Islamabad
On the wall above Asif Ali Zardari’s dining table in Islamabad is a framed copy of a letter. The handwriting is small and neat and it looks nothing special but he frequently grabs it from the wall to show to visitors. For on this piece of paper rests the remarkable rise of the man for years vilified as Mr Ten Percent, who this weekend looks set to become Pakistan’s President.
The letter is written by his late wife Benazir Bhutto, and dated 16 October 2007, two days before her return to Pakistan from exile, and 11 weeks before her assassination. Addressed to supporters of her Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) to be opened in the event of her death, she wrote it at her home in Dubai shortly after receiving a delegation from foreign intelligence services warning her she would be killed if she went back. ‘I would like my husband Asif Ali Zardari to lead you in this interim period until you and he decide what is best,’ it states. ‘I say this because he is a man of courage and honour. He spent 11 and a half years in prison without bending despite torture.’
‘You see,’ he said to me over lunch at his house last month, as he jabbed at the text. ‘She knew I was the only one with the strength to hold it all together.’
When Zardari produced this ‘political will’ at the first meeting of the party leadership after Bhutto’s assassination at the end of December, her long-time associates were stunned. Zardari had long been known as anything from Mr Ten Percent to Mr Thirty Percent and his alleged corruption was widely regarded as the reason for the early demise of Bhutto’s two governments. ‘Zardari? I don’t believe it,’ was the reaction of one of Bhutto’s oldest advisers in London, when I contacted him with the news. Zardari himself calls the will ‘the joker in the pack’.
Passing the mantle to Bhutto’s discredited widower might seem to be taking South Asia’s dynastic politics to extremes. But in shock from the death of their charismatic leader and fearing the party could otherwise disintegrate in the run-up to elections, no one had the heart to challenge words from beyond the grave. Zardari shrewdly named their 19-year-old son Bilawal as co-chairman and quickly added in a Bhutto to the boy’s surname. He said he would lead the party till Bilawal was ready and was not interested in a post for himself. Aides described him as ‘Mr Sonia Gandhi’, referring to the behind-the-scenes role taken on by the widow of Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi after his assassination.
When the PPP emerged from elections in February as the largest party and formed a coalition government, Zardari said he would not become prime minister, even though the courts had conveniently removed the requirement of needing to be a graduate. But somewhere along the line, he clearly decided he wanted to be more than the power behind the scenes. When we last met a month ago, I noticed that he referred to everything in the possessive, talking of ‘my stock-market’, ‘my Prime Minister’ and ‘my government’. He railed about President Musharraf, describing him as ‘a confrontatious (sic) queen sitting on top of me’ and claiming he was impeding the PPP government from doing anything. Days later Musharraf had been ousted under threat of impeachment. This Saturday Zardari hopes to be named President. Amendments brought in by Musharraf mean he can dismiss parliament and approve all hiring and firing.
It is an astonishing turnaround for a man so long regarded as the embodiment of corruption in Pakistan and of whom it is hard to find anyone on the street to say a good word about. I first met him at their wedding in Karachi just over 20 years ago. Ironically, Bhutto had agreed to an arranged marriage with him because she thought it politically expedient to have a husband rather than campaign as a single woman. As someone whose father owned a cinema and whose main interest was playing polo, he seemed harmless. Instead, when she became prime minister in 1988, he was to turn out to be a liability.
Today, Zardari shrugs off the corruption allegations as part of a smear campaign by the establishment and a military intelligence that wanted freedom to pursue a programme of Islamisation in the region. ‘You know how they overturned the ’88 government by saying we were corrupt,’ he said. ‘The question is not whether we were corrupt, the question is they made a perception to damage democracy because they had this jihad in the pipeline. They imprisoned me for 11 and a half years and no one proved anything.’
He describes his ascent to power as ‘revenge’ for his wife’s killing and insists that he has been forced to make his bid for the Presidency to ensure the party has the space to govern. ‘Otherwise once again we would be in office and not in power,’ he says. ‘I don’t want nine people strung up to avenge her death — it’s the whole system that must change. Only when we’re Singapore and prospering, then she will be avenged.’
Benazir’s death has left him sole parent to three teenage children. Zardari says he and the children have vowed to donate blood on every birthday in her memory and have turned her room into a shrine. ‘Our bedroom in Dubai has been locked and I sleep in the next room because the children and I don’t want to lose her scent in the room,’ he said. ‘If ever I have to stay in that room they come back and spray it with her perfume and they say, “Baba you’ve been there, we can scent her aroma.”’ But, as he admits, in 20 years of marriage, they spent 15 apart and when I ask him what perfume she used, he admits he can’t remember.
Looking at the lifesize photograph of her waving at the crowds before leaving her last rally, he says; ‘I told her to bunker down after the first assassination attempt in Karachi and I would take over, she said no, she didn’t want anything to happen to me. But it would have been better if she’d survived, she would have been much better at all this.’
Few would disagree. Western diplomats find it hard to conceal their horror at the prospect of Zardari running a country increasingly regarded as the world’s most dangerous and the new base for al-Qa’eda. Plagued by chronic back problems as the result of a polo injury, his fitness for having his finger on the button of the world’s first Islamic bomb was not helped by the emergence in the Financial Times last week of legal documents describing him as crippled by psychiatric problems. As recently as March 2007, a psychiatrist had attested to him suffering depression, dementia and an inability to concentrate. Others say these were just a device to get off another corruption case and that Zardari has had long-held ambitions to emerge from his wife’s shadow. Friends say he spent years reading and preparing while in jail then the last two years in New York undergoing treatment for heart problems.
One advantage of being President is immunity to further investigations. Unlike the Prime Minister, the President does not have to disclose his assets. This is convenient, as Swiss authorities last month released millions of dollars of his assets which had been frozen in 1997 after the Pakistan authorities claimed it was money received from kickbacks on government contracts that he was laundering in Swiss banks. Zardari claims the amount is nowhere near the $60 million cited by Swiss officials and that he would give $30 million to anyone who could prove it was $60 million.
Whatever his motive in seeking more power, the heavily armed guards in black T-shirts who surround Zardari everyw here he goes attest to the risk he is taking. Not only was Bhutto assassinated, but also her two brothers. Her father, who founded the PPP, was executed.
‘I know I’m in danger — I can feel it,’ says Zardari. ‘Whoever killed her wants to kill me. But I won’t be scared or bullied. If that was the kind of person I was she wouldn’t have left it to me — she’d put in too much.’