Benazir Bhutto

• 1. Introduction

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  Benazir Bhutto was sworn in as prime minister of Pakistan on the 2nd of December 1988, at the age of 35. No woman had ever been elected to lead a democratic government in a Muslim-majority country. Party workers were urged to address her as Mohtarma, which means respected lady. She called her victory "the tipping point in the debate raging in the Muslim world on the role of women in Islam". The woman taking that oath had spent years under arrest, much of it in solitary confinement. Her story raises hard questions. How did a graduate of Harvard and Oxford, raised among visiting diplomats, come to lead a party built by her father? Why did generals, presidents and even her own relatives work against her? How could a leader elected twice be removed from office twice? And what happened in the final weeks of 2007 that brought her life to an end?

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• 2. Education of a Politician

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  Pinto's Nursing Home in Karachi was where Benazir Bhutto was born on the 21st of June 1953. Her father was the barrister and politician Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Her mother, Nusrat, had been born in Isfahan to a wealthy merchant family of Kurdish descent. The Bhuttos were Sindhi landlords, part of the landed gentry known as waderos. Benazir was the eldest child, named for an aunt who had died young. Three siblings followed: Murtaza in 1954, Sanam in 1957 and Shahnawaz in 1958.

  English was Benazir's first language. She spoke Urdu less often, barely spoke Sindhi, and learned some Persian from her mother. She attended convent schools in Karachi and then a boarding school in Murree, near the Indian border. During the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 the pupils practised air-raid drills. In December 1968 she passed her O-levels with high grades. Her father encouraged her schooling against the traditional attitudes toward women that were common in Pakistan.

  Diplomats walked through her childhood home. When she was five her father became minister for energy, and when she was nine he became foreign minister. Visitors included Zhou Enlai, Henry Kissinger and Hubert Humphrey. At fourteen she saw him found the Pakistan People's Party, whose motto declared "Islam is our faith, democracy is our policy, socialism is our economy." Its promise of "roti, kapra aur makan" meant bread, clothes and housing for every Pakistani. Benazir joined at once. Behind the public confidence her parents' marriage was strained, and Nusrat was once thrown out of the family home. Bhutto never acknowledged this publicly.

  From 1969 to 1973 she studied at Radcliffe College, part of Harvard University. She began at sixteen, younger than usual, after her father pulled strings. He asked his friend John Kenneth Galbraith to act as her local guardian. Through Galbraith she met his son Peter, who became a lifelong friend. A fellow student recalled that she "cried most of her first semester". Years later she called Harvard "four of the happiest years of my life". She worked as a campus tour guide, joined a Moratorium Day protest against the Vietnam War on Boston Common, and graduated cum laude in comparative government.

  In 1972 she went to the India-Pakistan Summit in Simla in place of her ill mother. There she met Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, and the Indian press noticed her. She explained the attention by saying she "symbolised a new generation." In 1974 she accompanied her father to a summit in Lahore, where she met Muammar Gaddafi, Anwar Sadat and Hafez al-Assad.

  In autumn 1973 she moved to Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics. She earned a second-class degree and then took a one-year postgraduate course in international law and diplomacy at St Catherine's College. One classmate said she "epitomised the classic spoilt rich girl from a third world country". Other friends found her funny and intellectually curious. In 1977 she became President of the Oxford Union, the first Asian woman to hold the post. Her close friend Victoria Schofield succeeded her after a three-month term. Biographer Brooke Allen judged Oxford the happiest, most carefree time of her life.

  She also campaigned for Oxford to give her father an honorary degree, with support from his old tutor, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. Protesters opposed her, citing his alleged role in atrocities during the Bangladesh Liberation War, and the university declined. Bhutto later admitted she had not known of the army's complicity, but she always defended her father. In June 1977 she returned to Pakistan, planning a career in the Foreign Service. She was scheduled to sit its entrance exams later that year.

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• 3. Father's Shadow

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  Operation Fair Play was the name given to the military coup of July 1977, in which General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Zulfikar Bhutto. Zulfikar had just been re-elected. Both father and daughter suspected that the American Central Intelligence Agency had helped. Zulfikar claimed that in 1975 Henry Kissinger had threatened to make "a horrible example" of him unless he ended Pakistan's efforts to build a nuclear bomb. Zia suspended the constitution and began a regime that paired military rule with a program of Islamisation. Socialists, intellectuals and journalists were arrested.

  Zulfikar was first held for under a month. When a crowd of over one million people welcomed his release in Karachi, Zia decided to eliminate him. In September he was arrested again, charged with the 1974 murder of Muhammad Ahmed Khan Kasuri, the father of one of his critics. Benazir's brothers went abroad to seek support. She and her mother stayed, were detained repeatedly for short periods, and published a book about him. Benazir helped prepare his defence. The Lahore High Court sentenced him to death and the Supreme Court upheld the sentence. Former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark attended the trial and called it a kangaroo court.

