Posted by
Michael on Friday, December 28, 2007 2:24:08 AM
B/W of Meryl Yourish, here is an article by Fatima Bhutto, a neice of Benazir Bhutto who alleges that rampant corruption and assasinations were part of Bhutto's tenure as Prime Minister:
And
I am suspicious of her talk of ensuring peace. My father was a member
of Parliament and a vocal critic of his sister’s politics. He was
killed outside our home in 1996 in a carefully planned police
assassination while she was prime minister. There were 70 to 100
policemen at the scene, all the streetlights had been shut off and the
roads were cordoned off. Six men were killed with my father. They were
shot at point-blank range, suffered multiple bullet wounds and were
left to bleed on the streets.
My father was Benazir’s younger
brother. To this day, her role in his assassination has never been
adequately answered, although the tribunal convened after his death
under the leadership of three respected judges concluded that it could
not have taken place without approval from a “much higher” political
authority.
I will concede I know very little about the
Pakistani situation, but I am led to believe that she and other
moderates in Pakistan are infinitely better alternatives to the brutal
rule of Islamic radicals. In my estimation, this kind of overanalyzing
is pointless, when dirt can be dug up on any figure largely accepted as
courageous in the face of overwhelming odds. Martin Luther King was a
serial adulterer, Malcolm X was a former hoodlum, Gandhi had a
tense relationship with his son, and so on and so on.
For a contrasting viewpoint from the one above, read Christopher Hitchens' article,
"Daughter of Destiny," published today in Slate:
The
sternest critic of Benazir Bhutto would not have been able to deny that
she possessed an extraordinary degree of physical courage. When her
father was lying in prison under sentence of death from Pakistan's
military dictatorship in 1979, and other members of her family were
trying to escape the country, she boldly flew back in. Her subsequent
confrontation with the brutal Gen. Zia-ul-Haq cost her five years of
her life, spent in prison. She seemed merely to disdain the experience,
as she did the vicious little man who had inflicted it upon her.
Benazir
saw one of her brothers, Shahnawaz, die in mysterious circumstances in
the south of France in 1985, and the other, Mir Murtaza, shot down
outside the family home in Karachi by uniformed police in 1996. It was
at that famous address—70 Clifton Road—that I went to meet her in
November 1988, on the last night of the election campaign, and I found
out firsthand how brave she was. Taking the wheel of a jeep and
scorning all bodyguards, she set off with me on a hair-raising tour of
the Karachi slums. Every now and then, she would get out, climb on the
roof of the jeep with a bullhorn, and harangue the mob that pressed in
close enough to turn the vehicle over. On the following day, her
Pakistan Peoples Party won in a landslide, making her, at the age of
35, the first woman to be elected the leader of a Muslim country.