‘Miracles can happen,” declared Benazir Bhutto at Dubai airport in October,
just before she said farewell to her husband and two daughters and swept
onto the plane that was to take her out of exile and back to Pakistan. “I
believe in miracles.” She looked radiant as she spoke and far younger than
her 54 years. Her eyes shone as, with the apparent backing of both General
Pervez Musharraf and Washington, she once more glimpsed the prize of prime
minister within her grasp.
This was no longer the woman who struggled with her weight as she tried to
forget her sorrows in Ben & Jerry’s caramel fudge ice-cream, yoga
classes and self-help books. Dressed in an emerald green and white salwar
kameez, Pakistan’s national colours, she was again the iconic first woman
leader of a modern Muslim nation that she had been 20 years before, going
off to save her country.
Such was Bhutto’s passion about her return that it was easy to forget the
realities of today’s Pakistan: suicide bombs have become a daily occurrence,
militant groups this year laid siege to a mosque a mile from the presidency
and the Taliban have taken over much of the country’s favourite tourist
resort of Swat, just 60 miles from the capital. Moreover, the all-powerful
military and intelligence largely opposed her, Al-Qaeda and Taliban
militants had issued death threats and Musharraf himself had previously
vowed that he would never allow her back in power.
When the plane landed at Karachi, crowds of photographers gathered at the foot
of the steps to capture the triumphant moment when Bhutto stepped back on
Pakistani soil after more than eight years away. In the Pakistani tradition
of blessing a journey’s beginning, a copy of the Koran was held above her
head; as her foot touched the tarmac she raised her hands, palm upwards, in
prayer. Only then did she falter and tears poured from her eyes.
Some interpreted this as a rare sign of weakness as the risk that she was
taking hit home. But later she insisted to me: “I was just so happy to be
back on Pakistani soil. It was as if a great weight had been removed from
me.”
She added: “As we landed I was getting reports of all the millions of people
who had come to greet me. I really thought we can do this. We can save
Pakistan.”
But there was to be no miracle, no saving of Pakistan. On Thursday, exactly 10
weeks later, Bhutto’s journey came to an abrupt end with an assassin’s
bullet in her neck.
Even that heroic end was to be taken from her. As her body was laid to rest
beside that of her beloved father, whose own judicial murder led her to
enter politics, the government was claiming that she had died after hitting
her head on the sunroof of her car.
BHUTTO’S last day had started early as usual with prayers, telephone calls and
e-mails on the BlackBerry she carried everywhere. As usual, some of them
were about her fears that the Musharraf government was not doing enough to
ensure her security. After discussing the latest soundings on the elections
due on January 8, in which her party was expected to emerge as the largest,
the morning had been spent at the Serena hotel meeting Hamid Karzai, the
visiting Afghan president, a sign that she was being regarded as future
leader.
Back at her Islamabad home for a light lunch of half a piece of roti bread
with lentil stew, she quickly ran over her speech with Naheed Khan, her
secretary and constant companion. About 2.30pm the two women got into her
armoured white Toyota Land Cruiser.
Bhutto was dressed in striking royal blue with the trade-mark floaty white
dupatta, which she always struggled to keep over her hair.
Taught from an early age by her glamorous Iranian mother about the importance
of appearance, she was carefully made up and applied some last-minute
raspberry lip gloss in the car mirror. As usual since her return, her right
arm was bound with religious amulets.
As they left manicured Islamabad with its neat white houses set out on a grid
of numbered streets for the dusty hurly-burly and crowded bazaars of
Rawalpindi, passers-by waved at the speeding motorcade. In front was a blue
police van and a black Mercedes safety car; behind came another police
pickup, five pickups of her bodyguards and a few jeeps bearing leading
members of her Pakistan People’s party (PPP).
It was about 3pm when she arrived at Liaquat Bagh, the park where the rally
was being held, and entered through a back gate reserved for her. Only her
car and the black Mercedes were allowed in. The other vehicles were stopped
outside the back entrance on the main Liaquat road. Even her own bodyguards
were not allowed to enter the park.
