Benazir Bhutto

Benazir Bhutto was a Pakistani politician who chaired the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). She was the first woman to serve as Prime Minister of a Muslim country and led Pakistan twice between the years 1988-90 and 1993-96. In her first term, she was removed from office 20 months after her inauguration by order of then President Ghulam Ishaq Khan on charges of corruption. In 1993 she was re-elected, but in 1996 she was removed from office under the same accusation, this time by President Farooq Leghari.

On December 27 , 2007 , she was murdered after a PPP demonstration in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, two weeks before the election date where she was leading the opposition candidacy. She was considered at the time to be one of the most beautiful women in the world and one of the leading women of the Muslim world.

Summary

[ disguise ]

• 1 Biographical summary
  • 1 Career
  • 2 Allegations of corruption
  • 3 Death
• 2 Sources

Biographical summary

Born in Karachi , Pakistan , on June 21 , 1953 , daughter of Zufikar Ali Bhutto, sister of Murtaza and Shahnawaz. She joined the Pakistan People’s Party in 1967 , and studied Political Science in the United Kingdom, at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge .

It was in 1977 when he returned to Pakistan, his father being president. A few months after his return, General Zia-ul-Haq carried out a coup d’état, which overthrew and imprisoned his father, accusing him of murder, and he was finally executed on April 4 , 1979 . Ella Benazir assumed the presidency of the PPP, suffering various house arrests until being imprisoned in 1981 . In 1985 , her brother Shahnawaz was found dead, under mysterious circumstances, in her residence on the French Riviera.

Trajectory

In 1988 Zia-ul-Haq died and Benazir became the first woman to be appointed prime minister in an Islamic country, holding the position until 1990 . Again in 1993 she was elected again, and her brother, who had returned from his exile in Afghanistan , was shot dead in an attack. Benazir remained in office until 1996 when she had to leave, accused of corruption, along with her husband Asif Ali Zardari . After several years of exile in Dubai , and with Pervez Musharraf being president of Pakistan , she returned on October 18 , 2007 , to run in elections scheduled for January 2008 , being greeted with a violent attack from which she emerged unharmed.

Corruption accusations

French, Polish, Spanish and Swiss documents supported the corruption allegations against Bhutto and her husband. The two faced a number of legal proceedings, including charges of money laundering through Swiss banks. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, spent eight years in prison on similar corruption charges. Zardari, released in 2004 , denounced torture in prison, which was later corroborated by human rights groups.

A New York Times report indicates that Pakistani investigators have documents that showed a network of bank accounts, all linked to the family’s lawyer in Switzerland , with Asif Zardari as the main user. According to the article, some documents originated by French authorities indicated that Zardari offered exclusive rights to Dassault, a French aircraft manufacturing company, to replace the air force in exchange for a 5% commission to be paid to a Swiss company controlled by Zardari. The article also says that a Dubai company was given an exclusive license to import gold into Pakistan for which Asif Zardari was receiving payments of more than $10 million into his Citibank accounts in Dubai. The company’s owner denied making payments to Zardari and claimed that documents were altered.

According to Bhutto, the charges against her and her husband were purely political in nature: “Most of these documents are altered…”, “…the stories that have been circulating are absolutely wrong,” she said. The report of an Auditor General of Pakistan (AGP) supported what Bhutto said. The AGP report says Khan illegally paid up to Rs 28 million in legal advisers to file 19 corruption cases against Bhutto and her husband from 1990 to 1992 . She wrote several books. In 1978 she published Foreign Policy in Perspective and in 1989 her autobiography Daughter of Destiny. In 1988 she received the Bruno Kreisky Human Rights Award and in 1989 Radcliffe’s Honorary Phi Beta Kappa Award.

The constitutional reform of 2002 prohibits a Prime Minister from holding office for two terms. This prevented Bhutto from returning to office, as did former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Bhutto left Pakistan under the threat of a judicial investigation for corruption shortly after General Pervez Musharraf, also the army chief, seized power in a 1999 coup . Until 2007 , Bhutto lived in Dubai , United Arab Emirates , from where he maintained contacts with the PPP and its followers. He continually traveled abroad to give lectures.

Death

On December 26 , 2007 and in Rawalpindi , a new terrorist act, apparently signed by Al Qaeda fundamentalism, ended the life of this pro-Western woman who represented everything that Islamic fundamentalists hate.