brokered "rendition" of her rival Nawaz Sharif to Saudi Arabia, and so remove from the election her most formidable rival. Many of her supporters regarded her deal with Musharraf as a betrayal of all her party stood for.

 

Behind Pakistan's endless swings between military government and democracy lies a surprising continuity of elitist interests: to some extent, Pakistan's industrial, military and landowning classes are all interrelated, and they look after each other. They do not, however, do much to look after the poor. The government education system barely functions in Pakistan, and for the poor, justice is almost impossible to come by. According to the political scientist Ayesha Siddiqa, "Both the military and the political parties have all failed to create an environment where the poor can get what they need from the state. So the poor have begun to look to alternatives for justice. In the long term, flaws in the system will create more room for the fundamentalists.

 

 

In the West many right-wing commentators on the Islamic world such as Michael Gove and Martin Amis tend to see the march of political Islam as the triumph of an anti-liberal and irrational 'Islamo-fascism'. Yet much of the success of the Islamists in countries such as Pakistan comes the Islamists ability to portray themselves as champions of social justice, fighting people like Benazir Bhutto from the Islamic elite that rules most of the Muslim world from Karachi to Beirut, Ramallah and Cairo. This elite the Islamists successfully depict as rich, corrupt, decadent and and westernised. Benazir in particular had a reputation for massive corruption: during her government, the anti-corruption organization Transparency International named Pakistan one of the three most corrupt countries in the world, and Bhutto and her husband, Asif Zardari-widely known as "Mr 10%-faced allegations of plundering the country; charges were filed in Pakistan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States to investigate their various bank accounts

 

When I interviewed Abdul Rashid Ghazi in the Islamabad Red Mosque shortly before his death in the storming of the complex in early July, he returned over and again to these central issues of social justice: "We want our rulers to be honest people,��? he repeated. "But now the rulers are living a life of luxury while thousands of innocent children have empty stomachs and can't even get basic necessities.��?

 

This is the reason for the rise of the Islamists in Pakistan, and why so many people support them: they are the only force capable of taking on the country's landowners and their military cousins. This is why in all recent elections, the Islamist parties have hugely increased their share of the vote, why they now already control both the North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan, and why it is they who are most likely to gain from the current crisis.

 

Benazir Bhutto was a courageous, secular, and liberal woman. But sadness at the demise of this courageous fighter should not mask the fact that as a pro-Western feudal who did little for the poor, she was as much a central part of Pakistan's problems, as the solution to them.

 Source

 

 

  

 

Shattered Hopes

 

 

 

 

  

 

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Nick Grace, Weekly Standard
Web site: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/662vtwnq.asp   

 

  

 

01/29/2008

 

  

 

In the midst of an eight-day trip through Europe designed to assuage fears that his country is sliding toward chaos, Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf has reaffirmed that parliamentary elections will be held on February 18. Though the last year has certainly shown us that events in Pakistan are always subject to change, the election date should be considered about as stable as anything in Pakistan's political scene. With less than a month before these elections, it is a good time to assess the influence that Benazir Bhutto's assassination will have.

Even when Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October, "reform" (whatever that means in the context of Pakistan) was likely a pipe dream--but analysts thought a power-sharing agreement between Bhutto and Musharraf could bolster his increasingly unpopular administration and perhaps even lend some legitimacy to military action against the terrorist safe havens in the tribal areas. Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) continues to be a critical force because although it is not the country's only secular opposition party (the MQM and Awami National Party are still active), it is the only party of the type with true national reach. Unfortunately, the new PPP leadership faces internal conflicts and is unlikely to parlay public grief over Bhutto's death into positive political change.

The PPP is now headed by what the L.A. Times has described as "a notoriously corrupt husband and a sheltered 19-year-old son." The role that Bhutto's son, Bilawal Zardari, will play in the PPP was announced at a chaotic press conference just three days after her death. There, Bhutto's husband Asif Ali Zardari claimed that her will put him in charge of the PPP--but that "he had decided, with the consent of the executive committee, . . . to pass the baton to his son." Bilawal actually comported himself well enough during that initial press conference, his first real taste of the limelight. He even managed to get off a memorable (albeit completely meaningless) quip: "My mother always said democracy is the best revenge."

Little is known about Bilawal--so little that journalists desperate for insight into his personality raced to a false Facebook page for information. Born in Pakistan but raised mainly in Dubai and London, he studies history at Oxford University's Christ Church College, his mother's alma mater. His most notable accomplishments have come in youth athletics. A recent profile in the Hindu notes that Bilawal "is described as a fitness freak and a keen sports enthusiast. He is a black belt in Taekwondo and also loves swimming, horse riding, squash and target shooting." His public interviews have been rare; when he spoke to a Pakistani newspaper about three years ago, he voiced his regret that circumstances would not permit him to play cricket.

Bilawal's only previous political experience was serving as the vice president of the student council at the Rashid School for Boys in Dubai back in 2005. Further disadvantaging Bilawal, he reportedly cannot speak Urdu and is considered out of touch with life in Pakistan.

