Like most women in politics, I am especially sensitive to maintaining my
composure, to never showing my feelings. A display of emotion by a woman in
politics or government can be misconstrued as a manifestation of weakness,
reinforcing stereotypes and caricatures.
But when I stepped down onto the tarmac at Quaid-e-Azam international airport
in Karachi on October 18 last year, I was overcome with emotion. After eight
lonely and difficult years of exile, I could not stop the tears pouring from
my eyes.I felt that a terrible weight had been lifted from my shoulders. It
was a sense of liberation. I was home at long last. I knew what I had to do.
I had departed three hours earlier from my home in exile, Dubai. My husband
Asif was to stay behind with our two daughters, Bakhtawar and Aseefa. Asif
and I had made a very calculated, difficult decision. We understood the
dangers of my return, and we wanted to make sure that, no matter what
happened, our children would have a parent to take care of them.
It was a discussion that few husbands and wives ever have to make, thankfully.
But Asif and I had become accustomed to a life of sacrificing our personal
happiness and any sense of normality and privacy. The people of Pakistan
always come first. My children understood it and not only accepted it but
encouraged me. I said farewell not knowing whether I would ever see their
faces again.
I told my children: “Do not worry. Nothing will happen to me. God will protect
me.” I wanted to reassure them, but I also told them: “Remember, God gives
life, and God takes life. I will be safe until my time is up.”
The stakes could not have been higher. Pakistan under military dictatorship
had become the epicentre of an international terrorist movement with two
primary aims.
First, the extremists aim to reconstitute the concept of the caliphate, a
political state encompassing the great Ummah (Muslim community) populations
of the world, uniting the Middle East, the Persian Gulf states, south Asia,
central Asia, east Asia, and parts of Africa. Second, they aim to provoke a
clash of civilisations between the West and an interpretation of Islam that
rejects pluralism and modernity. The goal, the great hope of the militants,
is a collision, an explosion between the values of the West and what the
extremists claim to be the values of Islam.
Few on the aeroplane that carried me from Dubai to Karachi knew that in my
briefcase I carried with me the manuscript of this book exploring the dual
crises confronting the Islamic world – both internal and external. Within
hours of my reaching Pakistan, some of the pages would be symbolically
charred by fire and splattered with blood and flesh of dismembered bodies
thrown up by devastating terrorist bombs.
The carnage that accompanied the joyous celebration of my return was a
horrific metaphor for the crisis that lies before us and the need for an
enlightened renaissance both within Islam and between Islam and the rest of
the world. WHEN I returned, I did not know whether I would live or die. I
knew that the same elements of Pakistani society that had colluded to
destroy my father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and end democracy in Pakistan in
1977 were now arrayed against me for the same purpose exactly 30 years later.
Indeed, many of the same people who had collaborated with an earlier military
junta in the judicial murder of my father were now entrenched in power in
the Musharraf regime and the intelligence apparatus. There could have been
no more dramatic statement to me than General Musharraf’s recent appointment
as attorney-general of the son of the man who had sent my father to the
gallows.
We had, of course, been discouraged from returning. Musharraf had told me in
private meetings and conversations that I should come back only after
elections he was planning.
When it was clear that I would not postpone my return, he sent messages to my
staff that I should have no public demonstration or rally and I should fly
directly by helicopter from the airport to Bilawal House, my family home in
Karachi.
He said that he was concerned about my security and my safety, but his
supporters did very little to provide the necessary protection we needed:
jammers that worked, street lights that worked, roads that had been cleared
of empty cars that could carry improvised explosive devices – protection to
which I was entitled as a former prime minister.
I had become aware, through messages sent by Musharraf, that suicide squads
might be sent from the North West Frontier Province and Federally
Administered Tribal Areas to try to assassinate me immediately on my return.
I had actually received from a sympathetic Muslim foreign government the
names and cellphone numbers of designated assassins.
I was told by both the Musharraf regime and the foreign Muslim government that
four suicide bomber squads would attempt to kill me. These included, the
reports said, squads sent by the Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud; Hamza Bin
Laden, a son of Osama Bin Laden; Red Mosque militants; and a Kara-chi-based
militant group.
Musharraf’s regime knew of the specific threats against me, including the
names and numbers of those who planned to kill me, and the names of others –
including those in his own inner circle and in his party – whom we believed
were conspiring. Despite our request, we received no reports on what actions
were taken before my arrival as a follow-up to these warnings.
