THOUSANDS OF ROSE petals showered the path of Benazir Bhutto as she entered a packed auditorium in Karachi this summer. As the 33-year-old Pakistan opposition leader grinned and waved, the crowd stomped, clapped and chanted ”Benazir! Benazir!” Miss Bhutto brushed the petals from her auburn hair and adjusted her chiffon scarf to keep it modestly covering her head. A rhythmic song blasted from the loudspeaker, half disco and half tribal beat from Baluchistan, sung in Urdu by a local pop music queen. Listen, all you holy warriors, Look at Benazir, the nation joins her, Long live Bhutto, long live Bhutto!
At the podium, Miss Bhutto peered from wide-framed glasses and spoke confidently, with a forceful jab of her hand, promising higher wages for workers and more land for peasants. Dropping her text, she denounced as an evil usurper Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan’s President. An army general in 1977, he had overthrown her father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, ending the only period in history in which Pakistan was governed by a popularly elected leader. Two years later, Mr. Bhutto was hanged on a disputed murder conspiracy charge.
”Will you workers and laborers help to destroy this man?” Miss Bhutto now asked. ”Yes, yes!” the crowd shouted. ”Will you join our campaign to bring him down this autumn?” ”Yes, yes,” the crowd called again.
Since its independence in 1947, Pakistan has been dismembered once and has seen three military coups, three wars with India, untold riots, assassinations and turmoil – but it has never seen anything like this.
In an Islamic state in which women are generally expected to be subservient, the 33-year-old unmarried woman, educated at Radcliffe and Oxford universities, has established herself as Pakistan’s most popular opposition leader – indeed its most popular politician. The antigovernment activity she has helped foment since her return from voluntary exile last spring poses the most serious threat to the Zia regime in years.
Responding to the crisis, General Zia has proved himself to be a formidable and resourceful foe. In August, his Government cracked down by arresting Miss Bhutto and 2,000 dissidents, and deployed police and army troops to suppress the ensuing antigovernment riots in Karachi and rural Sind province, her home territory. For nine years, General Zia had ruled in just this authoritarian fashion, but last year he surprised many by shifting course, lifting martial law and turning the day-to-day functioning of the Government over to an elected Parliament and Prime Minister, Mohammed Khan Junejo. Having again proved its ability to use force, the Government this month released Miss Bhutto and said she could continue her politicking so long as it remained peaceful.
Miss Bhutto has been hampered by defections, splits and a lack of discipline in her organization. And she is widely criticized for offering no overarching purpose in seeking power, beyond vindication of her father. Nevertheless, most politicians agree that Miss Bhutto might win a national election today. But the Government stands firm in refusing to hold one until 1990.
Still, Miss Bhutto is in a position to help shape the future of Pakistan. She has proved her ability to draw crowds like no one else in the country’s short history. Her political organization, the Pakistan People’s Party, is the biggest and most powerful mass-based group in the country, drawing strength from peasants, students, labor unions, many professionals and wealthy landed interests. She is widely recognized as a symbol of hope for masses of workers and peasants, and she has an organization that can create sufficient disruptions to force a new crackdown at a time when it would prove embarrassing both to General Zia and to Washington.
THE UNITED STATES has an unusual stake in the drama being played out in Pakistan. Since the 1950’s, Pakistan has been a key element in American policy toward South Asia. It has been a valued, Western-oriented ally on the borders of the Soviet Union. And in 1971 it played an important role in facilitating America’s opening to China under Richard M. Nixon, whose controversial ”tilt” toward Pakistan during the India-Pakistan War later that year enraged India and its supporters.
In the 1970’s, Pakistan was a difficult friend because of the 1977 coup, the Bhutto execution, allegations that it was producing a nuclear bomb and the destruction of the United States Embassy by a mob in Islamabad in 1979.
But after the massive Soviet intervention in Afghanistan at the end of 1979, Washington came to see Pakistan as a ”frontline state” against Communism; the Reagan Administration granted it $3.2 billion in military and economic assistance – one of the largest United States aid commitments.
This month, President Reagan praised Pakistan for its decision to use force if necessary to block a hijacked American jetliner from leaving Karachi, although Pakistani commandos got to the scene too late to prevent the hijackers’ shooting spree, in which at least 21 persons eventually died.
