Would the ‘real’ Bhtto please stand up.
Over the next 10 years, it will be interesting to see how Bhutto dynasty shapes up. Fatima Bhutto seems to have an increasing fan base, whilst Bhutto-Zaradari will always be seen with suspicion due to the ‘Will’ and how his father Zardari has hijacked the party.
The new generation’s rivalry
ISLAMABAD — She would be the perfect candidate: beautiful, intelligent, politically savvy and a “real” Bhutto to boot.
But 25-year-old Fatima Bhutto was not even considered for leadership of the Pakistan Peoples Party after the assassination of her aunt Benazir.
That position went instead to her 19-year-old cousin Bilawal, the son of Benazir and her husband Asif Zardari, who had to immediately add Bhutto to his name and must wait six years before he can even stand for parliament. Bilawal and Mr. Zardari will be co-chairmen.
Fatima is the daughter of Murtaza Bhutto, Benazir’s brother, who was gunned down just outside his Karachi home by police in 1996 in unexplained circumstances. She was 14 at the time and heard the gunshots from her bedroom. “I am, and have been since then, a shell of the person I was,” she has said.
It was that event that placed Fatima irrevocably on the wrong side of a family torn apart by murder and rivalry for power. Fatima and her stepmother, Ghinwa, publicly and repeatedly accused Benazir and Mr. Zardari of complicity in Murtaza’s killing - Benazir was prime minister at the time - a charge they deny.
A Columbia University graduate, Fatima published a collection of poetry when she was just 15. Benazir seemed to have regarded Fatima as a threat, even though Fatima has not been involved in party politics. Now, with Benazir gone, Fatima could yet emerge as the political force that her aunt feared. Fatima’s brother, Zulfikar Ali junior, a 17-year-old named after their grandfather and founder of the Peoples Party, could also in time emerge as a contender.
Bilawal acknowledged yesterday that the family remains far apart. “I would love to reunite the family,” he said at a press conference in London, in response to a question about Murtaza’s children. “But while my mother was alive, they did not support her political ideology. And while the family can come united, I am unaware whether we can unify the two separate parties.”
Fatima’s bitter relationship with Benazir was passed on from her father long before he was killed. Murtaza saw himself as the true political heir to his father, Zulfikar Ali, and disagreed with his sister’s politics, urging her, for instance, not to accept the prime minister’s job in 1988 on terms he felt were dictated by the army.
So far, Fatima has chosen to do her politicking through her weekly column in Pakistan’s biggest English-language newspaper, The News, pouring venom on Benazir and Mr. Zardari. After the Oct. 18 bomb attack on Benazir’s convoy, she castigated her aunt for putting lives at risk. But since the killing, Fatima has reached out.
“The last 15 years were not ones we [Benazir and Fatima] spent as friends or as relatives, that is … the truth. But this week, I, too, want to remember her differently,” Fatima wrote in The News. “I mourn because my family has had enough. I mourn for Bilawal, Bakhtawar, and Asifa [Benazir’s children]. I mourn for them because I, too, lost a parent. I know what it feels like to be lost and left at sea, unanchored and afraid.”
Fatima seems undecided whether to enter the family business, politics, though it seems hard to believe that she can resist for too much longer.
Once, Benazir and Murtaza were rivals for the legacy of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the right to lead the Peoples Party he founded in 1967. Now it seems that the dynastic political drama could be played out between their children.
