Bhutto assassination marks dynasty’s end; ushers in further bloodshed (Part 1)

The murder in the garrison city of Rawalpindi of Benazir Bhutto (1953-2007) on Thursday 27 December almost certainly marks the end of a South Asian political dynasty, which has been central to Pakistani society for some 40 years. Her death, less than a fortnight before scheduled parliamentary elections, proved the immediate spark for widespread violent unrest and at least posed the possibility of civil war in a profoundly unstable state, often characterised as the lynch-pin in the US-led ‘war on terror’.

In the first of two parts George Binette outlines the historical background to and immediate aftermath of the assassination.

Benazir Bhutto and the PPP

Twice elected prime minister, only to leave office amid allegations of corruption on a grand scale, Benazir Bhutto was the elder of two daughters, fathered by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the scion of a major land-owning family and co-founder of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) in 1967. He became prime minister in 1970, riding into office on a crest of revulsion at a previous military dictatorship.

A self-styled moderniser, who sometimes saw himself as Pakistan’s answer to Ataturk, Bhutto stood in a line of radical bourgeois nationalists in the semi-colonial world, who ostensibly embraced ‘socialism’, synonymous for him with social reform measures, including some land redistribution, social welfare measures and state capitalist industrialisation to afford greater autonomy from the West. Among his obsessions was the development of a Pakistani nuclear arsenal.

Bhutto delivered on a small fraction of his reform pledges, but at the military’s behest blundered into a war with India over the Awami League's demand for autonomy in East Pakistan, which eventually became an independent Bangladesh in 1972. Though he retained a mass base of support throughout his increasingly autocratic premiership, Ali Bhutto ultimately found himself unable to cling to power after valid charges of election rigging in 1977, followed by a less persuasive murder rap that provided the pretext for his eventual execution.

In his wake the PPP continued to function, with something of a mass base, albeit with the appearance of a highly volatile family fiefdom that veered from half-baked attempts at armed resistance to the Zia regime to lobbying attempts to cultivate western diplomatic support for the dictatorship’s overthrow.

In a curious irony Benazir would die within walking distance of the prison where Ali Bhutto was himself hanged in April 1979 at the behest of the military dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, who had come to power in a coup in late 1977. In the early years of the Zia dictatorship, Benazir and her mother had faced house arrest and solitary confinement eventually returning to Europe, principally London, apparently transformed from the pampered ‘Pinkie’, apple of her father’s eye, into a hardened political operator, determined to avenge her father’s death and regain political dominance for the Bhutto family.

General Zia would eventually die in 1988, alongside the US ambassador to Pakistan, in a plane crash triggered by an explosion devised by still unidentified ‘terrorists’. Of course, Zia had already proved an immensely useful conduit of funds and weaponry on the West’s behalf to the Islamist forces fighting the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan through the 1980s.

The dictatorship also oversaw the introduction of a version of sharia law and the imposition of draconian restrictions on the activities of women and girls. Part of the horrible, lasting legacy of the period is the virtual absence of even primary education for the majority of girls in the country. Official estimates of illiteracy among Pakistani women stand at close to 70 percent, compared to approximately 40 percent for men (Source: Economist Intelligence Unit, various years).

By the end of 1988 Benazir had ostensibly achieved her goal as the PPP emerged as the single largest party in a revived parliament. What ensued, however, was nearly two years of political paralysis, allegedly accompanied by shameless pilfering of state funds. Her first term ended in disgrace, but she and the PPP managed to rebound in 1993, with her government surviving another three years before the then president, a PPP figure himself, dismissed her from the premiership, which then went to Nawaz Sharif in the subsequent general election.

Benazir and her husband, Asif Zardari, who acquired the contemptuous sobriquet of ‘Mr Ten Percent’, would eventually face a combined total of 13 indictments internationally arising from the receipt of kickbacks on a wide range of contracts. Benazir avoided jail, despite a conviction that was eventually overturned, while Zardari did nearly eight years in Pakistani custody. Cases against him in Spanish and Swiss courts are still unresolved.

A further allegation against Benazir, widely believed and never disproved by investigation, holds her at least complicit in the murder of her surviving brother, Murtaza, by heavily armed police, most probably at her husband’s instigation during the final months of her premiership. Tariq Ali recounts this scandal, largely unreported in the West, at some length in a recent article for the London Review of Books (‘Daughter of the West’ , 13 December 2007, p6).