American officials have long encouraged the Zia regime to move toward representative government, and many are concerned that Miss Bhutto’s aggressive tactics may jeopardize that process. Although Miss Bhutto carefully avoids direct criticism of the United States, American diplomats worry that many of her supporters resent Washington’s backing of the Zia government and may prove hostile to American interests in the region.
The violent unrest that has accompanied Miss Bhutto’s challenge to General Zia has raised the larger question of whether Pakistan can ever peacefully resolve the competing demands of its political factions. Pakistan has experienced some years of stability, and some years of representative government, but rarely both at the same time.
In Pakistan, some say Miss Bhutto’s challenge may leave the country stronger than before. Others fear that her demands for fresh elections next year cannot be reconciled with the Government’s determination to hang on, and that her drive might produce more turmoil, forcing the army to intervene and reimpose martial law.
”If that happens, the people will be demoralized and they will give up on this country altogether,” says a Karachi politician. ”It will be the last nail in the coffin of Pakistan.”
MISS BHUTTO IS NOTHING IF NOT a protegee of her father, who doted on her and always hoped she would pursue a career of public service. Son of a wealthy feudal landholding family in the southern Sind province, the late Prime Minister, who was elected to power in 1971, was an arrogant, charismatic, brooding and suspicious politician who governed with great flair and ruthlessness.
The slogan of the Pakistan Peoples Party of Mr. Bhutto was simple -”bread, clothing, shelter” – and it helped make him the only Pakistani leader in history to have broad appeal among peasants and workers. He was revered further for rebuilding national pride after the 1971 military debacle in which East Pakistan broke away to become the nation of Bangladesh.
In an effort to consolidate his rule, Mr. Bhutto was determined to break the power of the army, the government bureacracy he had inherited, big businesses and the old tribal and regional leaders he felt were strangling Pakistan and threatening national unity.
But this meant that when opposition parties gained strength, Mr. Bhutto outlawed them and jailed their leaders and thousands of their workers. He nationalized banks, insurance companies and most industries. He ordered press censorship and abolished the elite civil service, replacing government employees with his own loyalists.
Of the army, Mr. Bhutto said, ”I don’t take my eyes off them.” He filled its upper ranks with officers he thought he could trust, reaching down in 1976 to elevate a self-effacing lieutenant general named Mohammed Zia ul-Haq as the army chief of staff – ”the biggest mistake of my life,” he said later.
In 1977, at what seemed to be the peak of his power, Mr. Bhutto called for elections. All the other political groups – from left-wing socialists to right-wing religious parties – united against him. After a chaotic election day of stolen and stuffed ballot boxes and voter intimidation, the parties rose in protest, denouncing the Bhutto landslide as a fraud. Hundreds were killed in clashes with the police. And in 1977, led by General Zia, the army stepped in to oust Mr. Bhutto.
Like generals taking their cue from the last war, Miss Bhutto and her associates are trying to force history to repeat itself. Miss Bhutto hopes the army will defy General Zia in similar circumstances and agree to call immediate elections. If it simply cracks down and reimposes martial law, she can argue that the army was running things behind the scenes all along.
”It’s a risk,” says a Bhutto associate. ”But it’s the only route we can take. The Government will never let us into power any other way.”
MISS BHUTTO MAY HAVE AN IM-probable background for such political combat. But few children of privilege have been steeled by seeing their world crumble and collapse and then having to fight for their father’s life. Fewer still have had to suffer solitary confinement in a squalid prison cell where daytime temperatures hovered near 120 degrees.
The question today is whether these experiences strengthened Miss Bhutto’s character or transformed her into a distrustful, imperious loner striving for vindication.
As a child, Miss Bhutto was called Pinky, a nickname her oldest friends still use. She went to convent schools and grew up with servants, governesses and family dinners at the Bhutto mansion in the Karachi suburbs and the ancestral home in Larkana. There in the scrublands and farm fields of the Indus River Valley, the Bhuttos are said to own thousands of acres cultivated by poor but loyal peasants.
