Benazir Bhutto - SZABIST

ministers, sitting or former, who have been eliminated through unnatural death within the precincts of
the province of Punjab. Liaquat Ali Khan fell to an assassin's bullet in 1951, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was a
victim of judicial murder and was hanged at Rawalpindi jail in 1979 and, now, Benazir Bhutto has
been eliminated under similar circumstances. Do we simply call it a tragic coincidence, or is it all part
of a murderous conspiracy that Pakistan has been resonating with through the tumultuous years of its
independence?
Truly, it is a horrific end to a unique and distinctive political career of a woman who rose to fame as a
brave and heroic personage defying the shackles of military dictatorship at its most brutal. She was
subjected to inhuman and prolonged incarcerations, even solitary confinements, but never
compromised in the face of grave and daunting odds. She came back to Pakistan to a rousing and
rapturous welcome in 1986 and walked into the echelons of power as the first elected woman Prime
Minister of a Muslim country. Sent packing after only seventeen months in power through the use of
the draconian 58 (2)-B, she staged a comeback for another stint as Prime Minister in the mid nineties.
An early termination of her second tenure, again through the use of undemocratic means, led to a
prolonged self-exile that finished with her triumphant, but sullied, return earlier this year. For the first
time in her illustrious career, she carried the indelible stigma of a purported compromise with the
sitting military ruler in the shape of the National Reconciliation Ordinance. Her version was that she
was struggling for the advent of democracy in the country, while her adversaries dubbed it as a painful
and self-serving surrender before the dictate emanating from the barrel of the gun.
To facilitate her homecoming, she may have inflicted a mortal wound on the nascent democratic
aspirations of the people of Pakistan and offered another lease of life to the rule of an army general
that looked extremely shaky in confronting the judicial crisis and the subsequent protest, vociferously
led by various segments of the civil society. Her continual denial to sit with the opposition, on one
pretext or the other, was also a principal reason for the elusive unity within their ranks that frustrated
the prospect of a joint struggle to permanently dismantle the edifice of the military rule from the
country.
This is now part of history as is the legacy that she has left behind, but there is no denying her sagacity
in the face of indomitable odds and threats. Her recent return to the country was, by itself, an act of
remarkable courage. She knew there were lurking dangers for her. She knew there would be elements
out to eliminate her. She knew the ignominious role of the establishment in the task of sabotaging all
pursuits for the initiation of a democratic polity in the country. She knew all that, maybe some more,
but she staged a courageous comeback to lead her party and her supporters to the elections.
Blaming the terrorists alone for this heinous act is a gross travesty of justice. Who has nurtured these
wicked nurseries of hatred? Have the trees been laden with them that they have just popped down to
vandalise the country? In whose tenure have they sprouted forth and what are the reasons and
motivations behind their evil emergence? What policies have contributed to their rapid and rampaging
flourishing? Who engineered them and whose purpose are they serving? Is there a Machiavellian
intent to their presence here and the tasks that they are rendering? Observe this for instance: the
manner in which Benazir's body has been removed to her hometown is eerily reminiscent of the
mysterious circumstances that surrounded the despatch of her father's remains - the flight of a C-130
shrouded in the dark of the night!
With her tragic and dastardly elimination, the forthcoming farce, called the national elections, has lost
all relevance. Not that they ever carried any credibility in the first instance, but, in the drastically