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Benazir Bhutto in 2007. CreditRuth Fremson/The New York Times
Benazir Bhutto, the Muslim World's First Female Leader
June 21, 2016
Her rosy complexion as a toddler gave her the nickname Pinky. That’s what she was called in convent schools and later in the halls of Oxford and Harvard, where as a student she was a campus tour guide, listened to Carly Simon and looked like Joan Baez.
After graduation, the lyrics from Peter, Paul and Mary’s version of the 1960s song — “I’m leavin’ on a jet plane/Don’t know when I’ll be back again” — were stuck in her head as she boarded a plane for home. She returned 16 years later, in 1989, not as Pinky but as Benazir Bhutto, the new prime minister of Pakistan — the first woman elected to lead an Islamic country.
Her time in office would be as tumultuous as her childhood had been idyllic, ending in her assassination by the Pakistani Taliban on Dec. 27, 2007, just days before general elections, which her populist party was expected to win.
“I didn’t choose this life,” Bhutto said. “It chose me.”
Ms. Bhutto was born on this day in 1953 to a wealthy family whose lands were once so extensive it took days to appraise them. In a country where families dominated business and politics in an almost feudal manner, the Bhuttos seemed destined to rule. As Ms. Bhutto grew up, her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, rose in power, from a post in Pakistan’s United Nations delegation to prime minister. He imparted lessons to her along the way.
But her political education went into overdrive when a top army general, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, overthrew her father and imprisoned him. She was 24. Ms. Bhutto visited him often, absorbing one-on-one political seminars in the grimmest of settings. Her father encouraged her to study other female leaders, including Indira Gandhi and Joan of Arc.
Mr. Bhutto was hanged in 1979, charged with orchestrating the murder of a political rival. Ms. Bhutto was forbidden to attend his funeral.
She and her mother were soon given leadership of her father’s People’s Party. But as the opposition to a military regime, Ms. Bhutto spent half her time in prison or under house arrest, sometimes in solitary confinement.
When the ruling general’s plane mysteriously fell from the sky in 1988, much of the nation rejoiced, and elections were set. Ms. Bhutto seized her moment, campaigned as the “daughter of Pakistan” and, at 35, reclaimed the office of prime minister for her family.
She was elected twice, serving from December 1988 to August 1990 and again from October 1993 to November 1996.
“Charismatic, striking and a canny political operator,” The Times said in an appraisal after her death. “She ruled the party with an iron hand, jealously guarding her position, even while leading the party in absentia for nearly a decade.”
Ms. Bhutto could be imperial in bearing, charming and also ruthless. At one point she ousted her mother from the party’s leadership, provoking the elder Ms. Bhutto to remark, “She talks a lot about democracy, but she’s become a little dictator.”
After accusing her government of corruption, her younger brother Murtaza, a member of the provincial legislature, was gunned down outside his home in a police ambush. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, whom she had named minister of investment, was indicted in the murder but exonerated. Witnesses were either arrested, intimidated or killed.
Each of her terms as prime minister ended when she was dismissed by the president on graft charges. When she and her husband left office in 1996, they were worth hundreds of millions of dollars, though the source of their wealth was unclear. Pakistan was named one of the world’s three most corrupt countries.
“In her mind, she was Pakistan, so she could do as she pleased,” her former adviser, Husain Haqqani, said.
Ms. Bhutto spent most of the last nine years of her life in self-imposed exile, much of it in a palatial estate in Dubai. After receiving amnesty on the pending charges, she returned in late 2007 to seek a third term.
A close ally of the Afghan Taliban — which her government supported in its infancy in 1996 — killed her at a rally outside the capital. It happened in a park where Pakistan’s first prime minister was also assassinated, in 1951.
Pakistan still waits today for a real democracy to emerge, and an elected leader from outside the few feudal families that have ruled the country, alternating with the military, since its birth.
