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A year ago, two
times elected Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was brutally murdered on
December 27, 2007, while coming back from an energetic election
gathering in Rawalpindi. She had survived a near miss assassination
attempt in
Karachi
on October 18th of the same year, where around 140 of her supporters
died and many more injured. She had returned after an eight-year of
self-imposed exile.
Benazir saw a well
planned conspiracy behind the Karachi attack and repeatedly pointed
out to an unusual act of turning off the street lights, while her
procession approached a certain point. She had called for an inquiry
of the incident and also tried to register the First Information
Report (FIR) with the concerned police station. Her request was denied
by the Musharraf government and instead a government compliant was
launched, which as according to the Pakistani laws and rules was
highly unusual.
She also wrote a
letter to the military ruler, naming four persons whom she thought
might be responsible for attack on her. With the exception of one, all
others were close allies and part of the Musharraf regime. However,
the military ruler hurriedly blamed the warring tribes of North
Waziristan and Al Qaeda for the attack, a feat which he repeated after
her assassination.
In another
development, she wrote an email to her spokesman Mark Siegel. In that
she explicitly suspected Musharraf for hatching a plot to kill her.
She said that if anything happened to her, Musharraf will be
responsible. She wrote, “I wld [sic] hold Musharaf [sic] responsible.
I have been made to feel insecure by his minions”. This email was read
by Wolf Blitzer on CNN “The Situation Rooms”, soon after her
assassination.
Since her tragic
assassination, she has been symbolically honored by her husband and
the party which rules in the center and three provinces. In the Punjab
it is part of the coalition government but exerts itself enough
through the federally appointed governor. Some of the symbolic
gestures include the naming of the Islamabad airport, the Rawalpindi
main road and a hospital after her. On her first anniversary the
postal department has issued a 10-rupee coin with her portrait and
inscription of “Daughter of the East (in Urdu).
On the contrary,
after her assignation, no FIR has been registered till today, by
Benazir’s family or by her party, nor has there been any serious
attempt to investigate her assassination, although all the
intelligence agencies are under the control of President Asif Ali
Zardari. A request has been made to the United Nations to probe the
matter, which many view it as an eye wash and non productive.
When it comes to
real values and convictions in which she believed, they are far from
being realized. The question that comes to the mind of every Pakistani
is the kind of
Pakistan
she has left and what could have been different if she had been the
Prime Minister.
No one can deny
that there would have been a marked difference, for the better, both
in style and content of the governance - visibly far better, from what
we are witnessing today.
The Chief Justice
Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry would have been restored the first day of
the commencement of the newly elected parliament and that notorious
17th amendment in the constitution repealed, long ago.
She wrote in her
book,
Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West, that “the removal
of the chief justice “became the catalyst to trigger pent-up fury
against General Musharraf’s regime”, and that the PPP and others
joined the movement to restore the chief justice to frustrate attempts
to sabotage democracy and the elections.
If Benazir Bhutto
had been the Prime Minister, certainly the language and acts of her
cabinet would have been much more dignified and less embarrassing, and
above all, the discrepancy in the statements of the ministers avoided
under the leadership of more aware and educated head of the
government.
It is alleged that
she came back to Pakistan from exile as a result of an understanding
with the military dictator Musharraf, brokered by the western
countries. There is also enough evidence to argue that after she
settled down in an entirely transformed Pakistan, she started to move
away from Musharraf, to his utter annoyance and worked for more
cooperation with the political forces. This was the time when she
successfully pleaded with Nawaz Sharif to participate in the
forthcoming elections, to frustrate plans for rigging the elections,
which would have perpetuated Musharraf’s rule.
During her exile
she had matured to be a statesman of some caliber, admitting that
mistakes were made during her two tenures as Prime Minister. Both
occasions were marred by bad governance, corruption and malice against
her political rivals.
But now, she had
vouched to work with the political forces to consolidate democracy and
fair play in the country. In this respect Charter of Democracy of May
2006 was signed with her main rival Nawaz Sharif. The charter provided
a roadmap for a vibrant new
Pakistan,
with institution building for the promotion of democracy. So far, not
even a single clause of the charter has been implemented by her widow,
Mr. Asif Zardari.
Unfortunately, the
custodians of Benazir Bhutto’s legacy are those who do not comprehend
the kind of a vision she had in her mind when she returned to
Pakistan, only to be removed from the sight.
Dr. Farooq Hasnat
is a scholar at an American based think tank called The Middle East
Institute. Dr. Hasnat served as a Professor at the University of
Jordan's Institute for Strategic Studies, as a researcher at the
University
of Innsbruck (Austria), and as a course coordinator for the
Pakistan. |
