World has lost a leader

How does one say goodbye? To a politician whom the world saw as imperious, cold and manipulative. To a woman I grew to view as intrinsically warm, but torn nevertheless between a strong sense of destiny and an equally deep sense of duty to her young family and her troubled country.

Benazir Bhutto's eight years of self exile in Dubai were perhaps the only time in her tragedy-ridden life when she found a cocoon, a safe haven in the desert oasis that cloaked her and her family from the rough and tumble of Pakistan's brutal, unforgiving, Machiavellian battlefield.

A time, when she shepherded her beloved son and daughters to the threshold of adulthood. A time when she found a rare peace within, radiating a surprising warmth to all those she gathered to her, even as the world without remained awash with conflict, war and instability.

Indisputably, Bhutto's shock assassination, a casualty of that very instability, removes one of the world's most incandescent political leaders from the international arena. This was someone armed with the mantra of democracy, holding out the promise of indisputably changing the course of her country.

Away from the forces that were pulling Pakistan towards anarchy and radicalism, offering perhaps even an alternative, the palliative of a representative democracy alien to an increasingly militant environment.

The stark reality is just as Bhutto said it would be. In the last eight years of rule by diktat, a pretense of civilian rule allowed the spread of Talibanisation. Elected leaders who stood for principles, rule of law under threat, simply swept away by the radical, the fanatic.

Men who cloaked their beliefs and whose penetration of the establishment compromised security for the man on the street and those who claim to speak for them.

It's only apt then that hours after her remains were interred in the Bhutto family mausoleum deep in the Sindhi heartland at Garhi Khuda Baksh - a day after an assassin felled her at a high octane rally in Liaquat Bagh in the garrison town of Rawalpindi - the controversy surrounding her death has risen like a spectre.

The conflicting stories would have been torn apart in seconds by Bhutto, adept at deconstructing spin. A day after the October 18 failed assassination attempt Bhutto sat with me in her Karachi home Bilawal House and named the two men she believed were behind the attempt to eliminate her.

The rise of another Bhutto to upset the carefully built "mullah-military-madrassa" edifice would not be allowed.

But coaxed by Washington and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who used her as a human pawn in America's bloody chessboard, this woman had gathered up the courage to face the very men who systematically remove anyone who posed a threat to their idea of the ideological moorings of the state of Pakistan.

Foolhardy? Perhaps. Especially when she readily admitted that Washington's blessings were a kiss of death.

But as the water cannons hosed down Shar-e-Faisal where she narrowly escaped death the night before, removing all the evidence so that it will never be known whether it was a suicide bomber or a bomb planted in an abandoned car left on the divider that killed some 150 of her supporters and she upped the ante by calling for an independent judicial inquiry, she knew it was a plea that would fall on deaf ears.

No eye witness accounts were sought, no judicial inquiry, no public debate allowed in an unprecedented media clampdown. Ten weeks later, 12 days away from the polls and with growing evidence that this was a Bhutto on an electoral roll, the assassins struck.

Clearly, the trained marksmen who converged around her vehicle had studied her campaign, knew when the populist leader was at her most vulnerable - when she would be drawn by the magnet of crowds to emerge from her bullet proof vehicle to connect with her people.

The video footage released by officialdom shows a man with a gun to her left.

Eyewitnesses inside the car who cradled their mortally wounded, dying leader as they tried to get to hospital say the explosion that wrecked the vehicle came after she slumped back soundlessly through the hatch. Her trusted legal and political aides insist she had three bullet wounds to her neck, head and chest.

Cracked skull

That changing the cause of death from bullets to shrapnel to a lever that cracked her skull is to remove the idea of complicity of the military.

The lack of a post mortem, a dubious medical report, the haste with which a twice elected prime minister was buried without requisite state honours, the speed with which the spot where she died was hosed down and naming Baitullah Mehsud as the terminator can only raise questions of a cover up.

As for elections, her Pakistan People's Party would probably sweep polls buoyed by a sympathy factor, having quite the opposite effect intended by the masterminds. With ally Nawaz Sharif refusing to cash in and participate, the election is already a farce.

In death as in life, this remarkable woman's beliefs will continue to determine whether her country heads towards the abyss or the phrase she made her own - "transition to democracy". A woman to whom one can never say goodbye.

Neena Gopal is an analyst on Asia.