Many faces of Benazir Bhutto

Benazir Bhutto, Who was she? A martyr or an opportunist. A democrat or an autocrat. A peace lover or a war monger? Many have described her as a product of what Pakistan wanted in a leader; one who could lead them to humble India and get them Kashmir free of pesky Hindus. And she tried to deliver to the best of her ability by applying terror tactics against India. She was the willing mother of jihad and Taliban, the medieval monster in Afghanistan.
She was the one who asked Musharraf, the then Lieutenant General to install and rehabilitate Osama Bin laden in Khandahar, Afghanistan when Osama was thrown out from Sudan under American pressure. When she first visited Muzzafarabad in POK on13th March 1990, in her speech she declared the struggle in Kashmir a “Holy Jihad."

Then why for god sake, our press and electronic media is busy portraying her as “A daughter of the East”, “San Suu Kyi of Myanmar”, and ‘The pioneer of democracy?”

Her speech in ‘India conclave 2007’ in New Delhi is the recent example of her political opportunism to gain sympathy and change people’s mind set in her favor.

Here are a few excerpts from her speech at the conclave:

“ The attack on Samjhauta express demonstrated to us the fragility of a peace process that can be disrupted by those dedicated to violence. The challenge for us is to dismantle the militant cells, so that they can not hold the foreign policy of two independent nation’s hostage to their acts of terror.”

“ When I look at the situation of the tribal areas of Pakistan where the Taliban have regrouped, I see it as an example of the non-cooperation of people in a process. For despite 80,000 Pakistani troops being sent to the tribal areas of Pakistan, our regime was forced in to signing a peace treaty with the militants. Without political participation it is difficult to make lasting advances.”

“ The more I see the devastation of war, of how the vultures descend to feed on the bodies of dead children, the more I am convinced that we must keep our region secure and peaceful for we can not fall our children.”

“ I would like to remind you about the small peace park that is across the UN head quarters in New York. And in that small peace park there is an inscription that reads: they shall beat their swords in to ploughshares, and their spears in to pruning hooks: a nation shall not lift up sword against another nation; neither shall learn war any more."

She might have won a few hearts here in India with emotional speeches, but she can not wash her hands off from the mess she created for the sub-continent in general and India in particular. We might forget but we will never forgive her for the reign of terror that she unleashed against India during her tenure as Prime Minister of Pakistan.

William Dalrymple’s article “Benazir’s deadly legacy” in The Times of India describes it all. And here is what he wrote:

Benazir’s deadly legacy
WHEN, in May 1991, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India was killed by a suicide bomber, there was an international outpouring of grief. Recent days have seen the same with the death of Benazir Bhutto: another glamorous, Western-educated scion of a great South Asian political dynasty tragically assassinated at an election rally.
There is, however, an important difference between the two deaths: while Mr. Gandhi was assassinated by Sri Lankan Hindu extremists because of his policy of confronting them, Ms. Bhutto was apparently the victim of Islamist militant groups that she allowed to flourish under her administrations in the 1980s and 1990s.
It was under Ms. Bhutto’s watch that the Pakistani intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, first installed the Taliban in Afghanistan. It was also at that time that hundreds of young Islamic militants were recruited from the madrassas to do the agency’s dirty work in Indian Kashmir. It seems that, like some terrorist equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster, the extremists turned on both the person and the state that had helped bring them into being.
While it is true that the recruitment of jihadists had started before she took office and that Ms. Bhutto was insufficiently strong — or competent — to have had full control over either the intelligence services or the Pakistani Army when she was in office, it is equally naïve to believe she had no influence over her country’s foreign policy toward its two most important neighbors, India and Afghanistan.
Everyone now knows how disastrous the rule of the Taliban turned out to be in Afghanistan, how brutally it subjected women and how it allowed Al Qaeda to train in camps within its territory. But another, and in the long term perhaps equally perilous, legacy of Ms. Bhutto’s tenure is often forgotten: the turning of Kashmir into a jihadist playground.
In 1989, when the insurgency in the Indian portion of the disputed region first began, it was largely an amateur affair of young, secular-minded Kashmiri Muslims rising village by village and wielding homemade weapons — firearms fashioned from the steering shafts of rickshaws and so on. By the early ’90s, however, Pakistan was sending over the border thousands of well-trained, heavily armed and ideologically hardened jihadis. Some were the same sorts of exiled Arab radicals who were at the same time forming Al Qaeda in Peshawar, in northwestern Pakistan.
By 1993, during Ms. Bhutto’s second term, the Arab and Afghan jihadis (and their Inter-Services Intelligence masters) had really begun to take over the uprising from the locals. It was at this stage that the secular leadership of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front began losing ground to hard-line Islamist outfits like Hizbul Mujahedeen.
I asked Benazir Bhutto about her Kashmir policy and the potential dangers of the growing role of religious extremists in the conflict during an interview in 1994. “India tries to gloss over its policy of repression in Kashmir,” she replied. “India does have might, but has been unable to crush the people of Kashmir. We are not prepared to keep silent, and collude with repression.”
Hamid Gul, who was the head of the intelligence agency during her first administration, was more forthcoming still. “The Kashmiri people have risen up,” he told me, “and it is the national purpose of Pakistan to help liberate them.” He continued, “If the jihadis go out and contain India, tying down their army on their own soil, for a legitimate cause, why should we not support them?”
Benazir Bhutto’s death is, of course, a calamity, particularly as she embodied the hopes of so many liberal Pakistanis. But, contrary to the commentary we’ve seen in the last week, she was not comparable to Myanmar’s Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Ms. Bhutto’s governments were widely criticized by Amnesty International and other groups for their use of death squads and terrible record on deaths in police custody, abductions and torture. As for her democratic bona fides, she had no qualms about banning rallies by opposing political parties while in power.
Within her own party, she declared herself the president for life and controlled all decisions. She rejected her brother Murtaza’s bid to challenge her for its leadership and when he persisted, he was shot dead in highly suspicious circumstances during a police ambush outside the Bhutto family home.
Benazir Bhutto was certainly a brave and secular-minded woman. But the obituaries painting her as dying to save democracy distort history. Instead, she was a natural autocrat who did little for human rights, a calculating politician who was complicit in Pakistan’s becoming the region’s principal jihadi paymaster while she also ramped up an insurgency in Kashmir that has brought two nuclear powers to the brink of war.
William Dalrymple.