"He is just a young teenager," Pramit Chaudhuri, associate editor of the Hindustan Times, told us. "He grew up in Dubai and London and has virtually no experience in Pakistan. His mother kept him under tight wraps." A senior U.S. intelligence source concurred, telling us, "Bilawal is a 19-year-old kid. Like many 19-year-olds his political philosophy is still developing."

Under Pakistan's constitution, the head of a party needs to be eligible to run for parliament. Bilawal is too young (the minimum age is 25), but the fact that Asif Ali has been appointed the PPP's acting chairman and regent will probably insulate the party against legal challenges.

Asif Ali Zardari now runs the PPP's day-to-day operations as the parliamentary elections approach. Like his son, Asif Ali seemingly has no definable political philosophy. Indeed, it appears that democracy truly is "the best revenge" for him, considering how he managed to line his own pockets during his wife's rule.

Asif Ali wed Bhutto in an arranged marriage in 1987. He earned the nickname "Mr. Ten Percent" during Bhutto's stints as prime minister--the reference was to the value of his alleged kickbacks from each government contract. As a result, Asif Ali is frequently blamed for the corruption allegations that brought both of his wife's administrations to an end. Other allegations against Asif Ali range to the downright bizarre: he stood trial for allegedly trying to extort money from a British businessman "by attaching a bomb to his legs." He was acquitted of that charge.

After Bhutto's second government collapsed in 1996, Asif Ali faced corruption charges in Pakistan, Britain, Spain, and Switzerland for allegedly plundering $1.5 billion. Many Pakistanis suspect Zardari's involvement in the unsolved killing of Benazir Bhutto's brother Murtaza; his reputation is in fact so poor in Pakistan that rumors are now swirling that he was involved in his wife's assassination. Musharraf's government seemed intent on fueling these rumors when it suggested in early January that Asif Ali, and not Musharraf, had prevented an autopsy of Bhutto's body.

Needless to say, a man with this checkered history is unlikely to be an effective leader of a political party even under the best of circumstances.

But these are not the best of circumstances, and Asif Ali may find it difficult to hold the PPP together. Islamabad-based political commentator Ahmed Quraishi told us that the Bhutto family is privately suspicious of the will that Asif Ali relied on to take over the party's reins. "Nobody knew about it, not even the Bhutto family, nor any of Benazir Bhutto's political aides nor close associates within the party," he said.

"Zardari's rise to leadership marks the beginning of dissension within the PPP," B. Raman, former head of counterterrorism for India's external intelligence agency, told us. "It was a very unwise decision of the PPP to endorse Zardari, and very unwise of Benazir to have endorsed her husband."

There are already signs that Raman may be correct. Some members of the Bhutto family (who have controlled the PPP since its inception forty years ago) have signaled their rejection of the legitimacy of both Bilawal and Asif Ali. Though Bilawal recently adopted "Bhutto" as his middle name, some family members do not consider him a part of the dynastic line. "Bilawal is actually a member of the Zardari family," Saifullah Mehsud, a research analyst with the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore, told us. "They repositioned him as a Bhutto, but lineage is traced from the father and not the mother. He is a Zardari son."

Shortly after Bilawal's appointment, the Bhutto family patriarch, 74 year-old Mumtaz Bhutto, opined that "a real Bhutto" should have been appointed instead. Facing persecution under previous Pakistani governments is seen as a rite of passage in the PPP, and Mumtaz Bhutto stressed that the Zardari family has "made no sacrifices for the party. . . . The party has come into existence on the name and the sweat and the blood of the Bhutto family." Some party loyalists and Bhutto family members consider 25-year-old Fatima Bhutto as the rightful heir to the PPP's leadership. (Further complicating matters is the fact that Fatima is the daughter of Murtaza Bhutto--whose death many family insiders blame on Asif Ali Zardari.)

The PPP's fracturing is not inevitable, nor is it likely to occur before the Feb. 18 elections. An American intelligence source pointed out to us that the PPP's succession decision was rapid, and the party bosses have not revolted in protest. It is possible that the PPP can maintain its cohesion based on outrage at the Musharraf government's misdeeds alone, but there is skepticism at present that the current leadership can maintain its long-term credibility and effectiveness.

Even if the PPP does not collapse under the weight of internal bickering, the odds are overwhelmingly against anyone in the party leadership accomplishing the goals that Benazir Bhutto had upon her return to Pakistan. Since the PPP is Pakistan's only secular opposition party with true national reach, its weakening is significant for U.S. strategic interests.

Note:

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is a Zionist writer, whose commentaries are tilted towards a Zionist perspective. Whatever is in Israel best interest is in the interest of all Zionists. The  Zionist media and those who run it suffer from a Islamophobia. Theremission to see all traces of Islam disappear from Islamic societies.  Their hidden agenda is to publicise the crimes of terroristsand suicide bombers to their advantage in smearing Islam.  But, majority of muslims are unaware of this grand plan.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is the vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and author of My Year Inside Radical Islam.