Feudalism remains a potent factor in Pakistan, and feudal landlords are often successful in politics. With her hauteur, a longtime acquaintance says, Miss Bhutto ”is feudal to the core.”
At Radcliffe and Oxford, friends say, she studied politics but never developed a distinct set of views. Instead, she excelled at campus politics and at the Oxford Union, the prestigious debating society that she served as president, as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had.
Since returning to Pakistan, Miss Bhutto has given up most social engagements, and has told friends that for now she has no plans to marry. But at college, she drove a sports car, went to parties and had many male friends who speak of her today with affection and even awe. As a debater, she was known for the quick, sarcastic put-down, especially when the subject was whimsical and form was prized over content.
In the summer of 1977, Miss Bhutto planned to return to Pakistan and take up a career in government, perhaps in the Foreign Service. But within days of her arrival, the army seized control.
As Miss Bhutto recalls it, former advisers began to visit the ousted Prime Minister, demanding money and threatening to defect. Then one day an ex-Cabinet minister urged Miss Bhutto to leave the country. In the evening, she discussed the incident with her father. That night, the police seized him on a murder charge.
With Miss Bhutto’s younger sister and brothers still in school, it fell to her and her mother to fight against his conviction. They exhausted every legal avenue, including a plea to the nation’s Supreme Court. In the end, General Zia rejected the appeals of leaders around the world and authorized the execution. It was in the last year and a half of her father’s life, says Miss Bhutto, that she learned about the harsh realities of Pakistan’s politics. In the shadows of his prison cell, she and her father talked about all that had gone wrong.
”These were the bitter, bitter experiences . . .” Miss Bhutto recalled recently, her voice trailing off. ”All those ministers who betrayed us, the people who made hay while the sun was shining. I decided I didn’t want such men around me – ever.”
Two years after her father’s execution, Miss Bhutto was herself jailed after some antigovernment rebels hijacked a Pakistani jetliner and flew to Afghanistan and Syria. The hijackers said they were from a shadowy guerrilla organization run by Miss Bhutto’s two younger brothers. Investigators then charged that this group had backing from Libya, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union.
Miss Bhutto spent the summer of 1981 in solitary confinement in a prison on the scorched plains of Sind. After her release, she looked emaciated and had headaches and fainting spells. Finally, in 1984 the Government let her leave the country for medical care and recuperation in England.
”Benazir was transformed by the fights in those difficult years,” says Peter W. Galbraith, a college friend who is the son of the former United States Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith, and who now works on the Democratic staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ”Nothing in her background suggests that she would have had such courage to see it through.”
But her experiences also took their toll. Before the hanging in 1979, Miss Bhutto was asked what she thought would occur if her father was executed. ”Civil war, the breakup of Pakistan, a massive and total outburst from the people,” she said. It didn’t happen. Today, Miss Bhutto is certain why – the same party elders who were trying to save themselves earlier wanted to avoid trouble.
Many other politicians around at the time recall the situation differently. Their version is that Mr. Bhutto did himself in by his own greed for power. They note that politics in Pakistan, like politics everywhere, has its share of opportunists and that it is unrealistic to blame people for acting in their self-interest.
After the coup against her father, Miss Bhutto inherited the leadership of his party. In their grief and confusion, party leaders and workers felt that the Bhutto dynasty could keep them unified and strong. But while in England the last two years, Miss Bhutto fought with many of her father’s loyalists over party strategy.
”They treated her like a little punk girl,” asserted a colleague. The squabbles culminated when Miss Bhutto returned to Pakistan last year to bury her younger brother, Shahnawaz, at the family estate in Larkana. He had mysteriously died of poison at his luxury apartment on the French Riveria – another blow to Miss Bhutto and to her mother, who was ill herself.
”I thought to myself, my brother is dead, my mother has got cancer, I have suffered and made sacrifices – and for what?” Miss Bhutto said recently. But she came back to Larkana in August 1985 for a brief stay, to be greeted by tens of thousands of supporters. It was the biggest antigovernment demonstration in years, and Miss Bhutto took it as a sign to persevere.
”I realized that it was for those people that I fought,” Miss Bhutto said. ”I thought that if they accepted me, there should be some discipline in the party, and we will rule. The mood of the country was ready, even if the so-called party leaders were not.”
