Back from exile to a baptism by fire

Benazir Bhutto's near-fatal return to Pakistan has woken her up to some grim realities of her land.

It was only at 5.30am, when I finally sat down, that it dawned on me that I had survived an assassination attempt," Benazir Bhutto said, as we sat talking at her husband Asif Ali Zardari's Bilawal House in Karachi on October 19.

Hours earlier, suicide bombers had attacked the former Pakistan prime minister's cavalcade, killing about 140 people and injuring several hundred more.

"I felt a shiver run down my spine, and after that, I couldn't stop shivering, thinking of the people who had died protecting me, of how close I had come to death, of what it would do to my family, my people. I was on the phone almost non-stop, looking for [Pakistan People's Party, or the PPP, spokesperson] Farhatullah Babar and for so many of the party officials and friends who were with me on that bus," she told Weekend Review in an exclusive interview.

As party workers gathered at Bilawal House, reunited after a night of mayhem and waiting to hear the speech Bhutto never delivered at Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah's mazar, she said: "I knew the minute the first bomb went off that it was a bomb and not a firecracker as Naheed said it was."

Naheed Khan is a key strategist in the PPP and a Bhutto loyalist who has helped hold the party together in the eight years she has been in self exile.

Both women were seated in a specially designed armoured vehicle when the bombs went off. They were making final amendments to the speech she had planned to deliver to her party faithful, who had gathered in their millions near her home in Clifton, Karachi, their presence demonstrating the depth of her grass-roots support.

Terror unfolds

"Ever since I landed at 1 o'clock, my son Bilawal, who was watching on television, kept texting me to get behind the bulletproof glass," she said.

Bhutto didn't. Nor did she accept the government's offer to transport her by a helicopter to Jinnah's mausoleum.

"I wanted my people to see me, they had come from hundreds of miles away, it would have been wrong," she said, shrugging off criticism that she took a gamble and innocent people paid with their lives.

Bhutto said she saw a blinding, orange flash and looked at her watch. "It was 12.06pm and I waited for the second blast that I was certain would come." The force of the second blast, a minute later, shattered the reinforced glass of the window panes of the slow-moving armoured truck, dented its side and hurtled it several yards away. Before that came several rounds of gunfire aimed at her driver, who, she later discovered, had been shot in the shoulder before he escaped. "This was clearly part of the plan to stop me from escaping."

Karachi's police quickly evacuated her from the scene, which reeked of blood and burnt flesh and was littered with body parts, bloodied footwear and clothing, and gruesome scenes of the wounded and the dying.

She later said the lights along Karachi's thoroughfare had been switched off. "Whoever planned it, had the lights switched off so that my party workers would not see the suicide bombers coming," she said.

But, they did. Most of those who died in the explosions had come from Lyari, a Karachi stronghold of the PPP. These men formed a human chain which did not break even as the suicide bomber came charging at them shouting "bomb".

An eyewitness recounted that a suicide bomber had been caught and was handed over to the police 20 minutes before the twin blasts. Was it the same man who had escaped and penetrated the security cordon around Bhutto? Or were there more?

Bhutto has gone public with accusations that three retired generals were involved in the plot to assassinate her. In a complaint lodged at police headquarters, Karachi — which has not been made public — she has supposedly named Brigadier Ijaz Ahmad.

He has close links with the Taliban's Mullah Omar and Al Qaida's Osama Bin Laden, and as a former home secretary, was said to have debriefed Omar Shaikh who was involved in the killing of the Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl.

Ahmad is also said to be close to President Pervez Musharraf, who Bhutto has publicly absolved of responsibility for the assassination attempt.

Ghosts of the past

Her aides say they have reports that Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz were watching her homecoming on TV together and took a macabre delight in the night's developments.

The two other retired generals she is reported to have named are General (retired) Javed Nasir, former chief of the Inter Services Intelligence and General (retired) Hamid Gul who nurtured the Taliban insurgency, both during and after Zia ul Haq's presidency.

As Bhutto broke off our conversation to attend calls from her political opponent Nawaz Sharif, from Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Indian politician Sonia Gandhi and Musharraf, it was clear that every detail of her raucous homecoming would have to go back to the drawing board. Her relationship with the Sharif-led opposition group could be reworked, as could her plans to be part of a Musharraf-led dispensation.

Her security chief, Rahman Malik, has cancelled the countrywide election campaign that Bhutto would have revelled in.

Meanwhile, pro-Taliban groups inimical to the perpetuation of American interests in the region have announced that they will try again — that Bhutto's Shia-Sunni ancestry makes her a fair target.

Whether she wins the elections or not — if they are held as planned in January — Benazir Bhutto knows that she has come home to a Pakistan that on the surface may look the same but in reality has changed beyond recognition. A bitter-sweet homecoming, indeed.

- Neena Gopal is an Asia analyst.