With Benazir by now out of the country it was Nawaz Sharif’s premiership that came to an abrupt end in October 1999, as army chief Musharraf led the fourth military coup in just over five decades of the nation’s post-Partition existence. The coup was Sharif’s ‘reward’ for a belated attempt to rein in the military after an adventurous incursion into Indian-controlled territory in Kashmir, another regional hotspot where nationalist sentiment has become mixed with a brand of Islamism. The Clinton administration helped spirit Sharif out of the country, remaining lukewarm towards the new military regime despite its initial gestures towards rooting out endemic corruption and pledges to be a star pupil of the International Monetary Fund.

Two years later, however, came '9/11' and the Musharraf government, khaki and all, was an indispensable ally to the Bush administration, desperately keen on a regional proxy, in the 'war on terror'.

Assassination: prelude and aftermath

The much anticipated return from exile in Dubai came in mid-October. While the reception was not so rapturous as on her return from London in 1986, an estimated quarter of a million turned out to catch a glimpse of an older and sleeker Benazir. As the Bhutto cavalcade proceeded through Karachi two suicide bombers detonated themselves, killing an estimated 140 people, but leaving Benazir unscathed if evidently shaken.

Little more than a fortnight later, on 3 November, Musharraf seized on the failed assassination attempt as part of the pretext for declaring martial law, though his real target remained a judiciary that had dared to show an ‘intolerable’ degree of independence. Tariq Ali claims that the White House had been informed several weeks in advance of Musharraf’s actual announcement, with word transmitted to Downing Street somewhat later. He also suggests that Musharraf tipped off the PPP. Bhutto’s response, whether to the assassination attempt or the pending announcement from the general remains unclear, was to retreat to her Dubai haven for the first half of November.

Meanwhile, prominent members of the PPP, particularly in the legal profession, figured among those arrested. The outstanding cricketer turned honest politician, Imran Khan, was also hauled in and charged with ‘state terrorism’ before his eventual release. After flip-flopping on the state of emergency, Benazir eventually declared herself an implacable opponent and vowed to return to Pakistan once more to lead resistance to it.

She would live to see the official lifting of martial law and the start of a campaign for 8 January elections that her likely principal opponent Nawaz Sharif, back from Saudi to a rather muted response, was already threatening to boycott.

As news spread of Benazir’s assassination, violence spontaneously erupted in cities and towns across the nation, though the most serious rioting centred on her native Sindh province, where there were reports of sustained gun battles between PPP supporters and police as well as the looting of banks and shops. Bloody clashes also occurred in Baluchistan. By Saturday afternoon (29 December) official reports suggested at least 38 had died in clashes, with the Interior Ministry reporting the looting and torching of more than 175 banks, dozens of rail cars and numerous election premises. An Associated Press correspondent in Sindh province painted an image of an all but deserted main highway, dotted with unofficial roadblocks erected by PPP supporters and littered with burnt-out vehicle wrecks. At the same time, the rail network is effectively shut down, leading to localised food shortages.

At this stage and from this distance it is impossible to predict whether this firestorm of rage in the wake of Bhutto’s death will burn itself out in a matter of days or, instead, escalate into a more sustained confrontation that might result in the fragmentation of the central state.

What is abundantly clear is that Washington and London have suffered a hugely embarrassing setback as the principal brokers of what both the State Department and Foreign Office had hoped would prove an effective, if unlikely, political marriage between a Bhutto, with a suddenly whitewashed image, as prime minister, and Pervez Musharraf, now out of military uniform, as president.

After the occasional student protest against the Vietnam War and an occasional flourish of anti-imperialist rhetoric, the Harvard and Oxford-educated Benazir had long ago made her peace with Washington and in recent years had been a remorseless supporter of the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Though in exile in Dubai for the better of a decade, she was seen – with some justification – as a still charismatic political campaigner with a mass following greater than any other figure’s who could confer a degree of legitimacy on an otherwise discredited Musharraf presidency.

