Benazir Bhutto

Prime minister of Pakistan (1988-1990, 1993-1996)

• Born: June 21, 1953
• Birthplace: Karachi, Pakistan
• Died: December 27, 2007
• Place of death: Rawalpindi, Pakistan

Prime Minister Bhutto rebuilt the Pakistan Peoples Party, continuing the legacy of her father and leading the party’s drive toward democracy and human rights in Pakistan. She introduced measures that benefited women, the poor, and the dispossessed, and was the first woman to lead an elected government of an Islamic nation.

Early Life

Benazir Bhutto (BEHN-ah-zeer BEW-toh) was born to Nusrat Ispahani and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a former prime minister of Pakistan. Her grandfather was Shah Nawaz Bhutto, a wealthy wadero, or landowner, and politician. Benazir had a younger brother, Murtaza, born in 1954; a sister, Sanam, born in 1957; and a second brother, Shahnawaz, born in 1958. Bhutto attended the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Karachi and the Rawalpindi Presentation Convent and the Jesus and Mary Convent at Muree. Between 1969 and 1973 she attended Radcliffe College at Harvard University, majoring in political science.

Bhutto, who was shy as a child, was very much her father’s daughter, and she adored him. She acted as his assistant in December, 1971, when he spoke at the United Nations, and she accompanied him on trips to India, China, and Europe. She wanted to stay in the United States for graduate studies but her father insisted she study at his alma mater, Oxford University. She followed in her father’s footsteps and attended Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, from 1973 until 1976. During one year of graduate study (1976-1977) she was elected president of the Oxford Union, a debating society. She returned to Pakistan in 1977 to become an adviser to her father.

Bhutto surprised many people when she chose Asif Ali Zardari, who was more renowned for his social life than for his intellect, as her husband-to-be. They married in December, 1987, and had three children a son, Bilawal, and two daughters, Bakhtwar and Aseefa. Bhutto chose to use her family name in memory of her father and his legacy.

Life’s Work

Bhutto’s father was removed from office by the military under Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq on July 4, 1977, and was arrested, charged with murder, found guilty, and hanged on April 4, 1979. Bhutto inherited the family’s political misfortunes, and she would spend nearly six years in prison, under house arrest, or mostly in exile in London. In July, 1984, her younger brother, Shahnawaz, died under mysterious circumstances in Paris. She returned to Lahore, Pakistan, on April 10, 1986, and was greeted by an estimated one million people at the airport. During the following year she spoke at mammoth rallies all over the country. At the end of 1987, after marrying Zardari, her status changed to that of a “respectable” married woman, which assisted her considerably in a very traditional and conservative Pakistan.

On August 17, 1988, Zia-ul-Haq died in a plane crash, changing the political scene overnight. In the general elections that followed, Bhutto led the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) to victory, winning 94 of 207 seats in the assembly and becoming prime minister on December 2. Her immediate goal was to maintain and implement the socialist principles of the party, which included Roti, Kapra aur Makan (bread, clothing, and shelter), a slogan coined by her father.

With Bhutto as prime minister, Pakistan enjoyed a remarkable degree of political freedom and freedom of speech. Bhutto soon was hailed as one of the great leaders of the world and was warmly received in the United States and Europe. She dramatically improved relations with India and returned Pakistan to the Commonwealth of Nations. In December, 1988, she hosted the seven-nation South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation meeting in Islamabad.

However, because she was a Bhutto and a woman, opposition was vehement, virulent, poisonous, and unceasing at all levels political and personal. She was able to get only ten bills of minor significance through the assembly. The opposition was led by the president, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, at the behest of the military, and a willing Nawaz Sharif, leader of the Pakistan Muslim League. Corruption charges dogged her ministry as well. It had been rumored that any contract requiring government approval necessitated a 10 percent fee be paid to her husband. Bhutto also had appointed him to her cabinet.

On August 6, 1990, after serving just twenty months of a five-year term, her government was dismissed by President Ishaq, and her husband was imprisoned. For the next three years she campaigned against the government of Sharif; he was dismissed and Bhutto once again became prime minister (on October 19, 1993). Again, she was besieged by an opposition that staged marches and organized strikes.

