Benazir Bhutto, R.I.P.

2 Responses to “Benazir Bhutto, R.I.P.”

1. jose on December 28th, 2007 12:53 am permalink

   Interestingly enough, Nezua also inspired me to blog about this tragedy, too. Good looks.

2. shag carpet bomb on December 29th, 2007 8:08 pm permalink

   yikes. i’m kind of surprised at the unalloyed support for bhutto. tariq ali’s been writing some great stuff, including this published over two weeks ago:

   Daughter of the West (a play on her bio, Daughter of the East):

   [Bhutto] agreed that he could take off his uniform after his ‘re-election’ by Parliament, but it had to be before the next general election. (He has now done this, leaving himself dependent on the goodwill of his successor as army chief of staff.) He pushed through a legal ruling – yet another sordid first in the country’s history known as the National Reconciliation Ordinance, which withdrew all cases of corruption pending against politicians accused of looting the national treasury. The ruling was crucial for her since she hoped that the money-laundering and corruption cases pending in three European courts in Valencia, Geneva and London would now be dismissed. This doesn’t seem to have happened.

   …

   She had returned the favour [of being white washed in the US press] in advance by expressing sympathy for the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, lunching with the Israeli ambassador to the UN (a litmus test) and pledging to ‘wipe out terrorism’ in her own country. In 1979 a previous military dictator had bumped off her father with Washington’s approval, and perhaps she thought it would be safer to seek permanent shelter underneath the imperial umbrella. HarperCollins had paid her half a million dollars to write a new book. The working title she chose was ‘Reconciliation’.

   ;;;

   By the time she was re-elected in 1993, she had abandoned all idea of reform, but that she was in a hurry to do something became clear when she appointed her husband minister for investment, making him responsible for all investment offers from home and abroad. It is widely alleged that the couple accumulated $1.5 billion. The high command of the Pakistan People’s Party now became a machine for making money, but without any trickle-down mechanism. This period marked the complete degeneration of the party. All that shame-faced party members could say, when I asked, was that ‘everybody does it all over the world,’ thus accepting that the cash nexus was now all that mattered. In foreign policy her legacy was mixed. She refused to sanction an anti-Indian military adventure in Kargil on the Himalayan slopes, but to make up for it, as I wrote in the LRB (15 April 1999), her government backed the Taliban takeover in Kabul – which makes it doubly ironic that Washington and London should be promoting her as a champion of democracy.

   http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n24/ali_01_.html

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