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She sat down on a beige sofa and interacted tenderly; with her shy, very young;
daughter. A sealed package of Susan В Anthony coins which I had brought as a
gift was opened by Bhutto's security staff- one small sign of the safety measures
surrounding her.
Bhutto is dignified, eloquent and charismatic She speaks English with
touches of an Oxbridge accent, thanks to her several years in Britain. She is a
fiery public speaker who can animate large crowds of admirers.
Benazir Bhutto's has been a hard journey in a harsh land. Pakistan's
military has governed her country for half of the years since independence from
Britain in 1947. As in some other nations -Guatemala comes to mind -
parliamentary government in Pakistan masks the power of the generals, who
stand ready to intervene in political affairs. They hanged Bhutto's father in 1979
- an event that changed her life.
Benazir Bhutto had just returned from several years of study abroad, in
1977, when the army surrounded her family's house and took her father, the
prime minister, away to jail. Zulfikar Bhutto had two sons and two daughters;
Benazir was his favourite. In prison, he asked her to carry on his work.
She was born in Karachi on 21 June 1953, to Zulfikar's second wife,
Nusrat. The Muslim family were 'feudals' - one of the important landowning
families of Pakistan, sometimes called 'the twenty-two'. Educated by Catholic
nuns at a convent school in her early years - as were, interestingly enough,
several of the other leaders in this book, regardless of family religious
background - Benazir Bhutto was sent abroad for her more advanced education.
She graduated from Harvard (cum laude) in 1973 with a degree in
government; her father insisted that she continue on to Oxford, which he had
attended. There she became the first foreign woman to be elected president of
the Oxford Union, the university's famous debating society. Her father had also
headed it in his day. She has called her years in England her happiest; by 1977,
it was time to return home, to begin a career in diplomacy.
Instead,-Bhutto found herself placed under house arrest or jailed, time after
time for years, as she protested against her father's incarceration and the rule of
the military. Hers were not country club jail- -ings. At times she was in solitary
confinement, suffering from extremes of heat and cold; poison was deliberately
left in her cell as a temptation to suicide. At one point she was told that she
might have uterine cancer, and subjected to an operation whose results were
never made known to her. Pressure from abroad, and a dangerous ear infection,
finally led to her being allowed to leave Pakistan for London in January of
1984. From there she continued to protest against conditions at home, where
40,000 political prisoners were jailed.
Bhutto's opportunity to return to Pakistan came in April 1986. General
Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, the martial law ruler, felt secure enough to allow
political parties to operate once again. Huge crowds greeted Bhutto's return, and
she campaigned for two years to build up her Pakistan People's Party, calling