I wrote a letter to Musharraf. I told him that if I was assassinated by the
militants it would be due to their sympathisers in his regime, whom I
suspected wanted to eliminate me and remove the threat I posed to their grip
on power.
Even as we landed, the general’s people were calling to stop me from
returning, stop me from giving a speech at the tomb of the Quaid-e-Azam
[Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder], to cancel my cavalcade from the
airport to the mausoleum. But I knew that those who believed in democracy
and my leadership were awaiting me in the streets of Karachi.
As the sky darkened and my armoured campaign truck progressed almost by inches
through the growing masses, I noticed that street lights began to dim and
then go off as we approached. The jamming equipment that was supposed to be
blocking cellphone signals (that could detonate suicide bombs, or even
remote-controlled toy planes filled with explosives) for 200 metres around
my truck did not seem to be working.
My husband, watching the live coverage on television in Dubai, begged me not
to expose myself directly to the crowd from the top of the truck. I said no,
that I must be in front and greet my people.
Sometime after 11pm I saw a man holding up a baby dressed in the colours of my
party, the PPP. He gesticulated repeatedly to me to take the baby, which was
about one or two years old. I gesticulated to the crowd to make way for him.
But when the crowd parted, the man would not come forward. Instead he tried
to hand the baby to someone in the crowd. Worried that the baby would fall
and be trampled upon or be lost, I gesticulated no, you bring the baby to me.
Finally he pointed to the security guard. I asked the security guard to let
him up on the truck. However, by the time he reached the truck, I was going
down to my compartment in the vehicle’s interior because my feet hurt. We
now suspect the baby’s clothes were lined with plastic explosives.
My feet had swollen up after standing in one place for 10 hours, and my
sandals were hurting. Downstairs I unstrapped and loosened them. A little
while later my political secretary, Naheed Khan, and I went over the speech
that I would be delivering later at the tomb – one of the most
important of my life.
I was saying that perhaps we should mention my petitioning the Supreme Court
to allow political parties in the tribal areas to organise as part of our
plan to counter extremists politically. As I said the word “extremist”, a
terrible explosion rocked the truck. First the sound, then the light, then
the glass smashing, then the deadly silence followed by horrible screams. My
first thought was: “Oh, God, no.”
A piercing pain tore my ear from the force of the blast. An eerie silence
descended. Then a second explosion – much louder, larger and more
damaging – went off. Almost simultaneously, something hit the truck,
which rolled from side to side. (Later I saw two dents clearly visible on
the left side of the truck, where I had been.)
I looked outside. The dark night was bathed in an orange light, and under it
crumpled bodies lay scattered in the most horrific scene.
I now know what happened to the baby. Agha Siraj Durrani, a PPP
parliamentarian, was watching the access to my truck. When the man tried to
hand the baby up, Agha Siraj told him to get lost. The man then went to a
police vehicle to the left of the truck, which also refused to take the
baby. The man moved to the police vehicle in front of the first. Awoman PPP
councillor, Rukhsana Faisal Boloch, was on this vehicle, as was a cameraman.
As the man tried to hand the baby to the second police vehicle, the first
police vehicle warned: “Don’t take the baby, don’t take the baby, don’t let
the baby up on the truck.”
Both these police vehicles were exactly parallel to where I was sitting inside
the truck. As the man scuffled with the police to hand the baby over, the
first explosion took place. Everyone in that police van was killed, as were
those around it.
Within 50 seconds, a 15-kilogram car bomb was detonated, scattering pellets,
shrapnel and burning pieces of metal. According to some eyewit-nesses,
snipers began firing.
There seemed to be some chemical in the air. Although I came out of the truck
about eight minutes later, I suffered like others from both a perforated
eardrum and a racking dry cough, the likes of which I had never had before.
Dr Zulfikar Mirza, who helped take the dead and wounded to hospital, told me
of the strange state of the bodies. The clothes of some were totally burnt
off. Others were clothed, but when one moved to pick up the body, it would
melt and disintegrate. Many with pellet wounds subsequently died, making us
suspect that the pellets had been soaked in poison.
I was whisked away through back-streets in a jeep. Security boys clung to it,
providing a human shield around me. We were unarmed and we wondered whether
assassins might have a backup plan to kill us, knowing we had to reach my
home.
I entered the house that my husband had built for us after our marriage, which
was named in honour of our son Bilawal. Going up the stairs, I saw the
pictures of my three children peering back at me, and I realised the
absolute terror they must be experiencing, not knowing if I were dead or
alive.
