Omar Kalinge Nnyago
4 January 2008
column
It is exactly one week since twice former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was buried next to her father, once former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in the sleepy dusty village of Garhi Khuda Baksh of her ancestral Sindh Province. Her death shocked the world, but did not surprise keen Pakistan observers.
Reports of a possible irreversible crisis in Pakistan dominated the world media that is keen to portray Benazir, even in death, as perhaps the most significant personality that Pakistan ever produced. This is of course an exaggeration that is being sold to the world by the same forces that created her oversize image.
Benazir was but just the daughter of a former Prime Minister who was thrust into the limelight of Asia's politics of dynasty when her father was hanged on a conspiracy to murder conviction in the April of 1979.
It is this type of democracy, often despairingly referred to as "Dynastocracy" that has again created the new leader of the Pakistan People's Party, PPP, Benazir's son, Bilawal, 18, an Oxford undergraduate.
Like Rajiv Gandhi of India who had to abandon his career as a pilot to step in the shoes of his slain mother, Indira Gandhi. Rajiv was later to be the victim of the earliest recorded incidents of "suicide bombing" by a Hindu LTTE woman fighter, long before the Muslim suicide bomber was discovered.
With the death of Benazir, the party her father founded had the chance to decide whether it was not time to look elsewhere for leadership, other than from the blood of Zulfiqar.
It is not conceivable that a 21st century political organisation would find strength only from a leadership that is based on blood relation. Or even marital bonds. For, Asif Zardari, Benazir's husband has been chosen to co-chair the party with his son. Institutions cannot be built on such shaky foundations.
Pakistan, on the other hand, has the ability to withstand great shocks. In the early 1990s when President Gen. Zia-ul-Haq was assassinated in a plane crash along with over two dozen top military officers, everybody thought Pakistan had come to a possible halt. Nothing happened.
They were buried a day after the crash, and Pakistan just moved on, with one little known Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg at the helm. Not many days from now, as every Pakistan watcher will tell you, Pakistan will be back to work and perhaps test-fire a new missile.
But every nation, even the most resilient one, needs closure, when such a tragedy happens to one of its leaders. A week after her death, the versions of Benazir's possible cause of death are too numerous for comfort.
First, it was an al-Qaeda bullet that struck through her neck, the al-Qaeda sharp shooter, suddenly, blowing himself up. This meant that the investigations were over - the assassin had killed himself too.
Then the following day, the interior ministry had 'new evidence'. Benazir had fatally hurt herself by hitting her head on a sun roof lever of her Land Cruiser. She was neither hit by an al-Qaeda nor any other bullet or by any bomb shrapnel. This meant therefore that Benazir was not assassinated, but died in a freak accident. That she did not die of an assassin's bullet, but in the process of avoiding it.
Then the bombshell. An insider of the Pakistan People's Party, one Sherry Rehman who supervised the ritual bathing of Benazir's body claims that he saw "clear bullet wounds around the fallen leader's neck". This could mean then that someone is lying about Bhutto's death, pointing to a high level cover up that the world ought not to ignore.
So what happened to the much fancied "al-Qaeda assassinated Bhutto" line? It has been thrown into the dustbin. Yet it would have been the best explanation to give to the world. It would have fitted well with Bush's war on terror. These days, if you want to kill anyone, just go ahead and do it - and blame it on al-Qaeda. This would save all of us from any further investigation.
But not everybody seems to be buying in easy. In an opinion poll by the prestigious Khaleej Times, the highest circulated English language daily of the Gulf that was published on Sunday, December 30, 2007, only 29.9% of respondents answered "Yes" to the straight question: "Do you think al-Qaeda is behind Benazir Bhutto's death?". 70.1% replied "No".
Benazir's death has further exposed the international conspiracy of weaving every policy around the bogey of Al-Qaeda. The United States must be particularly angry that many people think someone else killed Benazir.
This is not good for the 'war on terror', its budget, and the planned American intervention in Pakistan to add it to Afghanistan and Iraq as the new "democracy export" project.
It will take a while for the world to know for certain who killed BB. However, I would not be surprised to hear when the time comes, that her assassination was the work of some of her closest international backers that she had called friends, but were more interested in presenting Pakistan as a failing state than in keeping Benazir alive.
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