Aboard the Democracy Train (31 page)

Abbasi recalls that at that point, “she turned to me and said, ‘How about some political slogans like “
Jeay Bhutto
,” [long live Bhutto] Safdar?’”

Acting on Benazir’s wishes, Safdar Abbasi took hold of the megaphone from inside the cruiser and bellowed out the catchy slogan, “
Nara-i Nara-i Nara-i Bhutto
… [crying, crying, crying Bhutto]” to which the crowd frantically responded “
Jeay Jeay Jeay Bhutto
.” That was the cue for a smiling Benazir to stand up from the sunroof of the vehicle and wave to the crowd. The frenzied crowd had by now forced the land cruiser to a crawl, giving the sharpshooter the opportunity to aim at Benazir’s head.

Suddenly, shots rang out. Seconds later, Benazir had slumped inside the cruiser, and her blood had spilled all over Naheed’s lap. The shots came from the left side, but the bullets pierced and left wounds on the right side of her head.

“She was instantly dead,” Abbasi claims.

Immediately thereafter, there was a loud explosion that cracked the windows of the vehicle and caused the tires to lose air. Video footage later showed that the sharp shooter had fired three shots, looked down and detonated his explosives. Dozens of others were killed as well, at least 15 of whom were disfigured beyond recognition.

While the bombproof Land Cruiser did not explode, inside Benazir was lifeless. The tires of her vehicle had lost air. “We began to drive as fast as possible but the car began wobbling,” says Abbasi.

At Murree road, they checked Benazir’s pulse and found there was no beat. The backup car carrying Rehman Malik and three other men, deputed for security purposes, was nowhere in sight. It would force Benazir’s entourage to make a U-turn on the road and transfer the nation’s only woman prime minister – now dead – into the car of journalist-turned-PPP loyalist, Sherry Rehman, who took her to hospital.

Supreme Court lawyer Anis Jilani, who attended Benazir’s last rally, was 15 ft away when he heard the gunshots, “followed by a huge fire ball and rush of air.” While people and police ran away from the explosion, Jilani rushed toward the crime scene. He had arrived just in time to see Benazir’s land cruiser wobble away from the road, strewn with the dead and wounded.

In the midst of the mass hysteria, Jilani saw people beat up the mask left over from a face that had blown off. He says that people suspected it was the suicide bomber – although it wasn’t clear to him if it was really so. Within a few hours, he saw the fire brigade dispatched by the municipal corporation hosing down the scene of the murder.

Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema held a press conference in Islamabad 24 hours later, in which the government blamed Tehrik-i-Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud for
the murder. According to Cheema, who later confessed to holding the press conference on the instructions of President Musharraf, the military had obtained a tape recording of Baitullah congratulating another operator for “a job well done.”

The United Nations investigation into Benazir Bhutto’s murder, led by Chile’s ambassador to the UN Heraldo Munoz, which submitted its investigative findings to the world body in its April 2010 report, called it “strange” that the Musharraf administration had such ready evidence of the assailants. The UN investigators, who interviewed 230 people over a nine month period, said that ISI officials had told them that they had been monitoring Baitullah Mehsud and recognized that it was his voice.

It was the same scapegoat named by Gen. Musharraf on October 18, 2007, when Benazir’s procession was first attacked in Karachi. Even back then, she had rejected the government’s claim. PPP insiders told me that when Musharraf called her and she named her three suspects – two intelligence officials and the Punjab chief minister – the general went “ballistic” and yelled at her for “playing politics.”

The UN report, undertaken at the request of the Zardari government, turned out to be a damning indictment of the Musharraf government and the intelligence agencies to stop what the UN team termed a “preventable” murder.

At the same time, the report implicated PPP insiders. The UN’s perusal of video tapes found that the backup security vehicle – which carried Rehman Malik, Babar Awan, Farhatullah Babar and Tauqir Zia – was nowhere on the scene when Benazir was killed. Even if the four men did not hear the loud explosions from the area, Rehman Malik had told reporters after departing from Liaquat Bagh that Benazir was “all right.”

Zardari’s failure to investigate the men and the career elevation of three of them – Rehman Malik as minister of interior, Babar Awan as minister of law and Farhatullah Babar as PPP spokesman – has left dark shadows around his government.

Interestingly, the Joint Investigation Team, headed by Minister of Interior Rehman Malik, would, like Musharraf’s earlier JIT, hold FATA militants responsible for Benazir’s murder. But in
February 2011, a wider FIA investigation found Musharraf guilty of the conspiracy to kill Benazir. A Pakistani court has since issued a warrant of arrest against the former military president, who lives in London.

Despite her fears Benazir had, after her return to Pakistan resolutely thumbed her nose at the powerful spy agencies and pushed through her populist agenda. The bullets that went through her head and brought her down left the image of a fighter – an image that is seared into the consciousness of the Pakistani people.

The skeletal iron framework that binds the federation of Pakistan groaned with the stress of Benazir’s murder. People wept on the streets in unprecedented scenes. In Balochistan, already in the throes of an insurgency, the administration shut off electricity and blacked out cell phones. It fanned more fears and rumors. Violence spread in Sindh and Balochistan as people vented their anger by damaging railway tracks, breaking government offices, banks and institutions of state.

Benazir’s assassination was a defining moment for Sindh where the Bhutto family – Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his sons Shahnawaz and Murtaza – are buried. Benazir had seen her father executed by Gen. Zia ul Haq’s military government and had buried two of her brothers, without their perpetrators ever being brought to trial. Her murder now threatened to sever the province’s last link with the federation.