Bhutto’s 1994 visit to the United States led to the U.S. Senate’s passage of the Brown amendment (September 21), which released military equipment to Pakistan. However, controversy was never far behind. In October, 1995, Bhutto purchased a twenty-room mansion in Surrey, England, for $4.35 million. Her troubles increased precipitously on September 20, 1996, when her brother, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, was killed in a police ambush in Karachi. Her husband was accused by many of having ordered the assassination. The murder badly damaged the Bhutto family’s reputation and collapsed whatever remained of the legitimacy of her ministry. Charges of corruption persisted, and her government became synonymous with corruption and mismanagement. On November 5, 1996, President Farooq Legari dismissed her government.

In 1997 the Swiss government froze more than $13.7 million found in Bhutto’s seven Geneva accounts because of money laundering charges. She and her husband were found guilty of money laundering. Furthermore, it is estimated the family received an estimated $1.5 billion in kickbacks. In April, 1999, in Pakistan, she and her husband were convicted of corruption, sentenced to five years in prison, fined $8.6 million, had their property confiscated, and were disqualified from official politics. Bhutto’s husband was imprisoned for murder and corruption (without being formally convicted) and was not released until November, 2004. Bhutto, however, went into self-exile in 1999 and resided in England and then in Dubai, facing corruption charges if she were to return to Pakistan.

On October 18, 2007, Bhutto returned to Pakistan to thousands of supporters, having been granted amnesty by Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf. Later that day, on her way to a rally in Karachi, two explosions, set off by suicide bombers, rocked Bhutto’s convoy and killed close to 150 people and injured hundreds more. The dead included more than fifty members of her security detail as well as local police officers. Musharraf declared a state of emergency (in effect, martial law) on November 3 and suspended the Pakistani constitution. (The order lasted until December 15.) Bhutto, placed under house arrest by Musharraf in November, announced her candidacy for the presidency. The PPP issued a manifesto in December, one month before Pakistan’s national elections to select a new president.

The elections, however, would not be held as planned. Bhutto was assassinated on December 27, following a rally at a park in Rawalpindi. Early reports indicate that she had been shot by a gunman seconds before a suicide bomber exploded a device outside her vehicle. Dozens of others also were killed, and the country and the world was stunned. International condemnation was swift, and Musharraf and other Pakistani officials were quick to blame Islamic terrorists for the assassination and bombing. Within days, Bhutto’s nineteen-year-old son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, a student at Oxford University in England who lacked experience in politics, was named her successor as ceremonial leader of the PPP. Her husband became the party’s interim leader of day-to-day operations.

Significance

In 2007, Bhutto had returned to a military-controlled Pakistan (with a self-declared president since 1999). Her own government, in stark contrast, had returned Pakistan to civilian governing and reintroduced a parliamentary system. In office she had maintained the power of the PPP and, like her father, was later accused of criminal acts and removed from office. However, she evoked the name and memory of her father and used his death as a shaheed, or martyr, to mobilize people in support of her party.

Bhutto’s 2007 campaign to return to Pakistan and to seek the presidency had led her to Washington, D.C., where she tried to convince U.S. president George W. Bush that she would be a better partner in the war against terrorism than would Musharraf. She hired a lobbying firm, spoke to the American Enterprise Institute, and wrote an opinion piece published in The Washington Post. She even met with her bitter rival, Sharif, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

With Bhutto’s return to Pakistan in 2007 and with her announcement to run for president, a new chapter in Pakistani and Middle Eastern political history began. That chapter, and a return to democracy and the valuing of human rights, ended violently with Bhutto’s assassination.

Bibliography

Akhund, Iqbal. Trial and Error: The Advent and Eclipse of Benazir Bhutto. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. An attempt to make sense of Bhutto’s legacy as the prime mover in Pakistan’s turn to democracy in the face of the controversies that have followed her.

Bhutto, Benazir. Daughter of the East: An Autobiography. London: Hamilton, 1988. Bhutto’s own account of her early life. Essential reading for an understanding of Bhutto and the Bhutto family.

Burns, John F. “Benazir Bhutto, 54, Who Weathered Pakistan’s Political Storm for Three Decades, Dies.” The New York Times, December 28, 2007. A brief but detailed obituary of Bhutto, published one day after her assassination and at a time when circumstances surrounding her death were still uncertain.

Shaikh, Muhammad Ali. Benazir Bhutto: A Political Biography. Karachi, Pakistan: Oriental Books, 2000. This is a sympathetic account of Bhutto’s life and career based, in part, on a number of interviews with Bhutto and those who knew her well.

Talbot, Ian. Pakistan: A Modern History. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Great Britain’s leading historian of Pakistan offers a frank description of Bhutto’s terms of office in this general history of modern Pakistan.