Benazir Bhutto’s son has none of his mother’s glamour, says Christina Lamb, but he must now do his dynastic duty in a country cruelly deprived of its only pro-Western, liberal leader and in which no one feels it is safe to criticise the establishment
On top of the bus carrying Benazir Bhutto from Karachi airport last October, at the start of the journey that had been planned as her triumphant return from exile but was to end so tragically, I fell into conversation with her amiable cousin Tariq, who told me his wife had begged him not to board. As we waved at the cheering crowds holding banners of Bhutto and her late father, I asked if he had ever been tempted to give up farming and go into the family business. He laughed grimly. ‘No way’, he said. ‘Our family is cursed. All the Bhuttos who get involved in politics end up dead — my uncle, Benazir’s father; both her brothers....’
Nine hours later it seemed he was going to be proved horribly right when the bus was hit by two suicide bombs leaving more than 140 dead. Benazir escaped that first attempt but last Thursday — just ten weeks after her return — her luck ran out and she too joined that sombre list.
The latest family member to take over the hazardous Bhutto mantle is her son Bilawal — a shy 19-year-old Oxford undergraduate who succeeds her as leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party. The glasses from which he gazed out owlishly as he was presented to the world’s media may have been Armani, but he has none of his late mother’s glamour. That, it seems, did not matter.
‘The party has to have a Bhutto face,’ said Wajid Shamsul Hasan, former Pakistani high commissioner to London and long-time adviser to Bhutto. As Bhutto’s two brothers had already died in mysterious circumstances (one poisoned in France and one shot dead in Karachi) and her only surviving sister, Sanam, has no interest in politics, her son was the obvious choice — even if he did not actually bear the hallowed surname. To get round this, he and his two younger sisters added a Bhutto to their names so he becomes Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari.
In Pakistan the minimum age for contesting elections is 25, which means his father, Asif Zardari, will manage the party while Bilawal completes his studies. Many predict this may ultimately lead to the PPP’s demise. Zardari is a controversial figure whose alleged corrupt activities are blamed by many in the party for the dismissal of its last two governments. But his supporters point out that he has never been convicted despite spending more than eight years in jail.
‘Democracy is the best revenge for my mother’s death,’ declared Bilawal as he was named PPP leader. Yet the anointment of father and son only emphasised that the party which stands for democracy is run on entirely undemocratic lines. It has had no internal leadership elections and has functioned almost as a personality cult for Bhutto for three decades. Of course, as the subcontinent of the Nehrus and the Gandhis, South Asia is used to dynastic politics. In many senses Bilawal was literally born into politics. Benazir gave birth to him — her firstborn — in 1988 while campaigning for elections which saw her become prime minister for the first time. She tricked Pakistan’s then military dictator General Zia by getting her medical records swapped with those of a woman due three months later, knowing he would time the election itself for around her due date.
Although Bilawal’s early years were spent with a mother otherwise occupied running the country or trying to get elected, since he was ten they have lived in exile, first in London, then Dubai. There they became incredibly close. ‘The good thing is I’ve had time to be with the children,’ she would say about being cast into the political wilderness. When she saw him off to her alma mater, Oxford, in October there were tears in her eyes. ‘It was so moving,’ she told me afterwards. ‘He looked so small.’
This conflict between the warm-hearted mother and the haughty would-be leader of the nation was part of the strange mix that made up Benazir. I first met her in 1987 when Pakistan was under its last martial law and she was in exile in London where I interviewed her in her Kensington flat. Impressed by her talk about democracy, I was shocked to visit her a few months later in Karachi where she sat on a throne on a dais in her garden receiving peasants like a feudal lord.
That first meeting had been my first interview with a leading politician. Benazir put me at ease; when she set her mind to it she could charm anyone. Later, when I lived in Pakistan, I would get fed up with middle-aged male journalists going in to see her with all their tough questions ready and coming out smitten, often bearing a carpet. She could melt women, too, with her girly talk about diets and fascination with fortune-telling and celebrity magazines. Journalists from Hello! and Paris Match were always received more readily than those from the New York Times.