When Miss Bhutto was named party leader, the real power in the party was in the hands of the elders, who expected Miss Bhutto to serve merely as a symbol. When she returned this year, however, her supporters among the workers did such an effective job in organizing her rallies and bringing out hundreds of thousands in trucks and buses that they felt entitled to make her the leader in fact. Miss Bhutto used her support among the rank and file to dismiss key party chiefs, and installed her own young loyalists in their place. As a result, Miss Bhutto has a better grip on her party, and she may be able to improve its effectiveness. But she has also fueled fears that she will indulge in her father’s excesses. Politicians throughout Pakistan now criticize Miss Bhutto for impetuousness and intolerance of dissent. One of the dismissed leaders, Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, a highly respected former Chief Minister of Sind Province under Bhutto, moved this fall to found his own political party, posing a potentially serious challenge.
”She is arrogant and has no practical experience in politics,” says Khwaja Kharuddin, a prominent antigovernment politician. ”She is repeating all her father’s mistakes by turning against her own people. We’ll never have an election unless we’re all allied.”
Miss Bhutto insists that she must do things her own way. In conversation, a shadow crosses her face when she is asked about her father’s record of repression, the stories of jailings and torture documented by Amnesty International and other human-rights groups. Friends say that Miss Bhutto cannot accept any criticism of her father. ”You can never bring it up with her,” said a senior party leader. ”She won’t accept it. Her demand for loyalty is total.”
GOD GIVE US MEN!” reads the opening of a prayer issued by the Pakistan Army a few years back, shortly after the army carried out its third military coup since independence. Men whom the lust of office does not kill, Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy, Men who possess opinions and a will, Men who have honor . . . men who will not lie.
Such is the self-proclaimed ethos of the institution that has governed Pakistan for most of its history.
In its early years, Pakistan was more of an amalgam of competing and conflicting loyalties than a nation commanding the allegiance of its people. Historians note that whereas India was founded on democratic and egalitarian ideals, Pakistan was formed because of a fear by Moslems of being swallowed up in a Hindu raj. The British agreed to partition their empire only at the last minute, a decision that in many parts of India is still bitterly regretted. In any case, for Pakistan’s leaders, representative government and civil liberties were secondary to preserving a cultural and religious identity that had long emphasized authority, faith and discipline.
Soon after independence, Pakistan’s founding father, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, known as ”The Great Leader,” died of cancer, leaving the country bereft and overwhelmed by chaos and the problems of a nearly bankrupt treasury. For the next decade, a succession of prime ministers scrambled for power until the army moved in for the first time.
Perhaps it was inevitable that Pakistan would then fall back on the ”great leader syndrome” and on the dynastic, aristocratic and feudal tradition in southern Asia. The British had left a powerful Asian-populated civil bureaucracy that had in the viceregal tradition become used to enforcing the law ruthlessly – plus an army that had developed a deep distrust of politicians.
General Zia today seems to epitomize that attitude. Relaxing in his study at Army House, the official residence of the chief of staff in Rawalpindi, he portrays himself as a humble officer who had no choice but to intervene in 1977 and rescue Pakistan from chaos and civil war.
”Why is it that Pakistan has not been able to bring stability to its political life?” he said in a conversation recently. ”At independence, our goal was clear. No sacrifice was too great. But thereafter, unfortunately, we did not have the kind of political leadership which the founder envisaged. Our political parties were not strong enough.”
The man who rose to the top of the army and stayed there for the last decade is an unassuming, affable and stolid career soldier with a habit of being in the right place at the right time. The son of a shopkeeper and religious-school teacher in what is today the Indian part of Punjab, he served with British troops during World War II in Burma, Malaya and Indonesia. When partition with India occurred, his family uprooted itself and walked across the state to the west with nothing but the bundles they carried and the clothes on their backs. When Pakistan experienced the military debacle and loss of Bangladesh in 1971, Mr. Zia escaped being tainted because he was on loan to Jordan, advising King Hussein. In Pakistan, he was just another army corps commander and tank warfare specialist when Mr. Bhutto picked him to become army chief of staff.
