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A Life Reflecting Her Country's Contradictions
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"There was a kind of fatalism about Benazir. She saw herself as being on a mission, to carry forward the message of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, and she was determined to carry that mission out, come what may," said Shuja Nawaz, a Pakistani American scholar in Washington who knew her well. "People accused her of being an opportunistic politician, but she was also very religious. She was resigned to doing what she had to do, and it must have taken a great deal of inner strength."
The high point of Bhutto's career came after her return to Pakistan in 1986, following nearly a decade of military rule, when she was welcomed by tumultuous mobs as the leader who could deliver the country from the darkness of the Zia years. "It is almost impossible to exaggerate the weight of expectation which her return aroused," author Ian Talbot wrote of her election as prime minister in 1988.
Yet even though she was an inspiration to Pakistan's poor voters, Bhutto proved a disappointing ruler. She traveled widely abroad and was extremely popular in Washington, and she enacted economic policies aimed at attracting foreign investment and reducing Pakistan's appalling poverty.
But she failed to control a series of domestic conflicts, especially a spiral of ethnic and sectarian violence in Karachi, her native city. She was accused of trying to manipulate the courts and the press and of stooping to multiple acts of petty self-enrichment while in power. She was forced from office after two years, then reelected in 1993 and forced out a second time after three more years.
Many of the corruption charges involved her husband, businessman Asif Ali Zardari, who was snidely referred to as "Mr. 10 Percent." The pair were accused of taking kickbacks for government contracts, on items from imported tractors to steel mill improvements, and of hiding their gains in international bank accounts and real estate.
Zardari was also accused of drug trafficking and of involvement in the 1996 murder of Bhutto's brother Murtaza, who was widely described as creating political problems for her. In 1999, husband and wife were sentenced to five years in prison; Zardari ended up spending eight years behind bars, but Bhutto, who was abroad at the time, did not return.
Bhutto consistently denied the charges and said they were politically motivated, but the scandals disillusioned many of her followers. Meanwhile, her lofty ideals gradually sank to the level of a petty rivalry with her political nemesis, Nawaz Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League, who was elected prime minister twice, partly because of her failures in office.
Bhutto spent much of the last decade living abroad with her three children, largely to avoid prosecution. But early this year, she began quietly negotiating to return to her troubled homeland, where she still harbored dreams of returning to power and where some Western officials viewed a co-government headed by Bhutto and Pakistan's military president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, as the best option for short-term stability.
Bhutto had been warned by friends and advisers not to return to Pakistan. Islamic terrorism was on the rise there, and the country's increasingly emboldened Islamic militants viewed her as a dangerously secular figure who was essentially the Western candidate for prime minister.
The degree of danger became starkly clear just hours after Bhutto's triumphant homecoming Oct. 18. As her caravan crawled through welcoming crowds in the port city of Karachi, two massive bombs exploded, sparing her life but killing more than 140 people.
On Nov. 3, Musharraf declared emergency rule and Bhutto was placed under house arrest twice in the days that followed. But despite the restrictions and the risks, she continued speaking out against both military dictatorship and Islamic extremism.
Once elections were announced for January, she toyed briefly with the idea of a boycott but soon began campaigning in earnest, seeking out the crowds that idolized her and attempting to stage events that would echo her past political triumphs. In was in such a place, Liaquat Garden in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, that Bhutto met her fate.
