So how many of you will waving the banners. 
What kind of welome will she receive? Will MQM come out and help make up the numbers?
| The Peninsula Qatar
KARACHI • Supporters of former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto (pictured) are making fevered preparations for her homecoming-despite political turmoil surrounding her return and growing opposition within her own party.
Bhutto is set to land in her powerbase of Karachi on Thursday after spending eight years in self-imposed exile in Dubai and London, having fled to avoid corruption charges arising from her two terms in power.
Thousands of followers from her Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) are expected to greet her. The port city of 12m people is bedecked with posters of the Islamic world’s iconic first female prime minister.
Vans filled with party workers have been racing around Karachi for days with pro-Bhutto songs blaring from radios. Huge billboards with her face have appeared atop crowded tenement buildings.
“We are waiting for her because she is the only genuine leader of Pakistan,” college student Mohammad Shahid told AFP as he fixed posters to a wall in Lyari, Karachi’s most pro-Bhutto neighbourhood.
Loyalists have also established scores of camps to mobilise the masses, as they did when she ended her last period in exile in 1986, seven years after dictator Zia-ul Haq executed her father, premier Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.
Bilawal House, the family home in Karachi, and her father’s tomb in the ancestral village of Larkana some 400 kilometres (250 miles) away have both been extensively renovated.
Bhutto is expected to travel to Larkana in the days after her arrival, party officials said. In a country where politics is dominated by both bloodlines and bloodshed, some supporters have shown devotion in unusual ways. Last week party workers at a rally lit candles soaked in their own blood.
“I love the PPP, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Benazir because my father and grandfather did too,” Arsalan Ali, a 13-year-old schoolboy, said at one of the party’s camps.
While Bhutto can count of generations of support in Karachi, her return remains fraught with difficulty.
Most of the problems can be traced to her proposed power-sharing deal with the country’s military ruler, President Pervez Musharraf, a pact that has been quietly backed by the United States.
Bhutto faces a legal headache after the Supreme Court on Friday agreed to take up appeals against a government amnesty on the corruption deal that smooths the path for an alliance with Musharraf.
The army general himself has made things awkward, calling on Bhutto to delay her flight until the court resolves legal challenges to his landslide win in an opposition-boycotted presidential vote on October 6.
If the court rules against either Musharraf’s victory or the amnesty it could effectively abolish their proposed deal.
Police meanwhile are on alert for possible attacks against Bhutto or a repeat of the bloody street fights between PPP workers and the pro-Musharraf Muttahida Qaumi Movement on May 12, that left 43 people dead. Worryingly for Bhutto, tensions have also appeared in her own party.
Some senior members are outraged she is seeking an alliance with Musharraf, the man the PPP has excoriated since he seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999.
“The deal has already started eroding the cohesion in the party,” a senior party official and close aide to Bhutto told AFP on condition of anonymity.