The Benazir Bhutto You Haven't Heard Of

Just a few months following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan looks just as divided as ever. On one hand is the President Musharraf, on the other, Bhutto’s husband, son, and supporters of Pakistani democracy. Where before her death Benazir and Musharraf had joined in an alliance for Pakistan, Pakistan has since then seen nothing but internal divisions and the prospect of more hard times to come. 

“My mother always said democracy is the best revenge,” Benazir Bhutto’s son Bilawal Bhutto said in the days following Benazir’s assassination and funeral. Ideologically, democracy is what Benazir stood for. As the first female leader of an Islamic country, Bhutto was a champion of democracy and women’s rights. She was also the key component of the optimistic United States plan to stabilize Pakistan on its path towards democracy by casting an aura of legitimacy onto President Musharraf’s rule. Her death ended this hopeful Bhutto-Musharraf alliance, and dealt a blow to both international and Pakistani politics. However, her rhetoric and hero-worship status on the part of Western idealists contrast sharply with some aspects of Benazir Bhutto’s lesser-known politics.

Benazir Bhutto, for all her support of democracy, belonged to a true Pakistani “feudal” family – one that, propelled by her popularity and power, is moving to control the country. Bhutto’s political party, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) is often referred to as the country’s only true mass political party, and yet its succession process and politics belie a form of government much different than the Western democratic ideal. Benazir Bhutto, the PPP’s “Chairperson for Life” wrote a “political will” before her death that named her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, as her successor. After her death, Zardari accepted the position and announced that he would serve as a sort of regent until their son Bilawal was ready to take office. Such family appointments are endemic to the PPP, which has never seen an internal election. The party was begun by Benazir’s grandfather, Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto, and popularized by her father Zulfikar Bhutto, who supported “democracy” while inventing a doctrine of “Islamic socialism” that almost ruined Pakistan’s economy and initiating Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. After Zulfikar was hanged by General Zia ul-Haq in 1979, Benazir continued her father’s example of pragmatically changing political stances and started an administration of rampant corruption and ineptitude.

During her time in office as Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto did nothing for women’s rights, lied about education reforms that she did not make, and appointed an extremely anti-American Islamist general Hamid Gul as chief of the ISI, Pakistan’s main intelligence agency. She and her husband, nick-named “Mr. Ten-Percent,” alluding to his policy on kick-backs, were also apparently responsible for extorting billions of dollars from the Pakistani government. In 1998 the Swiss government turned over documents to the Pakistani government which included a formal charge of money laundering by Swiss authorities against Bhutto’s husband Zardani. The Pakistani government went on to file criminal charges against Bhutto so as to track down an estimated 1.5 billion dollars that she and her husband allegedly received through various criminal activities. French, Polish, and Spanish documents also provided more evidence and fueled the claims. The PPP flatly denied the accusations, although Zardari ended up spending eight years in prison on corruption charges. Following his release on bail, Bhutto appointed him investment minister. 

Benazir Bhutto’s husband is also believed to have been responsible for the assassination of her brother Murtaza in 1996, who was vying for control of the PPP after his return from exile. The murder involved snipers, a roadblock, and an electricity black-out to part of the city, and is unlikely to have occurred without the help of Zardari. Bhutto claimed that Murtaza must have been targeted by the ISI or General Zia’s loyalists, but following the murder her government promoted all of the police officials involved in the killing.

There is no doubt that Benazir Bhutto’s death was a disaster for Pakistan democracy and U.S. foreign policy, but to hail her as a progressive, democratic, and honorable leader would be to grossly misrepresent her role in Pakistani and international politics. It is unfortunate, however, that her death further limits Pakistan’s choices of the “lesser of evils” to rule the divided and corruption-riddled country.