[R-G] Aunt Benazir's false promises by Fatima Bhutto

[Tim Murphy]

 Read this in conjunction with the 13th December article in the London
Review of Books by Tariq Ali.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n24/ali_01_.html

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November 14, 2007
Los Angeles Times
www.latimes.com


Aunt Benazir's false promises

Bhutto's return bodes poorly for Pakistan -- and for democracy there.

By 

Fatima Bhutto 


KARACHI -- We Pakistanis live in uncertain times. Emergency rule has been
imposed for the 13th time in our short 60-year history. Thousands of lawyers
have been arrested, some charged with sedition and treason; the chief
justice has been deposed; and a draconian media law -- shutting down all
private news channels -- has been drafted. 

Perhaps the most bizarre part of this circus has been the hijacking of the
democratic cause by my aunt, the twice-disgraced former prime minister,
Benazir Bhutto. While she was hashing out a deal to share power with Gen.
Pervez Musharraf last month, she repeatedly insisted that without her,
democracy in Pakistan would be a lost cause. Now that the situation has
changed, she's saying that she wants Musharraf to step down and that she'd
like to make a deal with his opponents -- but still, she says, she's the
savior of democracy. 

The reality, however, is that there is no one better placed to benefit from
emergency rule than she is. Along with the leaders of prominent Islamic
parties, she has been spared the violent retributions of emergency law. Yes,
she now appears to be facing seven days of house arrest, but what does that
really mean? While she was supposedly under house arrest at her Islamabad
residence last week, 50 or so of her party members were comfortably allowed
to join her. She addressed the media twice from her garden, protected by
police given to her by the state, and was not reprimanded for holding a news
conference. (By contrast, the very suggestion that they might hold a news
conference has placed hundreds of other political activists under real
arrest, in real jails.)

Ms. Bhutto's political posturing is sheer pantomime. Her negotiations with
the military and her unseemly willingness until just a few days ago to take
part in Musharraf's regime have signaled once and for all to the growing
legions of fundamentalists across South Asia that democracy is just a guise
for dictatorship.

It is widely believed that Ms. Bhutto lost both her governments on grounds
of massive corruption. She and her husband, a man who came to be known in
Pakistan as "Mr. 10%," have been accused of stealing more than $1 billion
from Pakistan's treasury. She is appealing a money-laundering conviction by
the Swiss courts involving about $11 million. Corruption cases in Britain
and Spain are ongoing. 

It was particularly unappealing of Ms. Bhutto to ask Musharraf to bypass the
courts and drop the many corruption cases that still face her in Pakistan.
He agreed, creating the odiously titled National Reconciliation Ordinance in
order to do so. Her collaboration with him was so unsubtle that people on
the streets are now calling her party, the Pakistan People's Party, the
Pervez People's Party. Now she might like to distance herself, but it's too
late. 

Why did Ms. Bhutto and her party cronies demand that her corruption cases be
dropped, but not demand that the cases of activists jailed during the brutal
regime of dictator Zia ul-Haq (from 1977 to 1988) not be quashed? What about
the sanctity of the law? When her brother Mir Murtaza Bhutto -- my father --
returned to Pakistan in 1993, he faced 99 cases against him that had been
brought by Zia's military government. The cases all carried the death
penalty. Yet even though his sister was serving as prime minister, he did
not ask her to drop the cases. He returned, was arrested at the airport and
spent the remaining years of his life clearing his name, legally and with
confidence, in the courts of Pakistan. 

Ms. Bhutto's repeated promises to end fundamentalism and terrorism in
Pakistan strain credulity because, after all, the Taliban government that
ran Afghanistan was recognized by Pakistan under her last government --
making Pakistan one of only three governments in the world to do so. 

And I am suspicious of her talk of ensuring peace. My father was a member of
Parliament and a vocal critic of his sister's politics. He was killed
outside our home in 1996 in a carefully planned police assassination while
she was prime minister. There were 70 to 100 policemen at the scene, all the
streetlights had been shut off and the roads were cordoned off. Six men were
killed with my father. They were shot at point-blank range, suffered
multiple bullet wounds and were left to bleed on the streets.

My father was Benazir's younger brother. To this day, her role in his
assassination has never been adequately answered, although the tribunal
convened after his death under the leadership of three respected judges
concluded that it could not have taken place without approval from a "much
higher" political authority. 

I have personal reasons to fear the danger that Ms. Bhutto's presence in
Pakistan brings, but I am not alone. The Islamists are waiting at the gate.
They have been waiting for confirmation that the reforms for which the
Pakistani people have been struggling have been a farce, propped up by the
White House. Since Musharraf seized power in 1999, there has been an earnest
grass-roots movement for democratic reform. The last thing we need is to be
tied to a neocon agenda through a puppet "democrat" like Ms. Bhutto. 

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 certain of this. 

--

Fatima Bhutto is a Pakistani poet and writer. She is the daughter of Mir
Murtaza Bhutto, who was killed in 1996 in Karachi when his sister, Benazir,
was prime minister.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-bhutto14nov14,0,5254789
.story?coll=la-home-commentary

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