At 62, General Zia is short and stocky with a drooping mustache that gives his face the look of a comic-book villain, but he actually has a friendly manner and a famous ability to listen politely to almost any guest or visitor.
The general’s supporters have always asserted that he carried out the coup d’etat in 1977 only after his own commanders demanded it and threatened to mutiny if he refused, and that he intended to permit Mr. Bhutto to run in a future election until evidence arose connecting him with corruption and the murder of a politician. Included in the evidence, according to the General’s supporters, was a list of Bhutto political foes with the Prime Minister’s handwriting in the margin next to one name saying ”Eliminate him.”
”I said to him, ‘Sir – I still called him that – Sir, why have you done all these things, you whom I respected so, you who had done so much?’ ” General Zia once recalled. ”And he only said that I should wait, and he would be cleared. It was very disappointing.” Later, General Zia refused to stay the Bhutto execution, asserting that ”politicians, like anybody else, have to answer for their deeds.”
At first, the General portrayed himself as a temporary custodian of power in Pakistan, working hard to smooth the way for new elections and civilian rule. He was praised for freeing thousands of Bhutto’s political prisoners, and the streets that were in turmoil for months suddenly turned quiet. But after promising and then cancelling elections for the second time in 1979, General Zia cracked down, banning political parties, imposing censorship and jailing opponents. Human-rights organizations had said that over the ensuing years, thousands have been jailed, tortured and mistreated. General Zia seemed to single out the Pakistan People’s Party for repression, as if determined to destroy the Bhutto organization as a force in national politics.
It is often said that power in Pakistan has three principal sources – the army, the feudal landlords and the religious leaders – and Zia has cultivated all three.
Like his predecessor, he has tried to keep an eye on his main flank, the army, replacing dozens of senior army officers with loyalists to his liking. Army officers have done well under General Zia, who has made them provincial governors and heads of government ministries, where they receive many perquisites – including, many experts say, frequent opportunities for kickbacks.
There have been reports of at least three mutiny plots among middle-level officers supported by left-wing civilians, and several officers were tried and convicted for one such plot in 1983. But diplomats and other analysts credit General Zia with keeping the army loyal. But his decision last December to return Pakistan to civil rule is testing the willingness of generals to return to their barracks. Pakistan is rife with rumors of discontent and willingness of some in the army to seize power again if circumstances permit. Politicians fear turmoil created by the opposition could provide such an opportunity. To placate the feudal leaders in the countryside, General Zia initially established an advisory council, nearly half of which was composed of wealthy landlords, and used foreign assistance to hasten adoption of modern agricultural methods and to increase farm production.
And for Pakistan’s religious leaders, General Zia embarked on a sweeping ”Islamization” drive to make Pakistani laws conform with Moslem teachings. Even as a corps commander, he was known for sponsoring classes on the Koran for his men. But the Islamization program has also cemented the support of the mullahs, who are now represented in large numbers in the councils of government.
Much of the Islamization has been cosmetic. No one has ever had his hand chopped off for stealing or been stoned for adultery, although such punishments were put on the books. In addition the Government ordered interest-free banking, although banks now pay a ”profit” on deposits instead of interest.
The main critics of Islamization have been professional women who fought against curbs on the testimony by women in legal cases from rape prosecutions to financial transactions. But many of them acknowledge that their earlier fears that women would be required to wear veils or stay out of sight as they are in other Islamic countries have not materialized.
Most of all, Mr. Zia has established his power by rallying the country in what has widely been perceived as a genuine national security crisis resulting from the 1979 Soviet invasion of neighboring Afganistan. Surrounded by hostile neighbors, Pakistan has always felt the need for military preparedness. Today, its cornerstone is the $3.2 billion military and economic aid package that President Reagan signed in 1981, and which he wants to renew with a $4.02 billion package next year.