She also collected people. One of those on the Benazir bus was a friend from Dubai who described herself as ‘Benazir’s yoga and shopping friend’ and was clad in totally inappropriate designer eveningwear. Among the other unlikely people who counted themselves as her friends was Cleo Rocos, the Celebrity Big Brother star, to whom she apparently sent recipes for Baked Alaska.
In many ways I owed my career to her. It was an invitation to her wedding 20 years ago that served as my introduction to Pakistan. I was so captivated that I gave up my job as a trainee TV reporter in Birmingham and shortly afterwards returned as a would-be foreign correspondent covering her first rise to power in 1988. Later we fell out because of my criticism of her two periods as prime minister, which were marked by corruption rather than legislation. Both times her tenure was brought to an abrupt halt by the military, which has ruled Pakistan for more than half its 60-year existence. But in recent years we had mended our fences and often met for lunch when she was in London.
Because of that, I was on her bus when it was bombed. Benazir was convinced that the people who had killed her father were behind that attempt — a group she referred to as the ‘old guard’. By this she meant senior bureaucrats and officers from the military intelligence ISI who had been promoted during the rule of General Zia. She started firing off emails to friends, journalists and diplomats describing threats against her. In Dubai in October she had written her last will and message to the party. Yet despite the threats she refused to hide behind the armour-plated shields carefully constructed by her security. Instead she was always popping up from sun roofs as if she thought herself immortal. When asked about the risks she would always reply: ‘It’s in God’s hands.’
Of course they got her in the end, but it was still a shock, even to those who had disliked her. ‘The whole nation is in mourning,’ said an old friend of mine who had always been her critic. Perhaps fittingly for one who had for so long stood against the military’s involvement in politics, when the moment finally came it was in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, headquarters of the army. Benazir had been addressing a rally at Liaquat Bagh, a park named after the country’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, who was assassinated in 1951, just four years after Pakistan’s creation. Round the corner used to be Rawalpindi jail where Bhutto’s father was hanged in 1979.
As her vehicle exited the park, crowds gathered shouting ‘Jiye Bhutto!’ — ‘Long live Bhutto!’ and she emerged from the top to wave. According to eyewitnesses and party members who were in the car, three shots rang out and she collapsed inside the vehicle bleeding as outside a suicide bom ber took more lives. The car rushed to Rawalpindi General Hospital two miles away but it was too late: 41 minutes later she was officially pronounced dead.
Her death has left a huge gaping hole not just in the party but in the country. Not only was she the only pro-Western, truly liberal leader, but her assassination has provoked a climate of fear that anyone who speaks against the establishment will be silenced. ‘People fear that if they can do this to Benazir, the leader of the main political party, daughter of Zulfilkar Ali Bhutto, with all her powerful friends and Western allies, in broad daylight just yards from GCHQ, then no one is safe,’ said Akbar Ahmed, professor of Islamic studies at the American University in Washington.
At the time of writing, the government has still not officially announced a delay to elections scheduled for next Tuesday, but because of the unrest it is widely expected. Ironically, given all the doubts the opposition had about the fairness of the elections, it is the ruling party that now wants a delay. PPP leaders are eager to go ahead, knowing that in the wake of Benazir’s death their party will get a huge sympathy vote. So is the Muslim League of Nawaz Sharif, the other main opposition leader. But President Musharraf knows he can no longer rely on the original script of a hung parliament where no party would have a majority and the balance of power would rest with him.
Whatever happens, one thing is sure. Nobody in Pakistan was wishing each other happy new year this week. ‘The future looks troubled,’ said Talat Hussein, a commentator with Pakistan’s Aaj TV. ‘It’s a grim beginning to a new year.’
Yet this should have been a celebratory year. Both India and Pakistan held festivals in London last summer to mark 60 years of independence from Britain. It is indicative of the respective fortunes of the two rivals that while India was showcasing Bollywood movies, among the displays for Pakistan was a collection of rifles. These were seized by police, leaving Pakistan’s embarrassed high commissioner to apologise, admitting they were ‘inappropriate’.