The crowd roared to see her. “Jiye Bhutto!” – “long live
Bhutto” they yelled and “wazir-i-azam Benazir” –
“prime minister Benazir”.
Bhutto responded with one of her most fiery speeches. “This government cannot
control the situation,” she shouted. “This is your country and this is my
country. And we have to save it!”
She continued: “All my family have sacrificed for this cause. And we must work
together.”
The last rays of the sun were disappearing as she left the dais about 5pm.
Exhausted, she sat in the back seat of her armoured car, flanked by Khan and
Makhdoom Amin Fahim, a PPP stalwart who had led the party while she was in
exile.
Although police had been frisking everyone entering the park with metal
detectors, crowds had been allowed to gather unchecked around the back gate.
As her car emerged they swarmed around it. Unusually, it was not surrounded
by her young security guards, the Martyrs for Benazir.
Despite Bhutto’s tiredness, she could not resist the chants of the crowd. As
the car drove towards the main road, she popped out of the sunroof and
started waving amid great cheers. At that instant three shots were heard and
she fell inside. A few seconds later a powerful explosion hit the back left
of her vehicle.
John Moore, a photographer, was close by taking pictures of Bhutto. He said:
“I heard several shots ring out – I think three – and she
went down. The timing was right with the shots; that’s when she was killed,
right there. I raised my camera and started shooting photographs and that’s
when the blast happened.”
As Bhutto collapsed inside the car, Khan first thought that she had fainted.
“I thought she might have become unconscious because of exhaustion,” Khan
said. “She was in my lap and then suddenly I saw blood on my hands.”
She screamed at the driver who sped to Rawalpindi general hospital, about two
miles away. Distraught supporters followed, smashing windows and doors as
they tried to storm into the operating theatre where surgeons struggled to
save Bhutto’s life.
At 6.16pm she was officially pronounced dead. As darkness fell and the news
emerged, party activists wailed and collapsed on the ground outside.
They shouted “Musharraf is a murderer” and “long live Bhutto” late into the
night.
In the land of conspiracy theories, exactly how Bhutto died is as confused as
who might have killed her.
Witnesses at the spot say they saw a thin young man with a wispy beard like
that of a teenager approach Bhutto’s vehicle from the back, climb on the
rear bumper, whip out a pistol and fire three shots.
As soon as Bhutto fell down inside the car, he detonated a suicide bomb and
blew himself up, killing 20 people around. The government’s own footage
clearly shows a gun being waved and the flash of a report.
Babar Awan, a leading lawyer and PPP official, was in the black Mercedes
behind. “The cars were bumper to bumper,” he said. “I rolled down the window
of my side to keep an eye on Benazir. Then I heard a few shots and moments
later there was a blast.
“I was the first to see her corpse. There was a bullet wound on her neck just
below her left ear.
“On the forehead there was another wound with scattered shrapnel pieces. I
could not say whether it was the entry or exit point of the bullet. But it
was very powerful.”
Doctors at the hospital initially described the bullet wound as the cause of
death. But on Friday, before her body was removed, doctors who examined
Bhutto said she had died from shrapnel piercing her skull from the blast and
that the x-rays showed no signs of bullets.
Then, at a press conference on Friday evening, Brigadier Javed Cheema,
spokesman for the interior ministry, claimed that Bhutto had not been shot
at all but had fractured her skull ducking down into the car to avoid the
blast from the suicide bomber.
“One of the levers of the sunroof hit her on the right side, which caused a
fracture, and that is what caused her death,” said Cheema. “There was no
bullet that hit Mohtarma Bhutto, there was no splinter that hit Mohtarma
Bhutto and there was no pellet that hit her. I wish she had not come out of
the roof top of her vehicle.”
PPP supporters were outraged by this version, pointing out that the blast
occurred only after Bhutto fell down inside the car.
“This is rubbish. It’s dangerous nonsense,” said Sherry Rehman, Bhutto’s
spokes-woman, who was in the car behind. “I don’t know how they say
concussion from the sunroof. It’s complete abdication of their
responsibility for security.”
