While the world was shocked by the assassination of Ms Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, it could hardly have come as a surprise to anyone. She had no shortage of enemies who wanted her dead, and she had been welcomed back to the country from exile in October with a massive suicide bomb which killed more than 130 of her supporters. Death threats had been made openly against her, and the Pakistani government has now said it had passed on information to her about several plots against her life. Certainly from interviews she gave following her return, she was in no doubt about the danger she faced, and it says a great deal for her courage that she still went out to public meetings to address and make contact with her supporters. But as Mrs Thatcher once observed following the IRA bombing of the Brighton hotel where the Conservative Party Conference was being held in 1984, democratic leaders cannot lock themselves away from the people; they have to be accessible to the public.
As several commentators have remarked, Ms Bhutto’s family were the Pakistani equivalent of the Kennedys. A political dynasty with considerable wealth, they have also been marked by tragedy. Ms Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, became Prime Minister in 1973, but was removed in a military coup in 1977 and was hanged in 1979, despite the best efforts of world leaders to secure his reprieve. She herself was jailed by the military for five years, and she told interviewers it was what had happened to her father that eventually persuaded her to go into politics. She was in office twice, first in 1988, being removed by the military after two years for corruption and incompetence; and then again in 1993. On that occasion she was dismissed by the army three years later for corruption.
The accusations of corruption were particularly associated with Benazir Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who had played a prominent role in her government. He served eight years in jail, although not in connection with the corruption allegations, but for being allegedly involved in the murder of Benazir Bhutto’s brother, Murtaza, a charge he has always denied. Murtaza was a great deal more militant than his sister, and at one time was seen as her political rival. He was shot in strange circumstances in 1996 in Karachi. Ms Bhutto’s youngest brother, Shahnawaz, who also was in politics, was found dead in his apartment in France in 1985. It was suspected he had been poisoned after attending a family reunion. The one remaining sibling, it is reported, has no interest in entering politics.
Whatever Benazir Bhutto was or was not, her assassination has caused a crisis in Pakistan. When it embarked on its independent journey in 1947, that nation had a similar inheritance to India in terms of the bureaucratic infrastructure left behind by the British, and the political choices available to it. As it was, India took the democratic road, and has demonstrated to the world how a nation with a polyglot population only second to that of China in terms of size, living on a large land mass can make democracy work. While there are political problems, the obvious benefit (among many others) has been the institutionalization of a stable system of government.
Pakistan, in contrast, has never allowed democracy to take root. There have been civilian governments it is true, but they have all been dismissed by the military, which has ruled Pakistan directly for 33 out of its 60 years of independent existence. In addition, beginning in 1953 with Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, there has been a sinister tradition of the assassination of leaders, or at least, their unexplained deaths, not excluding military rulers. General Zia-ul-Haq, for example, who ruled the country between 1977 and 1988 died in a suspicious plane crash along with the senior officers of the Pakistan army and the US Ambassador. As things stand, therefore, sovereignty does not really reside with the people of Pakistan; in the final analysis it lies with the army.
If that were not enough to contend with, there are powerful centrifugal forces at work in the country especially in provinces like Balochistan, not to mention the problem of tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan which no government has ever really brought under national jurisdiction. In addition, of course, there is the matter of the extremists and certain madrassas which have been turning out militants, and in some cases, suicide bombers. If religious extremists are the major problem in Pakistan they are today, it is because military dictatorships have tended to ally with them to neutralize the democratic forces in the nation. President Musharraf has been no exception to this, and has depended partly on militant Islamic parties to help him stay in power. It must also be said that various US administrations have been none too discriminating about which government they supported, giving generous aid to military regimes for reasons which had nothing to do with the political health of Pakistan.
Benazir Bhutto with her national mass following represented the fragile hope of providing a bridge which would eventually allow the country to return to democracy, and now it is difficult to see who could replace her. It was reported yesterday that the US government had passed along warnings to Islamabad that the Pakistani Taliban and associated al Qaeda groups intended to kill various moderate and democratic leaders, which included former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, the man removed by President Musharraf in 1999. One didn’t need to be a security analyst to predict that Islamist extremists would target democratic forces.
The elephant in the room, of course, is Pakistan’s nuclear capability which has the West, and no doubt India in particular, very nervous. The MSNBC website yesterday reported anonymous US defence officials as saying the fear was that instability in Pakistan would spill over into Afghanistan, and intensify the fighting there. Any kind of melding of the conflict in the two countries could present enormous security problems for everyone, and at the very least make safeguarding Pakistani nuclear materials like enriched uranium, a particular challenge.
The way forward is by no means obvious. The first thing which one hopes President Musharraf could be prevailed upon to do would be to agree to hold an inquiry into Ms Bhutto’s assassination which would have some level of foreign involvement, such as the United Nations. Following his government’s clumsy attempt to absolve itself of blame for any security lapses at her meeting on Thursday by suggesting that she died because she struck her head on the sun-roof lever and not because she was hit by bullets or shrapnel the President needs to remove any suspicion that his administration was involved at any level. After all, it is well known that the Pakistani intelligence service created the Taliban, and the military too includes militant elements.
The election is due in just over a week, although it is difficult to see how it can come off now in view of the insecurity, and in any case Mr Nawaz Sharif has said that he at least would not take part. It seems likely that the government will meet the political parties before it makes the next move, although if they demand that Mr Musharraf step down, as some of them have said they would, that meeting is unlikely to make progress. In the short term, at least, a state of emergency is a distinct possibility.
For any democracy to have any chance of survival the extremists have to be confronted, and President Musharraf’s record is not good on that score – plenty words, little action. Most of all, a constitutional framework has to be created whereby the army removes itself from politics for good. While the objective might be clear, however, the intervening steps to achieve it are by no means so. One can only hope that all the players will keep at the forefront of their minds that the alternative is civil war.
