The two faces of Bhutto

Uncertainty, rage and violence linger in Pakistan well into the second week after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the twice former prime minister who was staging a comeback from exile to reclaim power ahead of elections originally staged to be held this month.

Bhutto, given her dismal record in office, was not an ideal model for the future of Pakistan, a country afflicted with state failure, but her violent death nevertheless represents a blow to stability in a nation that since independence six decades ago had been progressively falling apart from misrule by successive military and civilian governments.

The media elite in the United States loved Bhutto. To editorialists, columnists and sundry pundits she was an eloquent defender of democracy, an Oxford graduate versed in the Western political tradition, and the spearhead of economic progress, political reform and civil rights in a country very much in need of all three. Pakistan's leaders have been brutish dictators, these folks argued, and Bhutto, the brave, young and dashing voice of modernity in a "Muslim, male-dominated society", was clearly the saviour of her people.

Cautiously

The point I want to put across here is difficult to make. It may give rise to misunderstanding however cautiously I put it. After all, we don't speak ill, or seemingly ill, of a young woman who has recently met an untimely and unwarranted death. But the point I'm making is simply this: Bhutto's role as a reformer committed to the revival of civil society was one she had scripted herself and constantly projected in Western capitals, most recently in a November op-ed in the Washington Post.

The sad facts attest otherwise. Bhutto may have been a glamorous Harvard graduate, fluent in the semantics, idiom and metaphor of Western political discourse, but she was also known in her own country (and not just by her opponents) for ruthlessness, as she was equally known for brazen corruption. Long-standing corruption charges against her and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, a figure cynically dismissed by ordinary Pakistanis as "Mr 10 per cent" for his reputation for taking money off the top of government deals, remain on the books.

Bhutto's political party, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), is more a feudal organisation than a modern political party. An anomaly by any definition, the PPP is advanced as a party for the "impoverished masses", yet its leadership was always confined to Bhutto family members, as if it were a fiefdom, and run by a medley of wealthy landords.

Even at the lowly universities we attended, where tuition was a fraction of what students paid at Harvard, we learned early on as undergrads, in our 101 Political Science courses, that that would have represented a true paradox in political life.

Yes, the media elite in the United States loved Bhutto. Judging by the affectionate and glowing obituaries in the press, that followed her assassination, American readers, or those among them not fully informed of the politics of South Asian countries, would have been hard put to understand why such an endearing figure was hated by so many of her countrymen, including those many Pakistani cabbies cruising Washington streets who have engaged you in conversation about her death.

What we have here in the US is a big gap between our perception of foreign leaders, gleaned from the media, and that of their countrymen - a big gap in perception, if you will, between differing political cultures that forever extrapolate from their own respective social values.

Why had Egyptians, Americans wondered in 1981, hated the peace-making Anwar Sadat so much that none of them turned out for his funeral, and Iranians hated their modernising Shah so much that they demanded his head after he escaped the country in 1979?

We don't know (no one does yet) who ordered the assassination of Bhutto, the second attempt on her life. The first, it will be recalled, took place when her motorcade was attacked by a formidable suicide bombing in Karachi last October upon her return from exile. Her violent death in Rawalpindi was especially tragic since it was in that same garrison town that her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the deposed prime minister, was hanged by a military junta in 1979. The Musharraf government, working from a single intelligence intercept, has jumped the gun and identified the perpetrators as agents of a tribal leader from the lawless region of Waziristan, with the improbable name of Baitullah Mehsud (The Enviable House of God). No one is buying that, not yet.

United States intelligence analysts are not convinced by the evidence offered so far by the authorities in Islamabad, nor are the overwhelming majority of Pakistanis, who, like their counterparts in other Third World countries, have a penchant for conspiracy theories to begin with. Meanwhile, in keeping with PPP's baroque, dynastic tradition, the slain former prime minister's 19-year old son, a freshman at Oxford who has lived in outside Pakistan since childhood, will be the titular head of the party, and her husband its functional leader.

Somini Sengupta, the New York Times correspondent in Pakistan, filing from Karachi last on Wednesday, quoted a young Pakistani professional woman, Munizeh Sanai, as saying this: "Do I really live in a place where politicians are that ridiculous? Yes, I do".

Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.