  Zulfikar urged his wife and daughter to leave the country, but they refused. He was hanged in April 1979. Benazir and Nusrat were jailed for six months, then kept under house arrest for six more. They were fully released in April 1980. Nusrat had been named co-chair of the People's Party, and Benazir joined its central committee in October 1977. After her father's death she became its co-leader. In February 1981 she helped found the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy, an alliance of the People's Party with other parties. Its four-point program demanded an end to martial law, restoration of the 1973 constitution, parliamentary elections and a transfer of power to elected representatives. She also opposed the Hudood Ordinances of 1979, which she said discriminated against women.

  Her brothers Murtaza and Shahnawaz chose a different path. They founded Al Zulfikar, a group trained for assassination and sabotage against Zia. After Al Zulfikar orchestrated the 1981 hijacking of a Pakistan International Airlines plane, the government used it as a pretext to arrest Benazir and her mother again in March. She disapproved of the hijacking, believing it helped Zia, and her punishment may have worsened tension with her brothers.

  In July 1981 Nusrat was freed to seek treatment for cancer abroad, but Benazir was not. She was moved between Karachi and Sukkur prison, mostly in solitary confinement, and suffered hair loss, gynaecological problems and anorexia. In December she went to house arrest, where she stayed for two years. Meanwhile, in the United States, Peter Galbraith rallied support from politicians including Claiborne Pell and James Buckley. They raised her case with Zia when he visited Washington in December 1982. Under international pressure, the government put her on a flight to Geneva in January 1984.

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• 4. Homecoming and Victory

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  A flat in London's Barbican Estate became Benazir Bhutto's home after surgery on her mastoid. Friends said she was in "a mildly traumatised state, jumping at sudden noise and worrying about who might be spying on her". Still, she held dinner parties and went to the cinema. Her flat became the unofficial headquarters of People's Party exiles, who worked to publicise Zia's political prisoners. Some elder members worried that she was not committed enough to socialism and that the party was becoming a Bhutto family fiefdom. Murtaza believed he, not she, was their father's chosen heir, pointing to his management of the family's Larkana constituency in 1977.

  In July 1985 Shahnawaz died in Cannes under unexplained circumstances. Bhutto variously blamed his wife Raehana or Zia. Zia's government let her bring his body home for burial at Larkana, then placed her under house arrest until November. In December 1985 martial law was lifted. She arrived at Lahore Airport in April 1986 to a large crowd. An estimated two million people came to hear her speak at Iqbal Park. After a pro-democracy rally on Independence Day she was arrested again and held for weeks in Landhi Jail.

  Her mother chose her husband. Asif Ali Zardari came from a landowning family, and the wedding in Karachi in December 1987 was billed as the "People's Wedding". A party in a Lyari stadium drew 200,000 guests. Some fired Kalashnikovs into the air in celebration, and one person died by accident. Bhutto kept her own surname. She soon became pregnant and gave birth to a son, Bilawal.

  In May 1988 Zia dissolved the assemblies and called a November election. His date may have been chosen to coincide with the birth of her child. He also declared that candidates would stand as individuals rather than for parties. Then in August Zia died when his aircraft crashed after taking off from Bahawalpur. A joint U.S.-Pakistani investigation could not establish the cause. Sabotage was widely suspected, and Bhutto privately called it an act of God. The Supreme Court ruled that the election would go ahead on a party basis.

  The People's Party campaigned separately from its old alliance and dropped its socialist platform for economic Thatcherism and free markets. Some 18,000 people applied to be its candidates, many offering money, which upset longtime members. Zia loyalists and Islamic fundamentalists formed the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad, funded by the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, which also rigged votes. Their propaganda included a photo of her dancing in a Parisian nightclub. Even so, the People's Party won 93 of the 205 contested seats against 54 for its rival, which held the province of Punjab. President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, reluctant, invited her to form a government only two weeks after the vote. She built a coalition with the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, which held 13 seats.

  In that same year she published an autobiography, titled Daughter of the East in Britain and Daughter of Destiny in the United States. An American ghost writer assisted her. Brooke Allen called it "pre-eminently a political performance" aimed at Western readers. Allen noted factual falsifications, including a claim that her mother had urged her to wear the burqa.

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• 5. Generals and Presidents

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  Three men controlled the country that Bhutto inherited in 1988: Chief of Army Staff Aslam Beg, Inter-Services Intelligence chief Hamid Gul and President Ghulam Ishaq Khan. All three held her family in contempt. Her first cabinet was the largest in Pakistan's history. She made herself treasury minister, her mother a senior minister without portfolio and her father-in-law chair of the public accounts committee. Hopes that she would break with cronyism faded. Some of the party's old guard, including Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, left in frustration at her pro-capitalist turn.