“We’ve been tending the body since she was hit and there was a clear bullet
wound at the back of the neck from which she bled profusely, soaking
everyone else around.”
We may never know the exact truth. Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, did not
allow a postmortem examination and Rawalpindi police were quick to hose down
the scene, thus wiping away any possible evidence, although Pakistani
television showed a pistol lying among the blood and dismembered limbs in
the street.
The government said yesterday that Asif can exhume his wife’s body if he wants
to have an autopsy.
TO those who knew and loved Bhutto, not just the charismatic politician but
also as a loyal friend and devoted mother, her killing was a tremendous
shock. Yet if ever there was a death foretold, this was it.
When she was last in England in early October to witness her son Bilawal
starting at Oxford, following in the footsteps of both herself and her
father, she told me of her fears about returning home.
“I know there will be security risks, people who want to kill me and to
scuttle the restoration of democracy,” she said.
Then, if there was any doubt, the bus which she boarded at Karachi airport on
October 18 for her triumphant return was the target of a double suicide
bomb, the worst in Pakistan’s history, killing 140 people.
I was with her on top of that bus and know only too well how lucky we were to
escape the carnage all around us. Bhutto admitted to me the following day
that despite all the warnings she had been shocked when she heard the first
blast. “My first thought was: oh my God, they’ve actually done it,” she said.
The bus bomb made her rethink her plans to travel across the country by road
but she insisted she would not stop holding rallies. “In Pakistan people
want to see their leaders,” she explained. “Our power base in the PPP are
the poor and dispossessed – they don’t have televisions or computers.
They need to see us.”
Talking of her children – Asifa, 14, Bakhtawar, 17, and Bilawal, 19 –
she said: “I don’t want to face suicide bombers or be assassinated but if
it’s the price I must pay . . . they understand that.”
She knew more than anyone the risks of a life in politics. One of her early
memories was of being woken up late at night in 1963 by her father, who was
then foreign minister, to read the diplomatic cables coming in about John F
Kennedy’s assassination. “This is no time to sleep,” he told her. “The young
president of the United States has been shot.”
Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, became Pakistan’s first democratically
elected prime minister but was executed in 1979 by General Zia, who had
ousted him. Her two brothers were also murdered; one poisoned, the other
shot dead. The woman her father had encouraged her to take as a role model,
India’s Indira Gandhi, was assassinated in 1984.
That Bhutto was incredibly brave nobody doubts. But, given the risks, was she
also foolhardy? Whenever I pressed her on this she always replied that “life
and death are in God’s hands”. When I said she was making it easier for her
enemies by appearing in public so often and refusing to hide behind the
bullet-proof shields that her security built for her, she said: “I know they
won’t give up but I don’t fear death. I remember my last meeting with my
father just before he was hanged when he told me, ‘You know, tonight when I
will be killed, my mother and my father will be waiting for me’.”
It was almost as if she felt invincible. She called her memoir Daughter of the
East and regarded herself as a daughter of destiny. She, rather than her
brothers, was groomed from an early age to be the political heir to her
father, even though she wanted to be a diplomat.
“My father always would say, ‘My daughter will go into politics . . . My
daughter will become prime minister’, but it’s not what I wanted to do. I
would say, ‘No, papa, I will never go into politics’.
“This is not the life I chose; it chose me. But I accepted the responsibility
and I’ve never wavered in my commitment.”
She would tell people how both Ramzi Yousef, who led the first attack on the
World Trade Center in 1993, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind
behind 9/11, had tried to kill her but failed.
“They succeeded with the World Trade towers but they didn’t succeed with me,”
she said. “I don’t think it can happen unless God wants it to happen because
so many people have tried to kill me.” FOR all Bhutto’s bravado, they got
her in the end. It is an indication of how bad the situation is in Pakistan
that there are so many possible culprits and that we will probably never
find out who is guilty.
Police have been unable to establish who bombed her bus in Karachi. To this
day it is still unknown who was behind the plane crash that killed General
Zia in 1988, enabling the elections by which Bhutto first came to power.