Many Pakistanis have become alarmed by the number of Soviet-Afghan-sponsored bombings and air incursions that have increased recently in Pakistani territory near the Afghan border. And Pakistan has become enmeshed in the Afghan conflict because of the supposedly covert American aid – now reportedly $470 million a year – to Afghan ”freedom fighters” operating from bases in Pakistan, Backing for the freedom fighters appears to be generally popular throughout Pakistan, except among the educated classes that form a major part of Benazir Bhutto’s power base. They argue that the support of the rebel cause means that the three million Afghan refugees in Pakistan already straining social services and taking up jobs can’t go home and that their presence in the northwest could encourage secessionism there. Miss Bhutto cites just this argument in assailing the Zia regime for its handling of the situation. She has, however, never called for a unilateral cutoff in aid to the rebels.
American policymakers are wary of Miss Bhutto’s position on Afghanistan, remembering perhaps that her father was less than a friend of the United States and once accused the Central Intelligence Agency of involvement in his downfall.
Washington is also concerned that Pakistan is producing a nuclear bomb. Both General Zia and Miss Bhutto assert they oppose building such a weapon, but many experts in the United States feel that the country is close to that goal.
General Zia’s current political scheme began in 1983, when he announced another timetable for parliamentary elections in which parties were to be barred from participating. The elections last year were thus boycotted by Miss Bhutto’s organization and all other opposition parties making up the antigovernment Movement for the Restoration of Democracy.
But the election was perhaps General Zia’s greatest political triumph. Most voters ignored the boycott appeal and went to the polls. The new Parliament, not surprisingly, represents the usual establishment landlords, religious groups, businessmen and bureaucratic elite.
Responsibility for the whole new apparatus has fallen on the shoulders of Prime Minister Junejo, a soft-spoken, former Cabinet minister and landlord. By all accounts, Mr. Junejo is running the Government day to day now, so much so that General Zia calls himself an ”elder statesman” with plans to retire by the end of the decade. Few doubt that he wields decisive influence behind the scenes, even though Mr. Junejo has ignored his advice on occasion.
FEW POLITICAL AN-tagonists have ever had as many reasons to oppose each other as General Zia and Miss Bhutto. Their confrontation carries deep historical and psychological significance for themselves, their supporters and enemies – and for Pakistan itself. Lawrence Ziring, a political-science professor at Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, who specializes in Pakistan, argues that it is among the world’s ”weaker political entities” because of its internal divisions, its vulnerability to hostile neighbors, and its place in superpower politics. And Mr. Ziring argues that Pakistan’s politicians have been their own worst enemies. The country’s politics, he writes, have left ”little opportunity for give and take,” and elections in Pakistan have produced more conflict than they have ever resolved.
American experts point out that, for better or worse, Pakistan is the United States’ most important friend in one of the world’s most populous and turbulent regions. And American diplomats who support General Zia and Prime Minister Junejo argue that he is best equipped to nurse the country toward stability, freedom and representative government.
In recent years, Pakistan has enjoyed unusual stability. Its economy is performing well, the middle class is growing and more people seem to have a stake in political continuity. Perhaps because people have been numbed by the violence of the last decade, they seem reluctant to bring the country to its knees in order to achieve political change.
But many also doubt that Pakistan can maintain that stability, and Miss Bhutto’s challenge may prove to be a decisive test. There is no evidence of any groundswell of support for General Zia, and although Prime Minister Junejo has instilled hope among some, it is too early to know how well he will succeed in establishing his legitimacy.
How far Miss Bhutto can ultimately press her campaign to unseat General Zia remains an open question. The crackdown of August, in which army troops and police crushed the protest and violence after her arrest, belied her earlier claims that the party would be prepared to sacrifice or that people would rise up against the mistreatment of their leader. Yet there is little doubt that she and her supporters are prepared to push even harder in the months ahead.
”There’s no use crying over spilled milk,” Miss Bhutto said after her release earlier this month, admitting that she had ”underestimated” the Government’s ability to suppress opposition activity. ”We have to come to terms with that. In the future, we have to outplay them, outsmart them and outmanipulate them.”
Photo of Benazir Bhutto at rally in Province of Sind (Peter Charlesworth/Contact); Photos of President Zia and Islamic worshipers in Rawalpindi (Peter Charlesworth/Contact) (Pg. 42); Photos of demonstration in Karachi and Afghan refugees in camp near Peshawar (Peter Charlesworth/Contact; Leloup/Collectif/J.B. Pictures) (Pg.44-5)
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