**Asif Ali Zardari is fiddling while Pakistan drowns **
** The beleaguered country has a president more concerned with politics than his people, says Con Coughlin. **
Pakistan has had to endure more than its fair share of disasters, but even by its harsh standards, the floods that have driven millions of people from their homes, and killed at least 1,700, qualify as a tragedy.
In such circumstances, you might expect Asif Ali Zardari, the country's president, to abandon his European tour and return home at the earliest opportunity to assume personal control of the relief operation – such as it is. The military's failure to organise the evacuation has left entire communities stranded, while the authorities' wider inability to deal with the floods' aftermath has led to outbreaks of cholera in the Swat valley.
And yet Mr Zardari displays no inclination to return home, even though David Cameron’s injudicious comments about Pakistan’s ambivalent approach to fighting terrorism provided him with the perfect excuse. His officials insist that he is leaving the crisis in the capable hands of his prime minister, Yousef Raza Gilani, while he presses on with his equally important diplomatic mission to France and Britain to discuss global security issues.
But the reality is that Mr Zardari has a very different agenda – which is why, after spending a convivial few days at his family’s opulent chateau in northern France, he and his entourage have taken up residence in London’s Churchill hotel. They will then travel to Chequers for talks with Mr Cameron, before concluding their visit with the highlight of the entire tour, at least as far as Mr Zardari is concerned – a massive rally in honour of his eldest son, Bilawal Zardari Bhutto.
Under Pakistan’s constitution, Bilawal, who will be 22 next month and has just completed a history degree at Oxford University, is not allowed to run for office until he is 25. But ever since Benazir Bhutto was assassinated by a suicide bomber in the garrison town of Rawalpindi in December 2007, Mr Zardari, her husband, has been determined to ensure that Bilawal becomes the latest in a long line of Bhuttos to lead the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party.
The fortunes of the 700,000-strong Bhutto clan have fluctuated wildly since the PPP was founded by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s first elected prime minister, in 1967. His government collapsed amid allegations of corruption in 1977, and he was hanged two years later under martial law. Benazir was only 24 at the time of her father’s death. Initially, she was placed under house arrest, but in 1984 made her way to London, where she became the PPP’s leader-in-exile.
She returned in triumph following the mysterious death in a helicopter crash of General Zia al-Haq, the country’s military dictator, and fulfilled her life-long ambition of becoming prime minister in 1988. The previous year she had married Mr Zardari, the son of a wealthy tribal leader from Sindh. When she was forced out of office in 1990, Mr Zardari found himself at the centre of corruption allegations surrounding a variety of property deals.
Although Mr Zardari has always protested his innocence, he spent a total of 11 years in jail – many of them in solitary confinement. Even after his release, rumours swirled that he had acquired a fortune worth £1 billion, including homes in France and Britain. For years, Mr Zardari denied ownership of a 335-acre estate in Surrey, until his stake in the property was revealed when it was sold.
In the light of Mr Zardari’s controversial past, it is unlikely that he would ever have become president had it not been for his wife’s dramatic assassination. Even then, other factions within the family believed they had a better claim, including Mumtaz Bhutto, the 77-year-old clan leader who had previously opposed Benazir’s accession.
To keep the rival factions at bay, Mr Zardari worked hard to safeguard the position of his eldest son. And it is to this end that, rather than returning home to rally his country in its hour of need, he will be attending Saturday’s 3,000-strong rally in Birmingham, where Bilawal is to make his first political speech.
For the past two-and-a-half years, Mr Zardari, who shares the chairmanship of the PPP with his son, has effectively acted as a regent. Soon, he is expected to stand down as the PPP’s co‑chairman, opening the way for Bilawal to become its undisputed leader.
The importance of Saturday’s rally lies in the fact that the majority of the 1.2 million Pakistanis resident in Britain support the PPP, not least because it has always taken care to protect the interests of Britain’s Pakistani immigrants, as well as taking a hard-line position on Kashmir. The British Government, for its part, has quietly lent its support because of the party’s perceived pro-Western stance.
But beyond the power politics, Saturday’s rally is a microcosm of the wider problem that afflicts Pakistan. By attending, Mr Zardari will help to secure the PPP’s leadership for his son – yet in doing so, he will, like so many before him, be putting clan before country. And few in Pakistan will easily forget the image of their president’s helicopter leaving the elegantly manicured lawns of his French villa at a time when millions of his countrymen have been deprived of homes of their own.