Now BB is back to rip apart the country or whatever is left of it.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071024.wbhutto/BNStory/International/home
Murder, politics and money rip apart Bhutto clan
The rich, landowning family is bitterly divided as its members compete for the legacy of their patriarch, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
SAEED SHAH
From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail
October 24, 2007 at 4:04 AM EDT
KARACHI — In 1996, when Benazir Bhutto was prime minister of Pakistan, police in the southern city of Karachi ambushed her brother, Murtaza, and riddled him and his entourage with bullets. The mystery of Murtaza’s death has never been solved; no one has been brought to book. Suspicion fell on Benazir’s husband, Asif Zardari, though nothing against him was proved.
The killing caused the most dramatic cleavage among the Bhuttos, a rich landowning family torn apart after the execution in 1979 of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founder of the Pakistan People’s Party and the country’s first elected prime minister. Murder, politics and money were all to splinter the family in the years that followed.
At stake has been the legacy of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a man who inspired a passionate following among Pakistan’s poor. The Bhutto name is political gold in Pakistan. His supporters say that he was the only politician to give real hope of a better future to the country’s poor. The devotion to his memory extends to his descendants.
Ghinwa Bhutto, Murtaza’s Lebanese-born widow, said in an interview of her husband’s death: “She [Benazir] needs to take responsibility for it. She was prime minister when he was killed by the police. Why was that possible? And now she wants to become the prime minister again.”
Such is the bitterness within the family that even the massacre of 140 PPP supporters on the streets of Karachi last week has not brought the Bhuttos together.
Ghinwa, who now runs a rival party called the Pakistan People’s Party Shaheed Bhutto, said that the scale of the rally last week was designed “just to intimidate the opponents” of Benazir.
“It was foolish to endanger people’s lives in such processions. They died not for what they stood for, they died for what she stood for,” she said, speaking at the Bhutto family mansion in Clifton, an up-market neighbourhood of Karachi.
Disputes over the Clifton house and the Murtaza house in the Bhutto hometown of Larkana, both lovingly written about by Benazir in her autobiography, are said to have added further rancour.
While Murtaza took up arms in the 1980s against the regime of General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, which had deposed and then hanged his father, Benazir believed in peaceful political protest against the military government. Her other brother, Shah Nawaz, who was with Murtaza in the anti-Zia guerrilla movement but still close to Benazir, was poisoned in France in 1985 at the age of 27.
In Benazir’s autobiography, Daughter of the East, dealing very briefly with Murtaza’s death, she wrote: “All the Bhutto men were dead. What was left of my father’s family was our mother Nusrat and sister Sanam and I. We went into deep mourning.”
It is Murtaza’s daughter, Fatima, a 25-year-old Columbia University graduate, who is often considered to be the long-term challenger for the Bhutto crown. A published poet and newspaper columnist, Fatima has said that her politics are, for the moment, expressed solely through her writings.
“I don’t believe I have a birthright because of my last name, unlike my aunt,” Fatima said.
Mumtaz Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali’s cousin and a founding member of the PPP, who served as a minister in the Zulfikar Ali Bhutto government, said he was summarily dismissed from the party by Benazir in 1985 after he associated himself with a policy, confederalism, with which she disagreed.
“We were a close-knit family [once], a big family with three branches. We never used to allow anything to damage the family, particularly in the field of politics,” he said.
He is now chairman of the Sindhi National Front, a party based in the Bhuttos’ home province of Sindh in southern Pakistan.
“The People’s Party today just believes in giving in to power. It has no ideology, no manifesto. It swings in any direction, just as long as it gets into power,” said Mumtaz, 73.
These other Bhuttos accuse Benazir of surrendering to the military and the rest of the Pakistani establishment. When Ms. Bhutto first became prime minister in 1988, following the assassination of Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, she accepted terms that her brother Murtaza felt left the army still largely in charge, his widow, Ghinwa, said. Those terms apparently included keeping Murtaza out of Pakistan.
It was around this time that Benazir’s mother, Nusrat, is said to have sided with her son Murtaza, seeing him as his father’s political heir. But since Murtaza’s death, Nusrat Bhutto, now 78 and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, has lived with Benazir, mostly in exile in Dubai.
Today again the dissident Bhuttos accuse Benazir of giving in to Pakistan’s army, this time through a proposed power-sharing deal with the country’s current military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf.
Benazir defended her stand this week. “I know my opponents say I am doing a deal with a dictator, but I am not. I am involved in dialogue for transition to democracy,” she said.
The parties led by the other Bhuttos are marginal, while the PPP remains Pakistan’s biggest, best-organized political machine, with a huge following for the 54-year-old Benazir. She has three children to continue her legacy, the oldest of whom, Bilawal, has followed his mother to Oxford University.
Benazir’s political pre-eminence in Pakistan seems assured. In a region given to political royalty, it is the next generation of Bhuttos that will fight it out for the right to claim the mantle of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Key members of a political dynasty
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto: Pakistan’s first elected prime minister, and patriarch to the clan, he was killed in a politically motivated execution in 1979.
Benazir Bhutto: Zulfikar Ali’s oldest daughter, and twice prime minister herself.
Asif Zardari: Benazir’s husband, he remains in exile under a cloud of corruption allegations.
Bilawal Bhutto: Benazir’s son, he’s studying at Oxford.
Murtaza Bhutto: Benazir’s younger brother, he had a falling out with his sister and was killed by Pakistani police in 1996 while she was prime minister.
Shah Nawaz Bhutto: Benazir’s youngest brother, he died from a mysterious poisoning in France.
Ghinwa Bhutto: Murtaza’s widow, she runs a rival party to Benazir’s.
Fatima Bhutto: Murtaza’s daughter, she’s studying at Columbia University. Although not politically active, she’s been critical of her aunt’s return to Pakistan.
Mumtaz Bhutto: Zulkifar’s cousin and a founding member of the Pakistan People’s Party, he had a falling out with Benazir over political differences and now chairs a small political party.
