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Exiled Bhutto seeks a return to Pakistan

By admin | June 4, 2007

Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is stirring up Pakistani politics by talking of a power-sharing deal with the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and, in an interview, of returning to Pakistan before the end of the year.

Threatened with arrest and dogged by corruption charges, Bhutto has sat out the last eight years in self-imposed exile in London and Dubai, while still leading what is arguably the country’s largest party with nationwide support, the Pakistan People’s Party. In that time, she has seen Musharraf, her former chief of military operations, seize power in a coup. She has watched the political turmoil build as Pakistanis grow restless under military rule, galvanized most recently by Musharraf’s ouster of the chief Supreme Court Justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.

Members of her party were heavily represented in the outpouring of support for him at a peaceful rally in Abbottabad on Saturday, just weeks after more than 40 people were killed in Karachi in clashes related to his ouster.

As Pakistan veers toward elections this year, and as Musharraf runs into mounting opposition over his plans to seek a second term, Bhutto, 53, is raising her profile once again and positioning herself as savior of the nation, someone who can lead Pakistan back to democracy and provide a final bulwark against Islamic extremism.

Pakistan has been a major ally of the United States in its effort to reduce terrorism, and the leaders of al-Qaida and of the Taliban, who continue to cause havoc in neighboring Afghanistan, are thought to be in lawless tribal areas near the border between the countries.

Despite his repeated insistence that Bhutto will not be allowed to participate in the elections, Musharraf, according to aides and diplomats, has been conducting discreet negotiations for some kind of deal that would allow her to return and him to stay on as president. The corruption charges, which Bhutto says are politically motivated, might then be dropped.

“General Musharraf says that he wouldn’t allow me back, and I interpret that to mean that he would then arrest me and prevent me from having freedom of movement and freedom of speech and freedom of association,” Bhutto said in the interview, which took place recently at one of her homes outside Pakistan. “In any event. I’d like to go back, and I’m looking at the window between September and December to do that.”

The daughter of a politician executed by the military, educated at Harvard and Oxford, and the first woman to serve as prime minister in the Islamic world, at age 35, Bhutto captivated supporters in the West in her early days. She was twice prime minister, from 1988 to 1990 and then from 1993 to 1996, when her personal and political fortunes unraveled.

She left Pakistan eight years ago under a cloud. She was embroiled in a family feud when her brother, Murtaza, tried to claim leadership of the party their father founded, the Pakistan’s People’s Party.

Her brother was shot dead in 1996. Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, was jailed on suspicion of the murder, though the case was never proved. Bhutto says the killing was a plot by Pakistani intelligence to divide and weaken her family.

Topics: Pakistan News, Top Stories |