Kim Ghattas on Benazir Bhutto

““I do not regret the death of Zia” was Benazir Bhutto’s first reaction when she heard that the man who had sent her father to the gallows was dead. She had been in Pakistan for just over two years now, since a triumphant return from exile in April 1986. Zia had announced he was finally going to hold elections, and he had allowed her to fly home, not expecting the crowd of hundreds of thousands who thronged the streets to greet her and chant “Zia dog.” The dictator decided to place obstacles in her way. He maintained the ban on political parties, which meant Bhutto and her Pakistan Peoples Party couldn’t be on the ballot, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling they should be allowed to run. He scheduled the general elections for November 16, 1988, when Benazir would be days away from delivering her first child. But now that the dictator was dead, Benazir would run practically unopposed.”

“Benazir Bhutto’s party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, won enough seats to form a government. For five days, there was dancing and music on the streets of Pakistan, a public eruption of joy after years of fear, a celebration of life after everything but religion had been banned. Were people celebrating the first democratic elections in over a decade, or was it a belated celebration of Zia’s demise? Probably both, but another, more amorphous dictatorship was taking hold of the country, born from seeds planted there by Zia, with generous help from Saudi Arabia and the United States.”

“Benazir was now prime minister, the first-ever female Muslim head of government anywhere—and one of the rare women leaders on the world stage, still a small club. But she would never again appear in public—in Pakistan or overseas—without a veil, a loosely wrapped white chiffon scarf that became her trademark. She would try to undo Zia’s Islamization and carry forward her father’s dream of a progressive country where there was no discrimination on the basis of sex, race, or religion. But she would fail, assailed by the now entrenched religious and security establishment bristling at a woman leader and her secular rule. With the encouragement of Saudi clerics, there had even been fatwas against her run for office. She would be removed from power by August 1990, outdone by the military establishment’s maneuvers against her, and plagued by allegations of corruption.”

“Most Pakistanis had hoped her rise to office would yield a return to normal life, to the pre-Zia era, with no screaming clerics or gangs of armed gunmen—religious or criminal—ruling the streets. They looked forward to a full return of civilian rule. But Pakistan’s army, powerful before, was now so entrenched in politics that they didn’t even need a general in the presidency to rule the country. Bhutto was replaced by a Zia protégé and friend of Saudi Arabia, Nawaz Sharif, a soft-spoken forty-year-old with a round face and a balding head. Sharif appeared bland, a nondescript-looking man, but he was a ruthless, cunning politician who would dominate Pakistani politics for the next three decades, in and out of power, in and out of political exile in Saudi Arabia, yet always pushing to continue Zia’s Islamization and sectarianization of the country.”