too much love for the homeland(touch down in Pakistan after 8 years in exile)
Western-educated but very much a believer (Benazir, reading the Quran)
The Audrey Hepburn in her
Gentle but firm
"If we have to die protecting our homeland...so be it"
She could have been a beauty queen but chose to die a martyr.If she were caught in the games men played, was she a victim or was she just being brave? Can rule of law be applied to a country in which illiteracy still runs high? Is 'democracy' a word used to accommodate violence?And more violence?By all parties...in D.C., Rawalpindi, Karachi...
If you want to give peace to a troubled nation, give it schools and universities.Not guns and ballot boxes.
But Sister Benazir, we will remember you NOT as a courageous woman but a courageous leader who did not turn away from her people.Trying.Hoping.That humanity can be restored.
Al Fatihah.
4 comments:
the world misses her...no amount of tears and words can heal our hearts. thanks for sharing her pictures and your grief with us.
Hi Life,
I'm sure she had inspired so many people.
Let's pray for the well-being of the Pakistanis.I have so many happy memories of the beautiful country when I last visited it.
William Dalrymple
Sunday December 30, 2007
The Observer
One of Benazir Bhutto's more dubious legacies to Pakistan is the Prime
Minister's house in the middle of Islamabad. The building is a giddy,
pseudo-Mexican ranch house with white walls and a red tile roof. There
is nothing remotely Islamic about the building which, as my minder
said when I went there to interview the then Prime Minister Bhutto,
was 'PM's own design'. Inside, it was the same story. Crystal
chandeliers dangled sometimes two or three to a room; oils of
sunflowers and tumbling kittens that would have looked at home on the
Hyde Park railings hung below garishly gilt cornices.
The place felt as though it might be the weekend retreat of a
particularly flamboyant Latin-American industrialist, but, in fact, it
could have been anywhere. Had you been shown pictures of the place on
one of those TV game-shows where you are taken around a house and then
have to guess who lives there, you may have awarded this hacienda to
virtually anyone except, perhaps, to the Prime Minister of an
impoverished Islamic republic situated next door to Iran.
Which is, of course, exactly why the West always had a soft spot for
Benazir Bhutto. Her neighbouring heads of state may have been figures
as unpredictable and potentially alarming as President Ahmadinejad of
Iran and a clutch of opium-trading Afghan warlords, but Bhutto has
always seemed reassuringly familiar to Western governments - one of
us. She spoke English fluently because it was her first language. She
had an English governess, went to a convent run by Irish nuns and
rounded off her education with degrees from Harvard and Oxford.
'London is like a second home for me,' she once told me. 'I know
London well. I know where the theatres are, I know where the shops
are, I know where the hairdressers are. I love to browse through
Harrods and WH Smith in Sloane Square. I know all my favourite ice
cream parlours. I used to particularly love going to the one at Marble
Arch: Baskin Robbins. Sometimes, I used to drive all the way up from
Oxford just for an ice cream and then drive back again. That was my
idea of sin.'
It was difficult to imagine any of her neighbouring heads of state,
even India's earnest Sikh economist, Manmohan Singh, talking like
this.
For the Americans, what Benazir Bhutto wasn't was possibly more
attractive even than what she was. She wasn't a religious
fundamentalist, she didn't have a beard, she didn't organise rallies
where everyone shouts: 'Death to America' and she didn't issue fatwas
against Booker-winning authors, even though Salman Rushdie ridiculed
her as the Virgin Ironpants in his novel Shame.
However, the very reasons that made the West love Benazir Bhutto are
the same that gave many Pakistanis second thoughts. Her English might
have been fluent, but you couldn't say the same about her Urdu which
she spoke like a well-groomed foreigner: fluently, but
ungrammatically. Her Sindhi was even worse; apart from a few
imperatives, she was completely at sea.
English friends who knew Benazir at Oxford remember a bubbly babe who
drove to lectures in a yellow MG, wintered in Gstaad and who to used
to talk of the thrill of walking through Cannes with her hunky younger
brother and being 'the centre of envy; wherever Shahnawaz went, women
would be bowled over'.
This Benazir, known to her friends as Bibi or Pinky, adored royal
biographies and slushy romances: in her old Karachi bedroom, I found
stacks of well-thumbed Mills and Boons including An Affair to Forget,
Sweet Imposter and two copies of The Butterfly and the Baron. This
same Benazir also had a weakness for dodgy Seventies easy listening -
'Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree' was apparently at the top
of her playlist. This is also the Benazir who had an enviable line in
red-rimmed fashion specs and who went weak at the sight of marrons
glace.
But there was something much more majestic, even imperial, about the
Benazir I met when she was Prime Minister. She walked and talked in a
deliberately measured and regal manner and frequently used the royal
'we'. At my interview, she took a full three minutes to float down the
100 yards of lawns separating the Prime Minister's house from the
chairs where I had been told to wait for her. There followed an
interlude when Benazir found the sun was not shining in quite the way
she wanted it to. 'The sun is in the wrong direction,' she announced.
