[wvns] Aunt Benazir's false promises
Bhutto's return bodes poorly for Pakistan -- and for democracy there.
Aunt Benazir's false promises
By Fatima Bhutto
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18965.htm
12/13/07 "LA Times" - -- KARACHI -- We Pakistanis live in uncertain
times. Emergency rule has been imposed for the 13th time in our short
60-year history. Thousands of lawyers have been arrested, some charged
with sedition and treason; the chief justice has been deposed; and a
draconian media law -- shutting down all private news channels -- has
been drafted.
Perhaps the most bizarre part of this circus has been the hijacking of
the democratic cause by my aunt, the twice-disgraced former prime
minister, Benazir Bhutto. While she was hashing out a deal to share
power with Gen. Pervez Musharraf last month, she repeatedly insisted
that without her, democracy in Pakistan would be a lost cause.
The reality, however, is that there is no one better placed to benefit
from emergency rule than she is. Along with the leaders of prominent
Islamic parties, she has been spared the violent retributions of
emergency law. Yes, she now appears to be facing seven days of house
arrest, but what does that really mean? While she was supposedly under
house arrest at her Islamabad residence last week, 50 or so of her
party members were comfortably allowed to join her. She addressed the
media twice from her garden, protected by police given to her by the
state, and was not reprimanded for holding a news conference. (By
contrast, the very suggestion that they might hold a news conference
has placed hundreds of other political activists under real arrest, in
real jails.)
Ms. Bhutto's political posturing is sheer pantomime. Her negotiations
with the military and her unseemly willingness until just a few days
ago to take part in Musharraf's regime have signaled once and for all
to the growing legions of fundamentalists across South Asia that
democracy is just a guise for dictatorship.
It is widely believed that Ms. Bhutto lost both her governments on
grounds of massive corruption. She and her husband, a man who came to
be known in Pakistan as "Mr. 10%," have been accused of stealing more
than $1 billion from Pakistan's treasury. She is appealing a
money-laundering conviction by the Swiss courts involving about $11
million. Corruption cases in Britain and Spain are ongoing.
It was particularly unappealing of Ms. Bhutto to ask Musharraf to
bypass the courts and drop the many corruption cases that still face
her in Pakistan. He agreed, creating the odiously titled National
Reconciliation Ordinance in order to do so. Her collaboration with him
was so unsubtle that people on the streets are now calling her party,
the Pakistan People's Party, the Pervez People's Party. Now she might
like to distance herself, but it's too late.
Why did Ms. Bhutto and her party cronies demand that her corruption
cases be dropped, but not demand that the cases of activists jailed
during the brutal regime of dictator Zia ul-Haq (from 1977 to 1988)
not be quashed? What about the sanctity of the law? When her brother
Mir Murtaza Bhutto -- my father -- returned to Pakistan in 1993, he
faced 99 cases against him that had been brought by Zia's military
government. The cases all carried the death penalty. Yet even though
his sister was serving as prime minister, he did not ask her to drop
the cases. He returned, was arrested at the airport and spent the
remaining years of his life clearing his name, legally and with
confidence, in the courts of Pakistan.
Ms. Bhutto's repeated promises to end fundamentalism and terrorism in
Pakistan strain credulity because, after all, the Taliban government
that ran Afghanistan was recognized by Pakistan under her last
government -- making Pakistan one of only three governments in the
world to do so.
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 have personal reasons to fear the danger that Ms. Bhutto's presence
in Pakistan brings, but I am not alone. The Islamists are waiting at
the gate. They have been waiting for confirmation that the reforms for
which the Pakistani people have been struggling have been a farce,
propped up by the White House. Since Musharraf seized power in 1999,
there has been an earnest grass-roots movement for democratic reform.
The last thing we need is to be tied to a neocon agenda through a
puppet "democrat" like Ms. Bhutto.
By supporting Ms. Bhutto, who talks of democracy while asking to be
brought to power by a military dictator, the only thing that will be
accomplished is the death of the nascent secular democratic movement
in my country. Democratization will forever be de-legitimized, and our
progress in enacting true reforms will be quashed. We Pakistanis are
certain of this.
Fatima Bhutto is a Pakistani poet and writer. She is the daughter of
Mir Murtaza Bhutto, who was killed in 1996 in Karachi when his sister,
Benazir, was prime minister.
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