Benazir Bhutto - SZABIST

to call it a day. If that happens, it will be even more urgent that the world support a national
government, elections and a speedy return to civilian rule - and not another military dictatorship.
Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist, is the author of Taliban and Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam
in Central Asia
A warm, understanding and caring person
The Washington Post
December 28, 2007
Karan Thapar
Benazir was 19 when I first met her. I was the same age. At the time she was vice president of the
Oxford Union and I was her counterpart at Cambridge.
Benazir had a sense of timing, sense of humour and deft ability to riposte. But there was another side
to Benazir — the warm, understanding, caring and deeply human.
Many years later, in ’89 when she was the Prime Minister of Pakistan for the first time, my wife was
in a coma at a hospital in London with encephalitis. I had just returned from a visit to Pakistan where I
had met Benazir. Suddenly, one morning when I visited the hospital, the nurses were all aflutter.
There was an enormous bouquet that looked like a tree in Nisha’s room. “What’s this?” I asked. “It is
from the Prime Minister of Pakistan!” one of the nurses blurted out excitedly.
Later that evening, Benazir rang and asked why I hadn’t told her about Nisha. I muttered something
but she interrupted and said, “Remember Karan, We are friends”. For the next 3 weeks as Nisha lay
dying in London, Benazir made a point of ringing late at night at least every other day. I never forgot
what she repeatedly said: “Karan, you must learn to talk about what you are going through. Believe
me, it is the only way of coming to terms with it. I have been through it and I know what I am saying.”
Benazir was a supremely confident person. She had a great ability to determine how people saw her.
But inside she was a lady who often had deep doubts. She never showed them but they made her
human.
She told me about the last moments on the plane in 1986 which was the first time she returned to
Pakistan and took the country by storm. She deliberately chose to fly back via Lahore. As she said, I
have to make an impact in Lahore If I am going to make an impact in Pakistan. She took a Pakistan
International Airline flight from Saudi Arabia to Lahore and sitting in first class, alone she stared out
of the window into the clouds and said to herself, in just a couple of hours I will know if I have a
future or not.
When the plane landed, she scanned the horizon from the windows dismayed that the airport looked
empty and there wasn’t a soul in sight. As she told me later, “my heart sank”.
When she walked out of the plane, there were three solitary figures at the bottom of the stairs. They
were from her party. They looked at her, “Bibi jaan, don’t, there are a million people outside but Zia
won’t let anyone into the airport”.