Her hair was arranged in a sort of baroque beehive topped by a white
gauze dupatta. The whole painted vision reminded me of one of those
aristocratic Roman princesses in Caligula
This Benazir was a very different figure from that remembered by her
Oxford contemporaries. This one was renowned throughout Islamabad for
chairing 12-hour cabinet meetings and for surviving on four hours'
sleep. This was the Benazir who continued campaigning after the
suicide bomber attacked her convoy the very day of her return to
Pakistan in October, and who blithely disregarded the mortal threat to
her life in order to continue fighting. This other Benazir Bhutto, in
other words, was fearless, sometimes heroically so, and as hard as
nails.
More than anything, perhaps, Benazir was a feudal princess with the
aristocratic sense of entitlement that came with owning great tracts
of the country and the Western-leaning tastes that such a background
tends to give. It was this that gave her the sophisticated gloss and
the feudal grit that distinguished her political style. In this, she
was typical of many Pakistani politicians. Real democracy has never
thrived in Pakistan, in part because landowning remains the principle
social base from which politicians emerge.
The educated middle class is in Pakistan still largely excluded from
the political process. As a result, in many of the more backward parts
of Pakistan, the feudal landowner expects his people to vote for his
chosen candidate. As writer Ahmed Rashid put it: 'In some
constituencies, if the feudals put up their dog as a candidate, that
dog would get elected with 99 per cent of the vote.'
Today, Benazir is being hailed as a martyr for freedom and democracy,
but far from being a natural democrat, in many ways, Benazir was the
person who brought Pakistan's strange variety of democracy, really a
form of 'elective feudalism', into disrepute and who helped fuel the
current, apparently unstoppable, growth of the Islamists. For Bhutto
was no Aung San Suu Kyi. During her first 20-month premiership,
astonishingly, she failed to pass a single piece of major legislation.
Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the
world's worst records of custodial deaths, killings and torture.
Within her party, she declared herself the lifetime president of the
PPP and refused to let her brother Murtaza challenge her. When he
persisted in doing so, he ended up shot dead in highly suspicious
circumstances outside the family home. Murtaza's wife Ghinwa and his
daughter Fatima, as well as Benazir's mother, all firmly believed that
Benazir gave the order to have him killed.
As recently as the autumn, Benazir did and said nothing to stop
President Musharraf ordering the US and UK-brokered 'rendition' of her
rival, Nawaz Sharif, to Saudi Arabia and so remove from the election
her most formidable rival. Many of her supporters regarded her deal
with Musharraf as a betrayal of all her party stood for.
Behind Pakistan's endless swings between military government and
democracy lies a surprising continuity of elitist interests: to some
extent, Pakistan's industrial, military and landowning classes are all
interrelated and they look after each other. They do not, however, do
much to look after the poor. The government education system barely
functions in Pakistan and for the poor, justice is almost impossible
to come by. According to political scientist Ayesha Siddiqa: 'Both the
military and the political parties have all failed to create an
environment where the poor can get what they need from the state. So
the poor have begun to look to alternatives for justice. In the long
term, flaws in the system will create more room for the
fundamentalists.'
In the West, many right-wing commentators on the Islamic world tend to
see the march of political Islam as the triumph of an anti-liberal and
irrational 'Islamo-fascism'. Yet much of the success of the Islamists
in countries such as Pakistan comes from the Islamists' ability to
portray themselves as champions of social justice, fighting people
such as Benazir Bhutto from the Islamic elite that rules most of the
Muslim world from Karachi to Beirut, Ramallah and Cairo.
This elite the Islamists successfully depict as rich, corrupt,
decadent and Westernised. Benazir had a reputation for massive
corruption. During her government, the anti-corruption organisation
Transparency International named Pakistan one of the three most
corrupt countries in the world.
Bhutto and her husband, Asif Zardari, widely known as 'Mr 10 Per
Cent', faced allegations of plundering the country. Charges were filed
in Pakistan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States to
investigate their various bank accounts.
When I interviewed Abdul Rashid Ghazi in the Islamabad Red Mosque
shortly before his death in the storming of the complex in July, he
kept returning to the issue of social justice: 'We want our rulers to
be honest people,' he said. 'But now the rulers are living a life of
luxury while thousands of innocent children have empty stomachs and
can't even get basic necessities.' This is the reason for the rise of
the Islamists in Pakistan and why so many people support them: they
are the only force capable of taking on the country's landowners and
their military cousins.
This is why in all recent elections, the Islamist parties have hugely
increased their share of the vote, why they now already control both
the North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan and why it is they
who are most likely to gain from the current crisis.
Benazir Bhutto was a courageous, secular and liberal woman. But
sadness at the demise of this courageous fighter should not mask the
fact that as a pro-Western feudal leader who did little for the poor,
she was as much a central part of Pakistan's problems as the solution
to them.
· William Dalrymple's latest book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a
Dynasty, Delhi 1857, published by Bloomsbury, recently won the Duff
Cooper Prize for History
Thanks Suzana for this other side of Benazir.But I still think women make better leaders than men. :)
Why is it if the West gets chummy with us, we are often seen as traitors to our homeland? I'm sure she had her own game while playing with the superpowers.It is after all politics.
Also I would not judge a leader by the way he or she speaks.With or without a foreign twang. :)
Post a Comment