The government has been quick to lay the blame for her death on Al-Qaeda. The
interior ministry identified the main suspect as Baitullah Mehsud, a
militant leader in South Waziristan, a tribal area bordering Afghanistan
which is used as a hiding place and training ground by Al-Qaeda and the
Taliban.
“We have an intercept in which he congratulated his people for carrying out
this act,” said the ministry’s spokesman in a briefing to reporters. “We
have irrefutable evidence that Al-Qaeda and its networks are trying to
destabilise the government. They have been systematically attacking our
government and now a political icon.”
Yesterday Mehsud angrily denied any involvement in the assassination. “This is
absolutely wrong to say that Taliban or any member of the Taliban were
involved in the murder of Benazir Bhutto,” his spokesman told the BBC.
“Tribal people have their own customs. We don’t strike women.”
To PPP leaders, blaming Islamic militants such as Al-Qaeda is rather too
convenient an explanation. Although as a woman, a Shi’ite and pro-west-ern
liberal, Bhutto was almost certainly on an Al-Qaeda hit list, there were
others in Pakistan who regarded her as more of a threat. Her allies point
out that her assassination took place in the garrison town of Rawalpindi
only yards from the army’s general headquarters.
Bhutto herself was convinced that the Karachi bombs were the work of what she
called “establishment forces”. By this she meant military intelligence, ISI,
factions of which had always hated her. In the 1990s they organised an
entire political alliance to try to stop her getting into power.
Before her return she had sent Musharraf a letter naming several people she
alleged were plotting to kill her. These included the chief minister of
Punjab, whose father was assassinated supposedly on her own father’s orders,
and a former head of the intelligence bureau.
She was careful not to blame Musharraf himself, perhaps because she knew she
could not come to power without his backing. The only reason she had been
able to return was that he had agreed to drop corruption charges against her
as part of a deal by which she was expected to become prime minister while
he would continue as president.
“What concerns me are the wild cards and they are usually the old guard, those
put in place by General Zia,” she told me after the Karachi bombs.
Rehman Malik, her security chief, was less circumspect. “This is the work of
the government,” he said immediately after the Karachi attack. “Mush-arraf
wants an excuse to impose martial law. He never had any intention of letting
Benazir into power.”
Within three weeks he declared a state of emergency, Bhutto was under house
arrest and any chance of a deal between them was in pieces.
At Bhutto’s funeral on Friday, her weeping supporters made clear whom they
blamed for her death. As her body was buried in the grand Moghul-style
marble mausoleum that she had built for her father, they tossed rose petals
and demanded revenge.
“Musharraf did this,” they shouted. “Musharraf must go.”
BHUTTO’S death has left the nation that she set off so confidently to save in
the biggest crisis in its 60-year existence.
Her killing took place just a few yards from where the country’s first prime
minister, Liaqat Ali Khan, was assassinated in 1951. Since then, Pakistan’s
history has been plagued by military coups and bitter political battles. But
Bhutto’s murder has prompted the worst unrest the country has seen.
For the past three days angry crowds have attacked anything associated with
government authority. Mobs in Karachi have looted banks and set them on fire
and engaged in shoot-outs with police. Elsewhere in southern Sindh province,
angry crowds set fire to railway stations and trains, forcing the suspension
of rail services.
In the central city of Multan, banks and petrol stations were ransacked and
stones were thrown at police, who responded with tear gas. In Islamabad, the
capital, about 100 protesters burnt tyres. In Peshawar, the northwest
frontier capital, rioters attacked the offices of the ruling party.
To try to curb the violence, the government ordered an almost complete
shutdown of services and empowered police to shoot rioters. Some fear the
next step may be martial law.
“What we are seeing now is anarchy,” said Akbar Ahmed, professor of Islamic
studies at the American University in Washington and a former high
commissioner to London. “The country is genuinely disintegrating.
“Bhutto may have been aristocratic and flawed but she felt for the poor, she
cried for them and people saw her as their daughter, sister or mother. It’s
not just the death of a charismatic politician. It’s the death of hope.”
Given the level of violence, it seems astonishing that the government still
claims that elections will go ahead in nine days’ time.