  Still, her government freed political prisoners jailed under Zia and lifted the bans on trade unions and student associations. It loosened rules on non-governmental organisations and moved against media censorship. She asked Shamsul Hasan to dismantle the National Press Trust, a chain of over 15 newspapers, but President Khan delayed the paperwork. It was broken up only during her second term. New literacy centres and pension rights followed, and fees imposed under Zia were abolished.

  Money was the problem. Zia had borrowed at high interest to pay government wages, and the state was bankrupt. She had promised a million new homes each year and free universal education and healthcare, none of which the treasury could fund. Beg warned her that the army would not tolerate interference in defence and foreign affairs. She won small fights, such as installing General Tikka Khan as governor of Punjab. She lost bigger ones: Khan refused to let her replace the chair of the joint chiefs, and the military rejected her choice for president. Allen said she "won some battles but ultimately lost the war".

  Another rival ran Punjab, home to 60 percent of the population. Nawaz Sharif, Zia's protege, was its chief minister, and he refused the federal officials she posted there. In April 1989 the opposition called a no-confidence vote, and she survived by 12 votes. She claimed that Osama bin Laden had supplied $10 million to bribe members of the assembly. That same month, Hamid Gul led a failed push to seize Jalalabad in Afghanistan. He blamed leaks from her circle. In May she moved him out of the intelligence agency.

  Operation Midnight Jackal, run by the intelligence service, used bribery and intimidation to peel assembly members away from her party. In late 1989 the Muttahida Qaumi Movement left her coalition, and by May 1990 she was sending the army to restore order in Karachi and Hyderabad. Her husband was drawing scandal too. He attended cabinet meetings without being a member and earned the nickname "Mr Ten Percent". The intelligence service spied on the couple, and President Khan privately paid plaintiffs to sue Zardari. Yet there was also significant evidence of his guilt.

  In August 1990 Khan used the Eighth Amendment to dismiss her government, citing corruption and disorder. In October Zardari was arrested on extortion charges, and he stayed in prison for three years. At the October 1990 election her party won only 45 of 217 seats and Sharif became prime minister. As opposition leader, Bhutto led a 10-mile march from Rawalpindi to Islamabad in November 1992 and was placed under house arrest. In April 1993 Khan dismissed Sharif too, and the two men agreed to step down together. During the campaign that followed, Ramzi Yousef twice tried and failed to assassinate her.

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• 6. Bombs and Borders

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  Rajiv Gandhi and his wife Sonia spent three days in Islamabad as Bhutto's guests after a regional summit in 1989. She withdrew Zia's proposed no-war pact, named the 1972 Simla Agreement as the basis for future relations, and cancelled Zia's offer of the Nishan-e-Pakistan award to Morarji Desai. Both countries agreed to reduce forces along the border and not to attack each other's nuclear installations. Islamist critics attacked the thaw. They hinted at an affair with Gandhi, called her a secret Indian agent and pointed to a Hindu paternal grandmother.

  She then hardened her line on Kashmir. She asked the United Nations to oversee the plebiscite promised in 1948. She visited a training camp for pro-independence Kashmiris and pledged $5 million for their cause. In 1990 Major General Pervez Musharraf proposed a military move on Kargil, and she refused it, fearing international condemnation. Even so, with both armies mobilising, there were fears of nuclear war. American envoy Robert Gates flew in. He missed Bhutto, who was in Yemen, but told President Khan that Washington would not back Pakistani military action. The Kashmiri camps in Pakistan were closed.

  How much she knew about Pakistan's nuclear program is unclear. President Khan and the military were reluctant to brief her, and she said she contacted scientists such as A. Q. Khan on her own. Before Congress she said, "we do not possess, nor do we intend to make, a nuclear device". In Washington, CIA director William Webster showed her a mock-up of the weapon, which came as a shock. President George H. W. Bush warned that American aid would stop if Pakistan made nuclear bomb cores. Between January and March 1989 she authorised cold tests, without fissionable material, which did not satisfy the military. In 1990 Ambassador Robert Oakley told her that satellites showed weapons-grade uranium being produced at Kahuta.

  Back in office in 1993, she says she demanded to know why Kahuta had defied her and tightened security there. The military still wanted the material. India's Agni missile worried planners, and Pakistan struck a deal with North Korea to trade enrichment knowledge for missile technology. Bhutto later said she carried a CD of nuclear data to North Korea in 1993, but she retracted the claim. On a state visit in 1995 she persuaded Congress to repeal sanctions imposed over the nuclear program in 1990. She also urged President Bill Clinton to revise the Pressler Amendment.

