When people die suddenly, especially if they are young, we generally tend to speak well of them. Maybe that is how it should be.
However, the eulogies to Benazir Bhutto have been quite over the top. Fact is being mixed with large dollops of fiction.
The West says that she was a democrat. I think that their understanding of the term is rather different from mine. Benazir Bhutto wouldn’t have recognized democracy if it had gone up to her and introduced itself.
As prime minister of Pakistan she was as allergic to democracy as most Pakistani rulers have been, before and after her. She showed no respect for the country’s democratic institutions undermining even the judiciary. She treated members of the Pakistani People’s Party like servants in a feudal household and allowed her husband to get away with even greater excesses. As prime minister she was an expert in playing both sides against the middle and all sides against everybody. She encouraged fundamentalism when it suited her and rubbished it when it didn’t. She made deals with Musharraf, her devil, because of her lust for power and her belief in her ability to eventually outsmart him. That she thought she was the destiny of her country was supreme arrogance.
They say she was a modern woman. She was modern when travelling abroad, feudal back in Pakistan.
They say she was intelligent. But she wasn’t intelligent enough to realize, that in her country at least, being close to the U.S. was the kiss of death.
For a ‘democrat’ there were too many allegations of culpability in some murders, including those of her brothers.
And then there was the matter of the corruption; mountains and mountains of it.
In an impoverished country with foreign currency restrictions how did she get the money to afford the lavish lifestyle of holidays in the South of France, Switzerland and other snob destinations?
When she was investigated for corruption she often claimed that these were politically motivated. What did she say when these investigations were conducted by government agencies in the West?
She could hardly have been married to Mr. Ten-per-cent without being, at least, Mrs. Something-per-cent. When she insisted to reporters that her husband was clean, she was probably talking about his hygiene.
Press reports say that in her will, drawn up a few days before she returned to Pakistan, she wrote that if anything happened to her, her husband was to lead the PPP. Obviously, this ‘democrat’ hadn’t heard the term ‘party elections’.
This act – assuming the will wasn’t another fraud by Mr. Ten-per-cent – was one more indication of the contempt she had for her party, her people and her country.
© Percy Aaron
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