How will Benazir Bhutto be remembered? Discussing Reconciliation on Radio 4’s
Start the Week, the presenter Andrew Marr got so excited by her legacy and
achievement that he said, “At the risk of straying across lines of
neutrality, I think the more people that read this book, the better.” The
book comes garlanded with acclaim from the likes of Senator Edward Kennedy
and Madeleine Albright. But does the praise lavished on Benazir since her
assassination bear any relation to what she actually did during her life?
Let me tell you about the former Pakistani prime minister, Mohammed Mohammed,
an ugly man with a thick beard.
During his first term in office he failed to pass a single piece of
legislation, and when he returned to government he and his family became
extremely rich from kickbacks on official contracts. He bugged and harassed
independent journalists. In the mid1990s, his paramilitary death squads
eliminated activists from the rival MQM in Karachi and he was implicated in
the murder of his own brother, as well as the deaths of three family
retainers in his mother’s entourage. He funded a proxy war against India in
Kashmir using Arab jihadis, and backed the rise of the Taliban in
Afghanistan; indeed, if he had not given cash, fuel, training and military
spare parts to the Taliban, it would not have been able to rise to power.
Mohammed Mohammed never, of course, existed: I am talking here about Benazir
Bhutto. She was brave, glamorous, feisty and articulate – and the midwife of
the Taliban. To a western audience (which she always handled impeccably,
flattering reporters with access) she came across as a secular democrat and
a committed campaigner for women’s rights. On David Frost’s sofa, Benazir
could change from cute to solemn in a moment. As the first woman elected to
lead a Muslim country, she offered huge symbolic hope. Since her death, she
has been praised extensively: a television anchor even wrote an article
about introducing Benazir to the joys of buying lingerie from Victoria’s
Secret. Ironically, it was left to the socialite Jemima Khan to puncture the
balloon. Khan concluded from her own years of living in Pakistan – as the
wife of Imran Khan, Benazir’s political rival – that Benazir was “as
ruthless and conniving as they come — a kleptocrat in a Hermès headscarf”.
Reconciliation is an odd book. It seems to have been put together by a variety
of people. Parts of it are readable and well argued, and deserve to be
remembered as Benazir’s last testament, a statement of the ideals she
aspired to but did not always fulfil. Other bits are tendentious and
irrelevant. The first chapter is vintage Benazir, written in the same tone
as her autobiography, Daughter of the East. She describes her return to
Pakistan from exile at the end of last year, and her triumphal homecoming
procession: “I must confess I felt safe in the enormous sea of love and
support that surrounded me,” she wrote.
It was obvious to anyone in Pakistan at the time that she would be targeted as
an American stooge, but she went ahead with the procession. A suicide bomber
struck, leaving nearly 200 people dead, but Benazir survived. She made much
in the book of the fact that the dictator General Pervez Musharraf did not
provide her with sufficient security, asserting: “Had the jammers worked,
the bombs could not have gone off.” But suicide bombers use toggle switches,
which are not blocked by jammers. Either way, another terrorist killed
Benazir only weeks later on December 27, 2007.
The next section of Reconciliation deals with the internal disputes within
Islam. It is frank about the sectarian splits between Sunnis and Shias, and
about the failure of the leaders of some Muslim countries to face down the
distortions of Osama Bin Laden. Benazir noted the lack of interest on Arab
television channels in the genocide of a Muslim population in Darfur, and
the “unwillingness within the Muslim world to look inward and to identify
where we may be going wrong ourselves”.
Using verses from the Koran, she has made a careful and reasonable case for
seeing the ideology of Al-Qaeda as a profound distortion of original Islam,
and has presented an alternative argument for believing in a reformist,
pluralistic and modern Islamic society, and seeing it as closer to the real
wishes of most of the world’s Muslims.
At this point, the tone of the book changes again, and the reader is treated
to a brisk and baffling examination of the history of assorted countries
including Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Iran, Mali and Congo; even Kazakhstan is
mentioned. India (the elephant in the room when it came to Benazir’s view of
the world) gets only a brief mention. The history of Pakistan that follows
is like something out of a primary-school textbook, crossed with a party
political broadcast. The achievements of the Bhutto family are exaggerated
and lauded and their mistakes and hypocrisies are ignored. Benazir’s
grandfather, Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto, a feudal landowner and a pro-British
politician of no great importance, is presented as a seminal figure in the
creation of Pakistan in 1947. Benazir’s own backing of the Taliban is blamed
on her successor, Nawaz Sharif.
The book ends with a prescription for a happier world, involving an equivalent
of the Marshall Plan being applied to the poorer Muslim nations by rich
countries, and a nuanced analysis of Samuel P Huntington’s The Clash of
Civilisations, an essay published in 1993 in the journal Foreign Affairs.
What are we to make of this strange book? I contacted Mark Siegel, Benazir’s
point man in Washington, who helped her to research and write it. I asked
him how it had been created, and he said that Benazir had been troubled by
the way that extremists had hijacked the message of Islam. “She wanted me to
compile all the assertions of extremist clerics and terrorists on democracy,
pluralism, tolerance . . . Then she wanted me to confer with Islamic
scholars and compile the Koranic references to the same subjects and line
them out in an array, almost a spreadsheet, against the extremists.” He did
his job well, and Benazir wrote a draft of the narrative.
Benazir was, by all accounts, a devoted patriot, a loyal friend and a loving
mother. As a young woman at Harvard and Oxford universities, she imbibed
idealistic ideas about democracy and feminism. But during the early 1980s
she was to be cruelly mistreated by the dictator General Zia, taken from
prison to prison and held for a time in a cage at a desert jail in Sindh,
where temperatures would reach above 50C. This — and her father’s judicial
execution — formed her political personality. Benazir was duplicitous to the
point of being delusional, playing a constant multiple game, saying one
thing to her supporters, another to the Pakistani army, another to the
intelligence services, another to London and Washington, and something else
again to the western media. She was a complex and brave woman, but she was
no Joan of Arc, let alone a Margaret Thatcher, an Indira Gandhi or a Golda
Meir.
READ ON
websites: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3101102.ece
Benazir Bhutto's obituary in The Times
RECONCILIATION: Islam, Democracy and the West by Benazir Bhutto
Simon & Schuster £17.99 pp328
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £16.19 (inc p&p)
on 0870 165 8585
Benazir has to be judged by what she did with the power that she had. Unfortunately, despite having been a supporter of her once, I have to say that she did nothing to benefit the people who elected her twice.
Many of her actions, like that of any leader were good and many bad. Being the "midwife of the Taliban" was a strategy shaped by what was perceived by her and her advisers as a national need. Ideally that was wrong, not because the Taliban are perceived as anti-West which they never were but because their ideology was and remains against the Quran.
Unlike her father, who despite his hugely flawed personality, did achieve a lot (and his legacy is also very mixed) she did not have his genius and abilities. External and internal factors also conspired to detract her and she was not able to achieve anything substantial.
Saad H. Bashir,
Karacahi, Pakistan
Saad H. Bashir, Karachi, Pakistan