Jeay Sindh Mahaz convenor, Abdul Khaliq Junejo says that Sindhis were shocked by television images of the brutal shooting of an unarmed, defenseless Benazir, as though she was an “orphan.” Despite being critical of her PPP, Junejo says the images were enough to make the peaceful, mystical people of Sindh take up arms against the military and support a violent struggle for secession.

At that defining moment, the nation watched as Asif Zardari, in his new role as widower – his hair pushed back, a shawl wrapped
across his chest – stepped into the shoes of his late wife. While bitter Sindhis cried out
“Pakistan Na Khappay”
(We Don’t Want Pakistan), Benazir’s widower responded to the rallies with PPP’s federalist slogan
“Pakistan Khappay”
(We Want Pakistan).

Although Asif named their son Bilawal as the party’s future successor, the young man made a brief debut and then departed to Oxford University in Britain to complete his education. The mantle of leadership fell to Asif, who was named in Benazir’s will to lead for the “interim period.”

While doubts swirled about the authenticity of Benazir’s will, her lawyer Mark Siegel attested her handwriting was genuine in the will – an excerpt of which is reproduced below.

Figure 13
Excerpt of Benazir Bhutto’s will.

Benazir’s murder was the signal for the nation to defeat President Musharraf’s Pakistan Muslim League (Q) in the February 2008 elections. The two political parties PPP and PML (N) – which had been in the woods since Musharraf’s military coup in 1999 – spoke of impeaching him. Musharraf, a commando at heart, carried on as president, even as he worked to deflate the overwhelming public perception that blamed him for Benazir’s murder.

But by 2008 Musharraf’s chief US patron, George W. Bush, too had lost public support because of the flagging economy and the unpopularity of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The upcoming Democratic Party distanced itself from Gen. Musharraf, who in any case had lost his vital importance after he shed his uniform.

Musharraf’s resignation gave a green light to Asif Zardari to use his personal charms to do what he does best. He made political deals with former rivals like the PML (N) and the MQM and in August 2008 succeeded in being elected as president of Pakistan. The PPP nominated another party loyalist, Yusuf Raza Gilani, to become prime minister.

Ironically, the Charter of Democracy – which Benazir Bhutto initiated with Nawaz Sharif and which culminated in the eighteenth amendment – would clip the wings of her widower. Making no mention of the irony, President Zardari addressed the joint houses of parliament on April 5, 2010 to laud the constitutional package as Benazir’s brainchild. Party loyalists wasted no time in telling the world that Zardari was the first president to voluntarily give up his presidential powers.

Chastened by Benazir’s murder and years in exile, Sharif worked with her widower to do away with the ordinances passed under former military rulers, Generals Zia ul Haq and Pervaiz Musharraf, that had strengthened their despotic rule.

Meanwhile, the Awami National Party too worked to fulfill the aspirations of their Pashtun voters when they changed the name given by the British, namely “North West Frontier Province,” to “Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.” Still, the province’s minority ethnic Hazara community has challenged the name in the Supreme Court.

Whilst the eighteenth amendment formally clipped Zardari’s presidential powers, the army let him know quite early on who would remain the real boss. Zardari’s interviews to the media that the Indo-Pakistani peace process should not be “hostage” to Kashmir and his description of Kashmiri militants as “terrorists” sent ripples of consternation ran within the army circles. Given that in Pakistan, the term “
masla-i-Kashmir
” (problem of Kashmir) is a metaphor for an intractable problem, civil society knew right away that Zardari would suffer the consequences of his remarks.

Shortly thereafter, in November 2008, there was a terrorist attack in Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel, in which over a hundred innocent people were killed and over three hundred injured.
India blamed the attack on the Lashkar-i-Tayyaba (LET; also known as the Army of the Riteous), led by Hafiz Saeed Mohammed, claiming it had trained for the attack in Pakistan. India conducted an investigation and handed the results over to Pakistan. But Pakistan’s courts claimed that with only one surviving terrorist in Indian custody, they did not have enough evidence to imprison the LET chief. Saeed was released due to lack of evidence.

The Mumbai incident put Indo-Pakistani relations into deep freeze – one that, despite the PPP government’s best intentions, is proving difficult to thaw. Moreover, given that the terrorist attack happened at a time when NATO leaned heavily on the Pakistan army for its war strategy in Afghanistan, the US preferred not to lecture Pakistan about harboring militants.

As the PPP government dug its heels in, President Asif Zardari was left with the unenviable task of carrying a sword against the Islamic militants as he walked the tightrope between America and the Army.

By the time Zardari took over as president, the Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariati-Mohammedi (TNSM) had established a parallel Taliban state in parts of Malakand division, where it ostensibly practiced “
Nizam-i-Adl
” (Order of Justice; essentially Sharia law). Awami National Party’s Senator Afrasiab Khattak told me that his new government was taken aback to find it had inherited an ill-trained, ill-equipped police force that was no match for an increasingly ferocious Taliban militancy, which, in Swat, was headed by Maulana Fazlullah.

In Khattak’s words, the situation had deteriorated so rapidly because “Musharraf’s duplicity had suited the Bush administration.”

Toward the end of 2008, a massive suicide bomb attack at the Marriot Hotel in Islamabad had destroyed the myth that parliamentarians, diplomats or even armed personnel were safe. Islamabad grew even more strongly fortified. A wide cordon was thrown around
the parliament buildings and cars were investigated at checkpoints set up at every few yards. The besieged political leadership traveled in groups and only to fortified locations.

Figure 14
Paramilitary personnel patrol a road in Bajaur tribal agency on February 28, 2009 (
Dawn
photo).