The dark side

Dear all,

December the 27th, 2007 was a dark winter’s day. Eight years later it remains a dark day.

It is, of course, the date of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, a death that is one of the many ‘hold-your-breath’ moments that punctuate Pakistan’s political history: moments that see the country brought to a crossroads in history, poised at the brink of chaos or compromise.

Bhutto had survived an earlier assassination attempt -- the bombing, in October, of her welcome procession of thousands of euphoric supporters near the Karsaz junction on Shahrea Faisal. At least 180 people were killed in that attack. Bhutto gave a defiant presser the next morning and over the next few weeks travelled across the country addressing election rallies and meetings. That she remained an assassination target was clear: suspicious would-be attackers were apprehended from a number of venues (most notably in Peshawar). Yet she carried on. And on Saturday, December 27 she addressed one of the most charged rallies of her career, working up the huge crowd at Rawalpindi’s Liaqat Bagh to fever pitch.

The attack killed not just her -- at least 24 other people were killed in the carnage of the bombing. The assassination caused a huge rupture in Pakistan’s political fabric as the country lost not just a former (twice) prime minister, and the leader of a party with a (quasi) socialist agenda but also a celebrity figure who had become the symbol of a better, more progressive future.

With the death of Benazir Bhutto came the end of an era where a woman had remained centre-stage in the nation’s politics. This was, no doubt, a great relief to a great many regressively oriented individuals who had long regarded this as something of an ‘aberration of the natural order’. It is now well-documented that several right-wing politicians and religious leaders had agreed that having a woman leading the country was ‘unIslamic’, and according to the investigative team of Levy-Scott-Clark, Saudi intelligence officials and al-Qaeda leaders even spoke of arranging her elimination. Ramzi Yusuf, later known to the world as one of the main perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, was picked up by police in Karachi in the early 1990s, where he was reportedly checking out the logistics of placing a bomb near Bhutto’s Residence, Bilawal House.

Bhutto’s widower subsequently revealed that during the time she was prime minister he had been approached by army commanders who suggested that he should take her place as the generals were somewhat ‘uncomfortable with having to salute a woman’. Despite Benazir Bhutto’s long and gutsy political career, despite her great electoral support and mass appeal, she never really won the fight against the deeply ingrained misogyny of Pakistan. It was this misogynistic hate that fuelled jihadis and fundos against her and was this misogyny that surfaced in snide commentary in the media where her hairstyle, her dress sense, her gait, even her lipstick were discussed and criticised, and where her decision to cover her head (the white dupatta that became part of her political uniform) became a hotly debated topic and cause for still more criticism.

In retrospect, I can see how I, and so many of my colleagues, fell prey to just these sorts of chauvinist tendencies and got caught up in discussing largely irrelevant issues when Bhutto was in power -- or even in opposition. I see now that BB was a trailblazer: a working woman balancing the demands of a difficult job with those of young children and a family life. I see how just by being centre-stage in the political arena, by being a leader and a figure of authority, Benazir Bhutto was able to be a powerful role model for Pakistan’s women.

Unfortunately, her death was made possible, indeed fuelled, by the very sentiment that energises those who deplore courageous women, the furious misogyny that facilitates assassinations like those of Sabeen Mahmud and Parveen Rehman and enables attacks on articulate schoolgirls like Malala Yousafzai and her classmates.

It’s been eight years since BB’s assassination, but the darkness endures.

Best wishes