Inevitably, ‘terrorists’ have been blamed for Bhutto’s death and within 24 hours of the assassination the Pakistani regime claimed proof positive that the suicide gunman/bomber was acting on orders from al-Qaida in the supposed guise of Baitullah Mehsud, a wanted jihadist leader, based in the South Waziristan region.

The hundreds of thousands, who journeyed with Benazir’s wooden casket to the family mausoleum, were having none of this, however. Chants rang out in Urdu and Sindhi denouncing Musharraf as a ‘dog’ and ‘murderer’. PPP representatives rejected the Interior Ministry’s claims regarding Mehsud and al-Qaida even as a public row had developed over the precise cause of Bhutto’s death with the Interior Ministry’s claim that she fractured her skull on the rooftop of her vehicle dismissed as ‘dangerous nonsense’ by her supporters. Thus far, even the Bush administration has kept its distance from the official line emerging from the Interior Ministry in Islamabad, while Democratic Party front-runner, Hilary Clinton, has called for an international inquiry into the assassination. Still, the British government was more charitable to the Pakistani regime with Foreign Secretary David Miliband stating that he had ‘no reason’ to doubt the Interior Ministry’s claims.

Whether Musharraf himself had a hand in Bhutto’s murder may never be known, but there is little doubt in the minds of the PPP faithful and quite probably a wider swathe of Pakistani society. The personal enmity between Bhutto and Musharraf was barely concealed, but more significant perhaps was the ill will towards the Bhutto family within sections of the ISI, the state’s notorious special security apparatus to which Bhutto herself had pointed to in several interviews with British and French journalists. Whatever the ultimate truth behind the assassination there was no shortage of enemies with plausible motives, among them Islamists quite independent of any links with bin Laden and co, as well as military figures anxious at the possibility of competition for the spoils of office.

At present, the regime appears to be closing ranks, refusing any offers of foreign assistance with an investigation of the assassination and thus far at least not suggesting any postponement of the 8 January poll. Of course, this might change swiftly under pressure from Washington. At this stage, however, Musharraf, however unpopular and mistrusted he may be domestically, appears to be the sole card that the Bush administration can play in the next few weeks and months.

A second piece to appear before the new year will offer an update on developments as well as considering the question, ‘where now for Pakistan?’, as the world’s sixth most populous nation plunges into new turmoil with the main bourgeois opposition party leaderless and the organised far left both tiny and fragmented.

Some further reading:

From a liberal perspective, the Pakistan Human Rights Commission (HRC) provides a useful and apparently objective, if now dated, guide to the patchwork of political parties that took part in the October 2002 elections. This poll saw an estimated turnout of just 20 percent, but proved surprisingly close despite widely accepted reports of large-scale ballot rigging designed to ensure victory for Musharraf’s latest repackaging of the nation’s founding party, the Muslim League (Q).

For a brief history of the Pakistani military and the first three years of Musharrraf’s rule see Tariq Ali’s ‘The Colour Khaki’, New Left Review, no 19 (new series), pp 5-28 (London, January/February 2003), which can be downloaded by journal subscribers. Though obviously dated, this is a good companion piece to his somewhat gossipy and self-indulgent pieces in the London Review of Books (13 December 2007 issue cited above), which are nonetheless informative and insightful. Just don't expect too much about the masses!

The Pakistani-born academic Ayesha Siddiqa-Agha has written extensively on arms procurement and corruption in Pakistan and her work comes as recommended source material by both Tariq Ali and the Socialist Party's general secretary, Peter Taaffe.

In terms of the British-based far left a brief statement appeared on the Socialist Workers Party website on Thursday night, while the Socialist Party's small sister organisation, the Socialist Movement Pakistan has posted a far more detailed account and position statement on the Committee for a Workers' International website.

The website of the Pakistan Labour Party, which has observer status within the United Secretariat of the Fourth International appears to have been shutdown, though the organisation did issue a brief public statement deploring the assassination and calling for a three-day general strike in protest against the regime.

Another extraordinary example of George Galloway MP's prose features a virtual paean of praise to Benazir Bhutto and suggests he was intending to go to Pakistan to join her campaign from 2 January. Somehow the anti-war MP for Bethnal Green and Bow seems to have missed that Ms Bhutto had been unequivocal in supporting the US-led operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Sun 30, December 2007 @ 01:37