I had been traumatised by my father’s arrest, imprisonment and murder, and I
know that such mental scars are permanent. I would have done anything to
spare my children the same pain that I had undergone – and still feel –
at my father’s death. But this was one thing I couldn’t do; I couldn’t
retreat from the party and the platform that I had given so much of my life
to. The enormous price paid by my father, brothers, supporters and all those
who had been killed, imprisoned and tortured – all the sacrifices had
been for the people of Pakistan.
I spoke to my husband and assured him that I was not injured. I could not
speak to my children. Thankfully they had gone to bed and had not seen the
blast on television. My daughter told me later she went to bed happy
thinking of the warm reception I was getting, only to wake to a text message
from a friend: “Oh, my God, I am so worried. Is your mother all right?”
With her heart pounding, she ran to the room of her father, who gathered her
in his arms, reassuring her, “Your mother is fine.”
WHEN all the bodies had been counted, the number of those killed went up to
179 dead and nearly 600 wounded, some disabled for life.
Later I was informed of a meeting that had taken place in Lahore where the
bomb blasts were planned. According to this report, three men belonging to a
rival political faction were hired for half a million dollars. They were,
according to my sources, named Ejaz, Sajjad and another whose name I forget.
One of them died accidentally because he couldn’t get away fast enough before
the detonation. Presumably this was the one holding the baby. However, a
bomb maker was needed for the bombs.
Enter Qari Saifullah Akhtar, a wanted terrorist who had tried to overthrow my
second government. He had been extradited by the United Arab Emirates and
was languishing in Karachi central jail. According to my second source, the
officials in Lahore had turned to Akhtar for help. His liaison with elements
in the government, according to this source, was a radical who was asked to
make the bombs and himself asked for a fatwa making it legitimate to oblige.
He got one.
The bomb blasts took place in the army cantonment area in Karachi. When army
officials arrived on the scene, the wounded hooted them down. Rightly or
wrongly, the perception in Pakistan is that the military is responsible for
the rise of militancy and all the horrific consequences that it entails for
Pakistan and its people.
Militancy started with the Zia military dictatorship in the 1970s. Its heirs
destabilised democracy until military dictatorship was once again imposed.
The Musharraf dictatorship, notwithstanding its public pronouncements, has
presided over the mushrooming growth of militant groups and militant acts
that have exacted a heavy human toll.
At times I worry whether we as a nation can survive the threat of
disintegration. Since the overthrow of my government in 1996, the militants
have made many inroads into the very structure of governance of Pakistan
through their supporters and sympathisers. Pakistan is a tinder-box that
could catch fire quickly.
Sixty years after its creation, the case study of its record with democracy is
a sad chronicle of steps forwards and huge steps backwards.
Democracy cannot be sustained in the absence of a stable and growing middle
class. The growth of India into a regional and international economic power
occurred – not coincidentally – as its middle class exploded into
a huge economic and political force.
How can a nation build a middle class? The first key is to build an education
system that delivers hope and real opportunity. Good public educational
opportunity is the key to the economic and political progress of nations,
and it can be so in the Islamic world as well. But in Pakistan $4.5 billion
is spent on the military each year – an astounding 1,400% more than on
education.
Militant madrasahs did not flourish there because Pakistani citizens suddenly
became more religiously orthodox than ever before in our history. The
militants took advantage of parents from low-income social classes who
wanted a better life for their children. If parents are so poor that they
cannot educate, house, clothe, feed and provide healthcare for their
children and the state fails to provide such basic human needs through
public services, they will seek an alternative. The militant madrasahs have
become, over time, an alternative government for millions of Pakistanis.
These political and military training camps invest little time and resources
in primary education. Rather, they manipulate religion to brainwash children
into becoming soldiers of an irregular army. They teach hatred and violence.
They breed terrorists, not scientists. They undermine the very concept of
national identity and rule of law.
When I was prime minister, I invested enormous political resources in stopping
these paramilitary political madrasahs, but unfortunately, in the years
since I left office, as many as 20,000 new ones have been built in Pakistan
alone. IN the epic debate over the inevitability of a confrontation between
Islam and the West, I am a reconciliationist. The notion that the culture of
Islam is antithetical to democratic values – put forward by those who
believe in the “clash of civilisations” – is not only
unsubstantiated by Koranic reference and Islamic clerical interpretation but
also plays into Islamic extremists’ views that the West is disrespectful and
antagonistic to Islam’s beliefs and history.
