Bhutto was assassinated this day, two
years ago
She was "truly, the Jihadists worst nightmare"
Tarek Fatah Dec 26 2009
Friends,
Today is the anniversary of the assassination of the woman
Pakistanis know as 'Bibi". The day she was killed,
I wept at my desk. The men who trade in my faith, Islam,
had killed one more Muslim.
On that day I penned my thoughts for the Globe and Mail.
It was my tribute to the woman who, despite her many flaws,
stood up to the jihadi hate-mongers and paid the ultimate
price.
I went on to dedicate my book "Chasing a Mirage"
to her memory and that of Daniel Pearl. Two years have passed,
but I still cannot get over the fact the JIhadi Islamists
killed a woman they couldn't defeat through the ballot box.
And now they are gunning for her husband the same way they
hanged her father and killed her brothers.
Mark Siegel and me
Her friend, the American writer Mark Siegel described BB
as "truly, the jihadists worst nightmare."
Siegel goes on to say:
"I don’t think people can ever understand the selflessness
of the woman, how she genuinely always put herself last
and put her country first, sacrificing personal happiness
and family. It was as if Asif was her second husband – Pakistan
being her first. It was as if Bilawal, Bakhtawar and Aseefa
had 170 million brothers and sisters vying for her attention.
She once said that she didn’t choose her life, that it chose
her."
Here is the piece I wrote the day BB died at the hands of
a Jihadi.
Tarek
-------------------
28 December, 2007
She Died As Her Father Did: Bravely
Tarek Fatah
The Globe and Mail, Toronto
It was the summer of 1966. We were mere teenagers meeting
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had just resigned as Pakistan's
foreign minister and was about to launch a new left-wing
political movement, the Pakistan Peoples Party.
Sitting in the front yard of his sprawling Karachi mansion,
he engaged us in a lively discussion about Islam, democracy
and socialism, while chewing on a cigar. That was the day
I first saw Benazir Bhutto. She came in, had a brief chat
with her dad and then left, as we debated how best to oust
Pakistan's then military dictator, Ayub Khan.
Pinky, as Benazir was then known, barely nodded at us. The
articulate young girl did not participate in the discussion
about democracy, nor did she hear her father talk about
the cancer of dictatorships, but she would not have to wait
too long to discover that herself. None of us could have
imagined how the disease, strengthened by Islamic extremism,
would wipe out almost the entire Bhutto family. Within 40
years, Benazir, her father and her two brothers would all
be victims of political assassination.
The macabre dance of death began on April 4, 1979, when
deposed prime minister Bhutto was hanged by the country's
Islamist dictator, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. The state-sanctioned
killing stunned the nation. Yesterday, they came for Benazir,
the leader who posed a greater threat to the established
order of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan than even her
father - for she was a woman.
While Benazir represented modernity and a quest for gender
equality, the Islamist establishment and the Army's Inter-Services
Intelligence - that Islamists have so effectively penetrated
- wanted to turn back the clock of history and permanently
exclude women from the corridors of power.
When the first suicide bombings killed more than a hundred
of her followers in October, on the day she returned to
Pakistan after years in exile, Benazir's naysayers claimed
she had staged the attack herself. The Islamists and the
left mocked her, labelling her as the poodle of George W.
Bush. The cruelty of the slander was matched by her resolve.
Why did they have to kill her? If she was as corrupt as
her critics claim, couldn't they have bought her loyalties?
Her killers, however, knew that the woman who spent years
in jail, lived in exile for a decade, had one thing on her
mind: the end of Islamic extremism in Pakistan. For that,
and for the fact that she was a woman, she had to be eliminated.
As a student leader in Pakistan in the 1960s, I witnessed
many failures. The country I called home lost wars, got
divided in two, suffered military coups. Close friends died
as a result of civil strife and comrades were tortured,
but the air of optimism would not leave us. Today, another
dark cloud of despair hangs over much of Pakistan. But the
spirit of the Pakistani people cannot be dampened.
When Bhutto senior was hanged, the streets went empty.
Fright had overpowered the people, who abandoned the man
they had come to love. Last night, hundreds of thousands
of people poured onto the streets of major cities. Some
beat their chests and in anger while others set fires.
In Pakistan, the forces of progress and enlightenment are
lined up against darkness and death. How can we in Canada
ensure that Benazir Bhutto's quest for progress and democracy
is not buried with her?
A lot. We need to stop dealing with military dictators
who imprison court judges, rewrite constitutions, harbour
Islamic militants and then present themselves as the saviours
of the West. We need to say to these men: As long as you
harbour merchants of death and purveyors of hate, we will
consider you as persona non-grata and that our doors are
closed for you, your ambassadors and your messages of medievalism.
The elder Bhutto wrote a book from death row in 1979. Titled,
"If I am assassinated," its last pages contained
a quote from Russian author Nikolai Ostrovsky:
"Man's dearest possession is his life, and since it
is given to him to live but once, he must so live as not
to be scared with the shame of a cowardly and trivial past,
so as not to be tortured for years without purpose, that
dying he can say, 'All my life and my strength were given
to the first cause in the world - the liberation of mankind.'
"
As death stared the senior Bhutto in the face, he stared
back. His past has no shame of cowardice. His daughter,
too, gave her life in courage.
---------
Tarek Fatah is author of Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion
of an Islamic State.
The author analyzes the diverging aspirations that separate
the Islamist from the Muslim, and the Islamic State from
the State of Islam.