“It’s not possible to hold elections with so much tension on the streets,”
said Imran Khan, the cricketer turned politician. Pointing out that on the
same day that Bhutto was assassinated, Nawaz Sharif, the other main
political leader, had also been attacked, Khan asked: “How could any
political leader hold a rally in these conditions and why would anyone come
to a rally?”
Sharif has already declared that his Muslim League will boycott the elections.
Opposition leaders have convened an all-party conference for this week at
which they are expected to call for Musharraf’s resignation, the restoration
of the judiciary – sacked when he declared a state of emergency last
month – and the appointment of a new caretaker government to oversee
elections.
Bhutto’s PPP was yesterday holding a meeting of its central executive
committee in her ancestral home of Larkana to decide party strategy. Most
were still in a state of shock.
“Everyone is just stunned,” said Farahnaz Ispahani, a PPP candidate. “We keep
expecting Benazir just to walk through the door.”
Some leading members were arguing for elections to go ahead, predicting a
massive sympathy vote. But it is unclear who will now lead the PPP, which
has for so long been a vehicle of the Bhuttos based on a personality cult.
Zardari, Bhutto’s widower, is expected to take temporary control but he is a
highly divisive figure, blamed by many in the party for its dismissals from
government because of his alleged corruption.
Some suggest that Bilawal, their son, will take the helm in three years’ time
after graduating from Oxford, thus continuing the dynasty.
On the broader front, the assassination sent shock-waves round the world and
may finally make Washington rethink its policy of blindly supporting
Musharraf because of his professed support for its war on terror.
What happens next in Pakistan matters internationally. First, because of its
nuclear arsenal (experts estimate that the country possesses between 50 and
110 warheads) and the fear of this falling into rogue hands. Second, because
the Taliban are trying to recapture Afghanistan from Pakistani soil and
almost all the main Al-Qaeda outrages – including 9/11 and the London
bomb-ings – have involved perpetrators trained in Pakistan.
The problem is that the Bush administration has no plan B. Even when
Musharraf’s popularity began plummeting with his attempts to sack the chief
justice, the US answer, rather than to look elsewhere, was to persuade him
to bring in Bhutto as “a democratic face”.
She was no saviour. Her two periods as prime minister were plagued by
allegations of corruption and mismanagement. And it was Musharraf, not
Bhutto, who allowed private television and radio stations (although he
recently closed many down) and improved women’s rights.
When I asked her last month what she would do differently if she returned to
power, she said she would not persecute the opposition in the way that
previous governments had.
“I now feel democracy is not just about elections,” she said. “It’s also what
is happening to the opposition in society.”
Bravely, she also said that she would spend less on defence: “I helped my
country get a missile defence system. I look back at that and realise we
should better have spent that money on investing in people.”
For all her flaws and her often imperious manner, she was the country’s most
popular politician, its only truly liberal leader and the best hope for
Pakistan. Husain Haqqani, a former critic and who is now director of
international relations at Boston University, said: “She had the basic
fundamental ability of a politician to be liked and loved.”
Additional reporting: Ghulam Hasnain in Karachi
A blighted history of coups and wars
1947 Creation of Pakistan
1948 War with India over Kashmir
1958 Military coup
1965 Second war with India
1969 Military coup
1971 War with India over secession of East Pakistan to form
Bangladesh. Defeat causes downfall of military. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, father
of Benazir, becomes president
1973 Bhutto becomes the country’s first democratically elected prime
minister
1977 Bhutto is removed from power by General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq
1979 Bhutto hanged. Russian invades Afghanistan; America channels arms
and money to mujaheddin through Pakistan
1988 Russian begins withdrawal. Zia dies. Benazir Bhutto becomes prime
minister
1990 Her government is dismissed amid charges of corruption
1993 She is elected prime minister again
1996 She is deposed for second time
1998 Military tests nuclear bombs
1999 General Pervez Musharraf leads military coup
2001 America recruits Musharraf as ally in war on terror, but elements
in military continue to support Taliban, whom they sponsored in the 1990s
2007 With country destabilised by terrorism, Musharraf considers
sharing power with Bhutto. She is assassinated