And the assertion that social, political and economic interactions between
Islam and the West precipitate conflict, as opposed to promoting
understanding, is antithetical to what we know about human behav-iour and
international relations.
Preventing a clash of civilisations, at least in terms of the Islamic world,
requires that we put our trust in the power of trade, exchange, technology,
education and democratic values to accelerate the process by which Islamic
societies can build bonds and trust with western societies. Within the
Muslim world, however, there has been and continues to be an internal rift,
an often violent confrontation among sects, ideologies and interpretations
of the message of Islam.
This destructive tension has set brother against brother, a deadly fratricide
that has tortured intra-Islamic relations for 1,300 years. It is most
visibly manifest today in a senseless, self-defeating sectarian civil war
that is tearing modern Iraq apart and exercising its brutality in other
parts of the world, especially in parts of Pakistan.
As the Muslim world simmers internally, extremists have manipulated Islamic
dogma to justify and rationalise a so-called jihad against the West. The
attacks on September 11, 2001, heralded the vanguard of the
caliphate-inspired dream of bloody confrontation: the Crusades in reverse.
The attack was received in two disparate ways in the Muslim world. Much, if
not most, reacted with horror, embarrassment and shame when it became clear
that this greatest terrorist attack in history had been carried out by
Muslims in the name of Allah and jihad. Yet there was another, troubling
reaction: some people danced in the streets of Palestine. Sweets were
exchanged in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Condemnations were few in the largest
Muslim nation, Indonesia.
The hijackers seemed to touch a nerve of Muslim impotence. The burning and
then collapsing towers represented, to some, resurgent Muslim power, a
perverse Muslim pay-back for the domination of the West. To others it was a
religious epiphany. To still others it combined political, cultural and
religious assertiveness.
And now there is Iraq. One billion Muslims around the world seem united in
their outrage at the war, damning the deaths of Muslims caused by US
military intervention without UN approval. But there has been little if any
similar outrage against the sectarian Iraqi civil war, which has led to far
more casualties.
Obviously (and embarrassingly), Muslim leaders, masses and even intellectuals
are quite comfortable criticising outsiders for the harm inflicted on fellow
Muslims. But there is deadly silence when they are confronted with
Muslim-on-Muslim violence.
Even in Darfur, where there is an actual genocide being committed against a
Muslim population, there has been a remarkable absence of protests, few
objections, and no massive coverage on Arab or south Asian television.
We are all familiar with the data that show an increasing contempt for and
hostility to the West in Muslim communities from Turkey to Pakistan. The war
in Iraq is cited as a reason. The situation in Palestine is given as another
reason. So-called decadent western values are often part of the explanation.
It is so much easier to blame others for our problems than to accept
responsibility ourselves.
The colonial experience has obviously had a major impact on the Muslim psyche.
But what outsiders did in the past does not exclusively account for the
quality of Muslim life today. There is a rush to condemn foreigners and
colonisers, but there is an equally weighty unwillingness within the Muslim
world to look inwards and to identify where we may be going wrong ourselves.
It is uncomfortable but nevertheless essential to true intellectual dialogue
to point out that national pride in the Muslim world is rarely derived from
economic productivity, technical innovation or intellectual creativity.
Those factors seem to have been part of the Persian, Mughal and Ottoman past
but not the Muslim present. Now we see Muslim pride always characterised in
the negative, derived from notions of “destroying the enemy” and “making the
nation invulnerable to western assault”.
Such toxic rhetoric sets the stage for the clash of civilisations between
Islam and the West every bit as much as do western military or political
policies. It also serves as an opiate that keeps Muslims angry against
external enemies and allows them to pay little attention to the internal
causes of intellectual and economic decline. Reality and intellectual
honesty demand that we look at both sides of the coin.
The burning twin towers have become a dual metaphor for both the intra-Islamic
debate about the political and social values of democracy and modernity and
the looming potential for a catastrophic showdown between Islam and the
West. And for both of these epic battles, my homeland of Pakistan has become
the epicentre – the ground zero, if you will – of either
reconciliation or disaster.
© The Estate of Benazir Bhutto 2008
Extracted from Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy & the West by Benazir
Bhutto to be published by Simon & Schuster on February 12 at £17.99.
Copies can be ordered for £16.19, including postage, from The Sunday Times
BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
In this ghostwritten extract Bhutto distances herself from Muslims and accountabity. She returned to Pakistan ready to exploit any platform to gain leadership and reclaim the family business,. Her tenures in office show no affect other than enriching her cronies and emptying the nations treasury. .
