An appeal from beyond the grave
Richard Beeston
RECoNCILIATIoN: ISLAM, DEMoCRACY AND THE WEST by Benazir Bhutto Simon & Schuster, £17.99, pp. 328, ISBN 9781847372734 In 1988 I arrived in Pakistan a few hours after the assassination of Zia ulHuq, the military dictator whose aircraft had been blown to pieces by a bomb. In most countries the violent death of a leader, who had dominated politics for more than a decade, would trigger soulsearching, or at the very least a determination to find out who had killed him and why. But within days of the assassination it was clear that there was little appetite to probe the latest chapter in Pakistan’s violent history. Zia was given a state funeral and quickly forgotten by his countrymen. Twenty years after his murder, the circumstances of his death remain a mystery.
The same fate could have befallen Benazir Bhutto, when assassins attacked her armoured car in the city of Rawalpindi on 27 January during the closing days of her election campaign. Footage seemed to show that she was shot by a gunman, but official investigators insisted that she died of head injuries caused by the impact of an explosion against her armoured car. When Scotland Yard detectives were called to investigate, the crime scene had been scrubbed clean, the body buried and the list of suspects was growing. To date, President Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s shadowy intelligence services, Baitullah Mahsud, the country’s top militant warlord, and even Hamza bin Laden, son of Osama, have all been accused of involvement.
The story might have ended there, had Bhutto not penned this book before her death. It not only reveals who she believes was out to kill her, but also sets out how she would have led the country as prime minister, had she survived to take part in elections that she would certainly have won earlier this year.
On the first point, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West will make uncomfortable reading for anyone, like America and Britain, who has supported President Musharraf, in the belief that he may be a dictator but he is the West’s best ally in the struggle against militant Islam in Pakistan.
According to Bhutto, there were certainly plots by al-Qa’eda terrorists to kill her but also strong suspicions that the Pakistani authorities colluded with them. Her argument is based on the failed assassination attempt against her made on 18 October last year in Karachi, where 139 people were killed. Before the attack on her homecoming procession through the city, street lights were mysteriously switched off. Pakistani security forces prevented her from using sophisticated electronic defences against car bombs. The most damning evidence is that none of the investigators ever questioned her about the attack.
‘In Pakistan things are almost never as they seem. There are always circles within circles, rarely straight lines. This was meant to look like the work of al-Qa’eda and the Taleban, and I do not doubt that they were involved. But the sophistication of the plan . . . suggested a larger conspiracy,’ she wrote. ‘Elements from within the Pakisani intelligence services had actually created the Taleban in the 1980s and certain elements sympathised with al-Qa’eda ideologically and theologically. Some had recruited or worked with it. I had identified those I suspected in my letter to the general before my return.’ Bhutto uses the incident as part of the central argument of her book, that democracy and Islam are not incompatible, that it is in the West’s interests to promote a democratic Pakistan and that the contest between Islam and the West does not need to become a clash of civilisations.
Some of the argument, particularly when she strays into the Middle East, is a little thin on detail but her central thesis is made with passion and conviction. At times it reads like an open appeal to the White House and Downing Street not to ditch democracy in Pakistan in favour of more military rule.
We will never know what sort of leader Bhutto would have made had she lived to become Pakistan’s prime minister again. But it would be good to listen to her final appeal from beyond the grave.
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