Benazir Bhutto - SZABIST

whose penetration of the establishment compromised security for the man on the street and those who
claim to speak for them. It's only apt then that hours after her remains were interred in the Bhutto
family mausoleum deep in the Sindhi heartland at Garhi Khuda Baksh - a day after an assassin felled
her at a high octane rally in Liaquat Bagh in the garrison town of Rawalpindi - the controversy
surrounding her death has risen like a spectre.
The conflicting stories would have been torn apart in seconds by Bhutto, adept at deconstructing spin.
A day after the October 18 failed assassination attempt Bhutto sat with me in her Karachi home
Bilawal House and named the two men she believed were behind the attempt to eliminate her. The
rise of another Bhutto to upset the carefully built "mullah-military-madrassa" edifice would not be
allowed. But coaxed by Washington and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who used her as a
human pawn in America's bloody chessboard, this woman had gathered up the courage to face the
very men who systematically remove anyone who posed a threat to their idea of the ideological
moorings of the state of Pakistan.
Foolhardy? Perhaps. Especially when she readily admitted that Washington's blessings were a kiss of
death. But as the water cannons hosed down Shar-e-Faisal where she narrowly escaped death the night
before, removing all the evidence so that it will never be known whether it was a suicide bomber or a
bomb planted in an abandoned car left on the divider that killed some 150 of her supporters and she
upped the ante by calling for an independent judicial inquiry, she knew it was a plea that would fall on
deaf ears.
No eye witness accounts were sought, no judicial inquiry, no public debate allowed in an
unprecedented media clampdown. Ten weeks later, 12 days away from the polls and with growing
evidence that this was a Bhutto on an electoral roll, the assassins struck.
Clearly, the trained marksmen who converged around her vehicle had studied her campaign, knew
when the populist leader was at her most vulnerable - when she would be drawn by the magnet of
crowds to emerge from her bullet proof vehicle to connect with her people.
The video footage released by officialdom shows a man with a gun to her left. Eyewitnesses inside the
car who cradled their mortally wounded, dying leader as they tried to get to hospital say the explosion
that wrecked the vehicle came after she slumped back soundlessly through the hatch. Her trusted legal
and political aides insist she had three bullet wounds to her neck, head and chest.
That changing the cause of death from bullets to shrapnel to a lever that cracked her skull is to remove
the idea of complicity of the military. The lack of a post mortem, a dubious medical report, the haste
with which a twice elected prime minister was buried without requisite state honours, the speed with
which the spot where she died was hosed down and naming Baitullah Mehsud as the terminator can
only raise questions of a cover up.
As for elections, her Pakistan People's Party would probably sweep polls buoyed by a sympathy
factor, having quite the opposite effect intended by the masterminds. With ally Nawaz Sharif refusing
to cash in and participate, the election is already a farce. In death as in life, this remarkable woman's
beliefs will continue to determine whether her country heads towards the abyss or the phrase she made
her own - "transition to democracy". A woman to whom one can never say goodbye.
Neena Gopal is an analyst on Asia
Gulf News
December 30, 2007