Picture the moment. It is Dec. 2, 1988. A beautiful woman, 35 years old, walks into the presidential palace in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, flanked by liveried and turbaned honor guards.
She is wearing a green silk tunic and a white gauzy shawl that barely covers her hair. She speaks flawless Urdu and English, her English perfected as an undergraduate at Radcliffe and then as a student at Oxford, where she was president of the Oxford Union. She is intelligent, erudite and intensely charismatic. And she is about to take the oath of office to become the first woman in history to lead a modern Muslim country. The idea of Benazir Bhutto has always been more powerful than the reality. Bhutto, who was assassinated last December while campaigning in Rawalpindi, seemed to many of her admirers in the West to be the consummate liberal. But she was also the descendant of one of the oldest and most thoroughly feudal families in the Sind province. The size of her family’s landholdings had stunned the British general Charles Napier, who conquered the province for Queen Victoria in 1843. She inherited the leadership of the Pakistan People’s Party from her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s first elected prime minister, and ran it like a personal fiefdom. She was president-for-life, allowed no internal party elections and in her will bequeathed her party to her 19-year-old son, Bilawal, who has spent most of his life outside Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto spent only 20 months as prime minister the first time she was elected. Pakistan’s president dismissed her government over charges of dysfunction and corruption. She had few legislative accomplishments during those years, and her second term in office, from 1993 to 1996, was also largely unsuccessful. There are explanations for her lack of achievement — the military establishment gave her little room and maneuvered against her constantly — but still one cannot help but notice the gap between ambition and action that haunted Bhutto for most of her public life.To read the complete article, please visit The New York Times´ Website
Picture the moment. It is Dec. 2, 1988. A beautiful woman, 35 years old, walks into the presidential palace in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, flanked by liveried and turbaned honor guards.
She is wearing a green silk tunic and a white gauzy shawl that barely covers her hair. She speaks flawless Urdu and English, her English perfected as an undergraduate at Radcliffe and then as a student at Oxford, where she was president of the Oxford Union. She is intelligent, erudite and intensely charismatic. And she is about to take the oath of office to become the first woman in history to lead a modern Muslim country. The idea of Benazir Bhutto has always been more powerful than the reality. Bhutto, who was assassinated last December while campaigning in Rawalpindi, seemed to many of her admirers in the West to be the consummate liberal. But she was also the descendant of one of the oldest and most thoroughly feudal families in the Sind province. The size of her family’s landholdings had stunned the British general Charles Napier, who conquered the province for Queen Victoria in 1843. She inherited the leadership of the Pakistan People’s Party from her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s first elected prime minister, and ran it like a personal fiefdom. She was president-for-life, allowed no internal party elections and in her will bequeathed her party to her 19-year-old son, Bilawal, who has spent most of his life outside Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto spent only 20 months as prime minister the first time she was elected. Pakistan’s president dismissed her government over charges of dysfunction and corruption. She had few legislative accomplishments during those years, and her second term in office, from 1993 to 1996, was also largely unsuccessful. There are explanations for her lack of achievement — the military establishment gave her little room and maneuvered against her constantly — but still one cannot help but notice the gap between ambition and action that haunted Bhutto for most of her public life.To read the complete article, please visit The New York Times´ Website