12 days before a general election, Pakistan's leading opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was killed this afternoon after holding a campaign ralley in the city of Rawalpindi. Her father was Pakistan's first popularly elected leader in the 1970s until he was overthrown in a coup and thereafter hanged to death.
Intent on pursuing her own political career, Benazir eventually served twice as Pakistani prime minister most recently in the mid 1990s.
After 8 years of self-imposed exile Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October, initially hoping to strike a power-sharing deal with the current president Pervez Musharraf. However, after an attack on her life that same month she broke off all negotiations with him and was today campaiging for the January general election. Jill Zobel asked Pakistani analyst MJ Gohel whether he felt her murder today was purely political:
"There can be little doubt that this was a very well-planned, well organised political assassination and the perpetrators were determined to eliminate her, they of course failed once before. Unfortunately, sadly, this time, they succeeded."
She was the main opposition leader, she was campaigning ahead of the January 8th
parliamentary elections. She returned in October after being out of the country for eight years. Why did she come back?
"Bhutto is really the last remaining bearer of her father's political legacy, the Bhutto family has been a key part of Pakistan's political history, going back to the time when her late father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was prime minister in the 1970ies. Now, her father was usurped by military dictator and subsequently Bhutto was hanged, she had two brothers, one of the brothers was found dead in Paris and the other brother was assassinated when he returned back to Pakistan and now of course Benazir Bhutto has been killed, so it is a tragic story of a family which was involved in politics in Pakistan and now the last remaining bearer of the political legacy has also been wiped out."
Bild: EPA
She went to the west, she was educated at Harvard and the university of Oxford, she was a strikingly beautiful woman, extremely articulate and media-savvy. She was two time prime minister in Pakistan. Was she a good prime minister?
"There are a lot of question marks about Benazir Bhutto unfortunately, I suppose the greatest advantage was that she was a democratic re-elected leader of Pakistan and the fact that she was a woman and was one of the few elected female leaders and probably the only one in an Islamic country. On the negative side corruption charges faced her twice during the time when she was prime minister and after she married, her husband was also charged with corruption and a number of this corruption charges were still pending. So there were question marks about her but nevertheless she was a very popular leader within Pakistan and she had a huge following and it was expected that she would win the election in January under the deal that she had done with General Musharraf, Pakistan's military ruler, the corruption charges had been dropped, so perhaps it would have been a fresh beginning for Benazir, but unfortunately it is not to be so."
Bild: EPA
You said at the beginning that you do believe that this was a political assassination, will we ever learn who was behind it, given this political situation with president Musharraf holding all the strings, pulling all the strings and virtually in charge of every faction of this society.
"It is highly unlikely that we will discover the full truth, people may be arrested, perhaps even charged but Pakistan's history is very murky, it is impossible to believe whatever comes out of Pakistan. There are a number of people who could have wanted to kill Benazir Bhutto but at the heart of this is the fact that General Musharraf created conditions within Pakistan under which it was highly likely that somebody was going to be killed. Instead of reigning in the radical islamists, instead of jailing Al Kaida and Taliban leaders, General Musharraf started to jail human rights workers, judges, lawyers, dismantled the independent media and in fact he created the kind of condition under which this kind of attack would become more possible because people were losing faith in the whole system, so I am afraid we may never know who did the killing but of course there are candidates, there are political opponents, there was the Pakistani military, which was not all that font of Benazir Bhutto, there is Pakistan's Inter Intelligence Service, which also was not very happy with Benazir Bhutto, there are of course Taliban figures out there who are not happy with the fact that she was a female prime minister who was close to the USA, so there are a number of candidates but we have to wait and see what information comes out of Pakistan."
Österreich | 27.12.2007 | 17:22 
