GARHI KHUDA BAKHSH, Pak Istan — Wailing and beating their chests, tens of thousands of people paid homage to Benazir Bhutto on Saturday on the first anniversary of her assassination — an event that dashed U.S. hopes the moderate Muslim politician would regain power and galvanize the campaign against al-Qaeda.
The commemoration came amid heightened tensions with India over the recent Mumbai terrorist attacks and a Pakistani troop buildup along their shared border, though Pakistan’s leaders used the occasion to call for peace.
“We don’t want to fight, we don’t want to have war, we don’t want to have aggression with our neighbors,” Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani said in a televised speech.
Tensions rose between the nuclear-armed neighbors after Delhi blamed Pakistani militants for last month’s three-day rampage in India’s financial capital and edged higher Friday with Pakistani officials saying the army had deployed troops toward India’s border.
Bhutto’s widow, President Asif Ali Zardari, did not mention the troop movement in a speech honoring his wife but insisted Pakistan was battling the “cancer” of terrorism.
“We ourselves have accepted that we have a cancer. Yes, we will cure it,” Zardari said. “They (terrorists) are forcing their agenda on us.”
Zardari took over the party after Bhutto’s death and was elected president in September, vowing to maintain his wife’s legacy and return the country to democracy after almost 10 years of military dictatorship.
“We will take Pakistan forward following the path of our martyr Benazir Bhutto,” Zardari told a gathering of party activists and her family in a speech near her mausoleum.
Many of Bhutto’s mourners had walked for hundreds of miles in the bitter Pakistani winter to her family mausoleum, where they jostled for a chance to kiss her grave or toss rose petals.
“We have an unconditional attachment and love for Benazir,” said Nazir Ali, a 35-year- old donkey cart driver who had hiked for 15 days. “I am tired but will keep trying to get into the mausoleum to have a glimpse of her tomb.”
Bhutto was killed in a gun- and-suicide-bomb attack on Dec. 27, 2007, as she was leaving a campaign rally in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, just outside the capital of Islamabad.
She was campaigning to return her Pakistan People’s Party to power in parliamentary elections — a scenario supported by the United States and other Western governments, who liked her mass appeal among the country’s 160 million people as well as her secular credentials.