M Khan, Peterborough, UK
Interesting the comments here that denigrate Ms Bhutto - they appear to all come from people with Muslim names.
What's wrong? Truth about people acting like barbarians in the name of your religion too unpalatable? It's time Muslims had an enlightenment and came into the 21st century.
People in the UK are getting very, very tired of your tedious demands, your constant anger and your dangerous tactics. Beware, remember the awakening of the sleeping dragon?
Fiona, south west,
I really appreciate her sense of objectivity. If only her people will humble themselives, bury there egos and subscribe to her advice; Islam will be an enviable religion and the intellectual and social status of Pakistans will improve dramatically. This will in turn become the bedrock of development just like there neibour - India.
Ola Kehinde, Nigeria.
Ola S. Kehinde, Lagos, Nigeria
The perception that Pakistan under General Zia, 1977 - 1988, was supported by the West for their strategic interests, and therefore is responsible for initiating the jihadi culture, cannot be ignored.
Similarly, 1988 - 1999 was the period which both Benazir and Nawaz Sharif was provided by History to contain the Frankenstein monster. Both, the democratic west and the democratic governments in Pakistan, including Benazir, knowingly did not address the root cause of the problem for their short term interests and ignored the long term repurcussions. This aspect of the issue, too, cannot be ignored.
Islamic fanaticism in Pakistan was provided an impetus in 1974 by ZA Bhuttos PPP government when Ahmadiyya Community was declared non muslim minority by the parliament. Zia military regime capitalized on that and was given full support of the extremists.
No where in her book Daughter of the East or this book, did she address this issue which has shaken Pakistans society and the region
Munir Varraich, Harryda, Sweden
She was an avowed socialist and a Muslim, but more than that, she was something that the Islamist Mullahs could not abide -- a woman with more gonads that all of them put together.
Mike Hall, Broomall, USA/PA
She was a balancing force in the recent months before she was taken out by the establishment. during the time she was in power military (the establishment) controlled the key decision making process. It takes time to establish a democratic system in country such as Pakistan, where no other institution exist except the military.
denali, Seattle,
I am a very tolerant person, and have spent some years in the Cradle of Islam.
MY experiences in that Kingdom gave me a deep insight into the mentality of the muslim, from the very meekest to the most rabid.
There is a fundamentalist streak in every man, woman, and child, old enough to understand the vicious creed that
is being pumped into them.
The cradle even is not safe from this militancy, as recorded by Bhutto re the exploding infant.
Any 'religion' that can use an infant as a bomb, or two Downs sufferers similarly has no right to exist.
It is the avowed intent of these maniacs to take over the middle east, and by fifth column tactic much of the west, it is about time our useless but ever so politically correct leadership took their heads out of their rears and did something to stem the tide that is rising within our society.
Fire with fire, intelligence gathering is all well and good,but it is ACTION that will carry the day.
morgan, Pontypool, Wales
"..and another whose name I forget"! Would I forget the name of my assassin?
How convenient that every thing that is now unpalatable to the West happened after she was ousted from govt.What exactly did she do to reduce extremism from Pakistan?
She is spot on about the cause of Muslim rage. Impotence and Denial
Raja Kaiqobad, Lahore, Pakistan
And what did she do whilst she was in power during the 1990's to solve the problems of Pakistan? Her niece Fatima blames her for being complicit in the assassination of her father. Her husband is blamed for looting $1.5bn out of the poor impoverished country. The Taliban flourished in Afghanistan. Benazirs' corrupt actions speak far louder than her words.
Zahid, Londonq, UK
A clever woman who analysed recent history and the reality on the ground quite well.
The present rifts in islam and the West stem from the Israeli Palestinian conflict and the West's insistence of allowing Israel to violate muslim Palestinians rights for nearly 6 decades. The West has dehumanised muslims and arabs to ensure the survival of the jewish State, especially in Hollywood where if you look back at films over the decades, you will nearly always see the muslim or arab portrayed as bad or evil.
Muslims have watched by with impotence as their fellow muslims suffer and the present resurgence of Islam in quite shocking and violent confrontations is a direct result of this. These taliban and extremist muslims are seeking to re-balance the weight of power in their own way.
Only now is Israel learning from it's mistakes and reaching out to make peace, but the damage is done as it has radicalised muslims the world over, especially Pakistan.
Abid, Shipley, UK