[Robert Stagg]
It is not unheard of for political leaders to die in undignified fashions. Antonio Salazar, the dictator of Portugal, fell victim to the grimmest of reapers when his deckchair folded in on itself. The medieval Ars Moriendi is a handbook decorated with the macabre (and often ridiculous) ends of kings and queens. The Japanese even have a word for this clumsy brand of expiration: karoshi. Benazir Bhutto’s death, if we are to believe the Pakistani government, was karoshi doubleplus. It is a testament to the powers of the absurd that a car sunroof could be quite so deadly.
But enough of the trivia. The current fashion, consecrated by editorials and obituaries worldwide, is to scrabble around for that mot juste: a legacy. Mrs. Bhutto has left one. She has also left a dynasty – her husband and her nineteen-year-old son have jointly and egregiously assumed her mantle as leader of the ‘Pakistan People’s Party’. This instalment of dauphins and entrenchment of the hereditary principle has progressed smoothly enough, so it is unlikely that Mrs. Bhutto’s shortcomings will be adequately aired. Instead, there has been broadcasting of the most uniformly pious and hagiographical nature.
Benazir Bhutto was a demagogue to the last, and one who enjoyed remarkable success in sppite of the fact that she was never much good at it. She regularly placed her supporters in danger in her attempts to display machismo and resilience. A hundred and thirty six of them were killed in October as they gathered at Jinnah International Airport to welcome her home.
Deciding not to heed the warning, delivered by the warlord Baitullah Mehsual two weeks before her death, she had 150,000 supporters bussed in to what would be her last rally. Delusional to the end, she claimed that three million were present. Now, scores of those are dead. Her car was armoured.
She always displayed tremendous courage with other people’s lives. Her policy of forcing open trade routes in central Asia led to a formal alliance between her government and the Taliban, waxed and sealed with financial and military support. Stephen Coll’s Ghost Wars amply demonstrates her chilly acceptance of, and co-operation with, the domination of Islamism over Afghanistan and its inhabitants. As such, it is difficult to establish quite how sincere Mrs. Bhutto’s recent rejection of her former friends and allies really was.
There is little reason to consider it a Damascene conversion. Mrs. Bhutto has been sincere about little in her life. Her husband, the obnoxious crook Asif Zardari, was known to the Pakistani proletariat as ‘Mr. Ten Percent’ – although by the end of his wife’s term in office it was alleged that he was taking kickbacks of triple that magnitude. Mrs. Bhutto attempted to make her business partner Abdul Raszak Yaqub the only importer of gold to Pakistan. The Swiss government also repeatedly demanded her extradition on charges of money laundering to the shrill tune of $11 million. ($175,000 of that went on a diamond necklace.)
She also denied owning any overseas assets, yet her property portfolio includes a ghastly neo-Tudor mansion in Surrey and a $3 million manor house in Normandy. When a slightly soapy interviewer at The Guardian questioned her about this and manifold other dealings, she fluttered her eyelashes as she mused plaintively: “I find that whenever I am in power, or my father is in power, somehow good things happen. I think the reason is that we want to give love and we receive love.”
None of this would matter to some people if she really was a symbol of modernity. But she was nothing of the kind. She made no effort to overturn the theocratic Hudood Ordinances that jailed women for adultery. She made no effort to reform ‘blood money’ legislation. Despite frequently pledging welfare reform for women when requiring their vote, she introduced nothing of the kind.
She has also made numerous inflammatory statements about race, most notably labelling the Muhajirs (Indian Muslims who moved to Pakistan during the 1947 partition) as “rats” with “bad blood”. (Musharraf is the son of a Muhajir. It has been suggested that a desire to purge this racial canker from her dynastic home was one of the motivations for her struggle to reclaim power).
Her supporters can bawl and mew about cover-up and conspiracy if they wish But they must not be permitted to serve their own platter of falsehoods, uncriticised, to a bawling and mewing world. Bhutto was not, as her vapid autobiography was titled, a daughter of destiny. She was a daughter of dynasty, and the product of her own self-made ‘destiny’.
