Nairobi — IN MANY WAYS, PAKISTAN didn't deserve Benazir Bhutto. She was everything Pakistan is not - cosmopolitan, secular, liberal. Yet, the irony is that if Pakistan was not the violent, feudal, militaristic and patriarchal place it is, Bhutto may never have emerged as its leader.

Pakistan was born out of violence and religious exclusion. Its founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, created a country that was based on the idea that Muslims and Hindus could not live together harmoniously within the same nation.

Both countries' independence in 1947 was thus marred by the rape, killing and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Muslims who sought refuge on either side of the newly-created Indo-Pakistan border.

After Jinnah, the country was ruled by various military dictators, the latest of which is Parvez Musharraf. Pakistan's attempts at democracy have been short-lived.

Bhutto's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was democratically elected in the early 1970s and Bhutto herself became prime minister twice, in 1988 and in 1993.

But the elder Bhutto was ousted by General Zia Ul-Haq in a military coup and executed in 1979, and his daughter was dismissed on charges of corruption.

Bhutto's own life mirrored the dysfunctional society in which she was raised. She spent a large part of her life in prison, under house arrest or in exile. Her political career was marred by allegations of corruption; even her husband, Asif Zardari, was often referred to as M. Ten Percent.

It is alleged that her strong stance against Muslim fundamentalism was her fatal flaw and placed her on the Al Qaeda hit-list, although Bhutto often asserted that fundamentalists in Pakistan were misinterpreting Islam and that the Prophet Muhammad wanted women to be educated and to inherit property.

Despite Bhutto's attempts at restoring a semblance of secular civilian rule in Pakistan, the country was doomed to fail in instituting democratic ideals from the start.

Jinnah took over an artificially-created country that had no real sense of nationhood. The military leaders that followed did little to consolidate democracy within the fragile nation.

During the Cold War, various US governments propped up these military regimes in the hope that they would stem Soviet influence in neighbouring Afghanistan, thereby undermining the possibility of democracy even further.

Under Musharraf, the country's military became one of the largest beneficiaries of the US-led war on terror - it currently receives an astounding $150 million in American aid every month. The sovereignty that Jinnah sought in 1947 has, therefore, never been realised.

PAKISTAN IS ALSO ONE OF THE LAST bastions of diehard patriarchy in the world. Despite the country's recent attempts at modernisation and its status as a nuclear power, two-thirds of the adult female population in Pakistan remains illiterate.

Large parts of rural Pakistan are feudal societies where women are seen as chattels that must owned and controlled. "Honour killings" of women and girls in some rural villages are so common that they are barely reported in the press, and few of the cases ever come to trial.

For a woman to be elected as prime minister in such a society, as Bhutto was, is therefore, remarkable - although some might say that in Asia it is not so unusual for women to attain power, especially if that power emanates from a male relative, in Bhutto's case, her father.

When she was first elected in 1988, the 35-year-old Bhutto was not only one of the youngest heads of state in the world, but the first woman in modern times to lead a Muslim nation.

Why did Bhutto bother to fight a system that was so hostile to women and to democracy?

In her 1988 autobiography, Daughter of the East, Bhutto suggests that by being elected prime minister, she, in effect, avenged the forces that sent her father to the gallows.

Her return to Pakistan from self-imposed exile in October this year was perhaps also motivated by the desire to clean her own tarnished image.

Just before she left Pakistan to attend Harvard University in 1969, her father said, "You will see many things that amaze you and travel to places you've never heard of. But remember, whatever happens to you, you will ultimately return here. Your place is here. Your roots are here. It is here you will be buried."

As fate would have it, Bhutto was, as her father had wished, buried next to his grave in her ancestral home in Larkana, not in the foreign lands where she was exiled.

Ironically, in death, the feisty and glamorous Bhutto has become a potent symbol of the democratic ideals that eluded her country for more than six decades.

Let us hope her death was not in vain and that Pakistan will now finally emerge as an egalitarian, progressive and democratic nation.

Ms Warah is an editor with the UN. The views expressed here are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the United Nations.