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Bhutto's roller coaster
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BENAZIR BHUTTO, twice elected prime minister of Pakistan only to be twice forced from office on charges of corruption, won an important legal victory on April 6 when the Supreme Court in Islamabad set aside her conviction in a kickback scheme.
The court ordered a retrial for Bhutto and her imprisoned husband, Asif Ali Zardari.
Since 1999, Bhutto, the Radcliffe and Oxford-educated heiress to a political dynasty, has been living in self-exile in Britain and the United Arab Emirates.
The court decision raises the possibility of a return to the country where her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was elected prime minister in 1971 and hanged in 1979 by the military government that had supplanted him.
Pakistan is under the control of a military government headed by General Pervez Musharraf, who deposed Bhutto's archrival, Nawaz Sharif, in October 1999. Sharif is living in exile in Saudi Arabia.
Although the general promises an eventual return to civilian government, he has repeatedly said that he considers Sharif and Bhutto crooks and that neither is welcome to return to Pakistani politics.
Nevertheless, Bhutto was talking about just such a comeback last week. “I have called all my colleagues over for a consultation as to setting a date," she said to Sky News, the British-based outlet.
“One big hurdle to my return has been removed, and it's important for me to go back and be part of the democratic process in my country," she said.
With Sharif having gone into exile last December in circumstances that remain largely unexplained, Bhutto seems to have to wrestle now with the temptation to emerge as a resurgent votary of civilian rule.
The international community, led by the Commonwealth, appears to have sustained the pressure on Musharraf to restore democracy in Pakistan.
So, a cynical question in focus is whether the military, which often prides itself as the messiah of stability, can seek to co-exist with Bhutto within the country's current political space. The notion of such coexistence is compounded by the intrinsic contradiction between Bhutto's wish-list and Musharraf's choices.
The question that the domestic campaigners for the restoration of democracy in Pakistan need to ponder is whether hotchpotch alliances, such as the one now led by Nawabzada Nasrullah, can at all deliver the goods.
Bhutto and her husband were convicted in April 1999 of accepting kickbacks from a Swiss company. They were sentenced to five years in prison and fined US$8.6 million. At the time, Zardari was already in jail on other charges.
In setting aside Bhutto's conviction, the Supreme Court issued a statement that did not explain the reasons for the decision.
All along, Bhutto has insisted that the case against her was a political manoeuvre set in motion by Sharif. In February, that accusation gained credence when The Sunday Times in Britain published transcripts of reported conversations between the original trial judge and pivotal figures in the Sharif government.
In an interview with the BBC last week, Bhutto said of the judges in her case, “They can stand up to the forces of dictatorship and uphold the scales of justice."
Those scales are quite likely to be teetering for a long time. Numerous allegations of corruption remain against Bhutto. If she does go home, she may well be taken into custody and find herself facing additional charges.
Bhutto was born in Karachi in 1953. After completing her early education in Pakistan, she attended Radcliffe College and Oxford University. As well as obtaining a degree in philosophy, politics and economics, she also completed a course in international law and diplomacy at Oxford.
Bhutto inherited the leadership of the Pakistan People's Party from her father, former Prime Minister Aulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was ousted in a military coup in 1977 and hanged two years later.
His oldest daughter, Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan in 1986 after 10 years of detention and exile, vowing to restore her father's party to power.
Her career has been a series of such pinnacles and canyons. In the male-dominated world of politics in a Muslim country, she became the first woman to head an Islamic country in 1988.
She was ousted on corruption charges two years later but struggled back to power in 1993.
President Farooq Leghari, a former ally, sacked Bhutto again on November 5, 1996, charging her with sponsoring police hit squads, condoning bribery and nearly bankrupting the government.
Throughout the years in opposition, Bhutto pledged to transform Pakistani society by focusing attention on programmes for health, social welfare and education for the underprivileged.
She was once considered a great hope for good government in notoriously corrupt Pakistan. But her years in office were marked by the familiar scenes of scandals, favouritism and political vendettas.
Pakistanis attribute many of Bhutto's problems to her husband in an arranged marriage, Asif Ali Zardari, a shady businessman whom Bhutto named to her cabinet. As a government official, Zardari was known as “Mr 10 Per Cent" because of bribes he allegedly extracted for business contracts.
(SD-Agencies)
“I don't allow people to kick me out... Win or lose, I fight."
Bhutto, in an interview with The Associated Press after her second ouster, in November 1996
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