With her luminous eyes and strong features framed by a flowing white head scarf, Benazir Bhutto was the face of Pakistan’s democratic hopes — a face that had been thrust into the limelight with the execution of her father in 1979 and that remained there, aging gracefully, until her assassination by a suicide bomber in Pakistan on Thursday.
Bhutto, 54, was a charismatic but controversial political leader whose highly magnified life was marked by dizzying twists of fate.
Following in the footsteps of her father, Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, she was twice chosen as Pakistan’s prime minister in the 1990s but was also twice driven from office amid charges of corruption and incompetence. This winter, after years of self-imposed exile, Bhutto was attempting to stage a high-risk political comeback that could have led to a third term as premier in elections next month.
Benazir Bhutto was born June 21, 1953, into a life of feudal privilege and wealth in a highly stratified society, then sent to boarding schools and on European vacations while millions of her illiterate countrymen toiled in brick kilns and wheat fields for pennies a day. Yet she went on to became a champion of popular democracy who headed her country’s closest equivalent to a secular Western movement, the Pakistan People’s Party.
Nicknamed “Pinkie” for her rosy complexion, she was a graduate of Radcliffe College and Oxford University. Yet she also submitted to a traditional arranged marriage and, while speaking up for the rights of women in Muslim societies, was always careful to publicly observe the stylistic dictates of her religion.
Bhutto broke with family tradition by not covering her face with a veil in public. Instead, her white head scarf, known as a dupatta, became her political trademark — a symbolic bridge between tradition and modernity.
She was a highly disciplined and wily politician who kept an iron grip on her party, remaining its lifelong president and making all its decisions, even during her long exile. Despite her cult status as a democratic leader, she flirted opportunistically with military power-sharing and attempted rapprochement with Afghanistan’s Islamic Taliban rulers when it seemed expedient.
Above all, she was her father’s daughter, raised with foreign democratic leaders at the dinner table. Then in 1977, a military coup plucked Pinkie from carefree college life. Her father was thrown into prison, tried on dubious charges of corruption and murder conspiracy, and finally hanged in 1979 on orders from Pakistan’s dictator, Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq.
Later, Bhutto faced her own ordeal of house arrest, prison and exile, but she emerged toughened and determined to carry on her father’s legacy as a secular reformer.
The high point of Bhutto’s career came in 1988, when she returned to Pakistan after a decade of military rule. Yet even though she was an inspiration to Pakistan’s poor voters, Bhutto proved a disappointing ruler. She traveled widely abroad and was extremely popular in Washington, and she enacted economic policies aimed at attracting foreign investment.
But she failed to control a series of domestic conflicts, especially a spiral of ethnic and sectarian violence in Karachi, her native city. She was accused of trying to manipulate the courts and the media and of stooping to multiple acts of petty self-enrichment while in power. She was forced from office after two years, then re-elected in 1993 and forced out a second time after three more years.
Many of the corruption charges involved her husband, businessman Asif Ali Zardari. The pair were accused of taking kickbacks for government contracts and of hiding their gains in international bank accounts and real estate. In 1999, husband and wife were sentenced to five years in prison; Zardari spent eight years behind bars, but Bhutto, who was abroad at the time, did not return.
Bhutto consistently denied the charges of corruption and claimed they were politically motivated, but the scandals disillusioned many of her followers.
Bhutto spent much of the last decade living abroad with her three children, largely to avoid prosecution. But early this year, she began quietly negotiating to return to her troubled homeland, where she still harbored dreams of returning to power.