  Elsewhere she cultivated different partners. She made repeated trips to Beijing. According to the account, she brought Musharraf on a 1993 American visit for a secret meeting with Israeli officials, and a final meeting followed in 1995. In September 1996 the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, and hers was one of only three governments to recognise them. At the Dorchester Hotel in London, Islamist protesters gathered outside. She told British prime minister John Major that Salafi ideology was growing in Britain and would create problems for Western countries in the future.

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• 7. Power and Its Price

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  Her second oath came on the 19th of October 1993, after an election in which her party won 86 seats to the 73 of Sharif's new Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz). She held a weaker mandate than in 1988. Determined to avoid another hostile president, she ensured that a loyalist, Farooq Leghari, won the office in November. Zardari was freed from prison and appointed investment minister, among other posts. She gave him a monopoly on gold imports that earned him $10 million, which he deposited in an Indian bank.

  John Burns of The New York Times investigated the couple's business deals. By 1996 their takings were estimated at $1.5 billion. Pakistan's Accountability Bureau found that in one year Bhutto, her husband and her mother declared only $1.2 million in assets, leaving out foreign accounts and properties. In 1993 and 1994 Bhutto paid no income tax at all. Transparency International ranked Pakistan the world's second most corrupt country in 1996. She ordered a 110-acre residence in Islamabad that cost $50 million. In 1995 Zardari bought a fifteen-bedroom house at Rockwood in Surrey through companies based on the Isle of Man. She also made 24 foreign trips in the first twelve months of the term.

  Her record on women's rights was mixed. She signed Pakistan to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and helped found the Council of Women World Leaders in 1996. She created a women's division in government and a women's bank. She opened all-female police stations and set up family courts with female judges. In 1994-95 the first women judges joined the Supreme Courts of Peshawar and Sindh. But Zia's Islamic laws stayed in place, and her failure to remove them damaged relations with women's and human rights groups.

  This time she embraced privatisation openly, as Sharif had. More than 42 billion rupees were raised from sales of nationalised banks and utilities. Pakistan drew a record $20 billion in foreign investment, mostly in power, and entered the world's top ten developing capital markets. Yet 70 percent of revenue went on debt, and most of the rest went to the military. Poverty rose to 33 percent, and the 1995 budget brought strikes and demonstrations.

  In Karachi, abductions, bombings and murders multiplied. Bhutto let interior minister Naseerullah Babar launch Operation Blue Fox against the Muttahida Qaumi Movement. The government said that 3,000 people were killed, although the real toll may have been far higher. Amnesty International found torture, rape and extrajudicial killings still common in Pakistani prisons.

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• 8. Family and Fall

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  Murtaza Bhutto won a seat in the Sindh assembly in 1993 while still living in Syria. His mother, Nusrat, campaigned for him against Benazir's wishes, since Benazir feared him as a rival for the party. He flew home in November. About ninety criminal charges dated from the Zia era, so he was arrested and held for eight months in solitary confinement. Some suggested Benazir allowed this to satisfy officials who insisted he face trial. He was freed on bail in June 1994 and later acquitted of every charge.

  He set up his own party in 1995, the PPP (Shaheed Bhutto), and called his sister "Begum Zardari". He blamed her husband for government corruption. He hung a picture of Zardari in a guest toilet, and a rumour spread that bodyguards pinned Zardari down and shaved half his moustache. Nusrat sided with Murtaza. Benazir removed her from the party co-chair, and Nusrat told The New York Times, "She's talked a lot about democracy, but she's become a little dictator."

  On the 20th of September 1996 police ambushed Murtaza near Karachi, killing him and seven others. Two witnesses died in custody. His supporters blamed Benazir and Zardari, and they threw rocks at her car when she tried to reach the funeral in Larkana. At the funeral Nusrat, who had early Alzheimer's disease, also blamed her. Benazir pointed to a plot against the family and suggested President Leghari was involved. She invited Scotland Yard to investigate, but the case went unsolved. Afterward she rebuilt her bond with her mother.

  After her brother's killing, a failed coup in 1995 and a bribery scandal involving her and her husband, Leghari dismissed her government. Her party suffered a historic defeat at the 1997 election. In 1998 she left Pakistan again, living between Dubai and London for the next decade. A Swiss court convicted her in 2003 as a corruption inquiry widened.

  American-brokered talks with President Pervez Musharraf opened the way for her return in 2007, to contest the 2008 elections. Her platform stressed civilian oversight of the military and opposition to rising Islamist violence. She was assassinated on the 27th of December 2007 after a political rally in Rawalpindi. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility, though the Pakistani Taliban and rogue intelligence elements were also suspected. She was buried at her family mausoleum in Garhi Khuda Bakhsh.

  Opinions of Bhutto stayed divided. Islamist and conservative groups called her inexperienced and corrupt and opposed her secular agenda. Early in her career she had been popular at home and abroad as a champion of democracy. After her death she came to be regarded as an icon for women's rights.

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