[mukto-mona] Fwd: Grieving for Benazir - Where's the outrage among world's democratic leaders ?

 

Grieving for Benazir

By BERNARD-HENRI LEVY
December 29, 2007; Page A10

They have killed a woman. A beautiful woman. A visible, indeed a conspicuously, spectacularly visible woman.

A woman who made a point not only of holding rallies in one of the world's most dangerous countries, but did so with her face uncovered, unveiled -- the exact opposite of the shameful, hidden women, the condemned creatures of Satan, who are the only women tolerated by these apostles of a world without women.

They killed a Jew, Daniel Pearl. They killed Ahmed Shah Massoud, the great guerilla leader against the Taliban, a moderate Muslim, a cultivated man and free spirit. They tried for years to kill a man, Salman Rushdie, who dared say that to be a man is also sometimes to choose your own destiny.

And now they have killed Benazir Bhutto -- killed her because she was a woman, because she had a woman's face, unadorned yet filled with an unswerving strength, because she was living out her destiny and refusing the curse that, according to the new fascists (the jihadists) floats over the human face of women. They killed this woman incarnation of hope, of spirit, of the will to democracy, not only in Pakistan, but in all the lands of Islam.

Pervez Musharraf has been a false adversary of al Qaeda. But if Benazir had won the election, if she had lived, she would certainly not have ceased to say, by dint of her mere presence, her being, her speaking out, that she was their resolute and absolute adversary, a hard-liner. For these men she was more than a political threat; she was an ontological threat. She would have been merciless. They knew it, and they killed her.

I remember her on an afternoon in December 2002, in London, while I was investigating the death of Daniel Pearl, and therefore the powder keg that Pakistan was already: al Qaeda's staging area and sometimes even its forward base. She was incredibly courageous, with a will to return, against all odds, to the country which had already torn her two young brothers and her father from her.

I also recall her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, 35 years ago, just before the liberation of Bangladesh that would split the country he then served as prime minister. I can see him as he was then, as yet unaware of his destiny, elegant and refined, at once Pakistani and Anglophile, Muslim and Western, the living cross-pollination of two cultures, which no one at the time imagined so many forces would soon set against each other.

These people were the salt of the Pakistani earth. They were among those who could prevent the country and even the entire region from sinking into utter chaos.

Benazir Bhutto is dead, and mindful of Sept. 9, 2001, the day Massoud was assassinated, I cannot help wondering what gruesome scenario her assassins might have planned. I cannot help wondering what this major event, this thunderbolt, might be the prelude to.

What should be done now? How to respond to this tragic new challenge which concerns us all?

The best, the most beautiful way of responding would have been for Angela Merkel, George Bush, Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy to have gone immediately to Pakistan for her funeral.

We should have seen, standing behind Benazir's body, as they once did behind Anwar Al-Sadat's and Itzhak Rabin's, the largest possible number of government leaders and heads of state, to make the funeral a global demonstration on behalf of the values of democracy and peace.

We would have wanted the French president to interrupt his vacation to bid farewell to this great lady, now a martyr, on her last voyage. But no. The man who just rolled out the red carpet for Moammar Gadhafi contented himself with a short communiqué, not responding to those who had begged him to find a gesture or at least words which would honor this assassinated heroine. Beyond Mr. Sarkozy, the entire community of democratic heads of state has been astonishingly moderate, prudent, indeed pusillanimous.

Still.

From now on Benazir Bhutto will be much more than a chief of state. She has become a symbol. She has become, as did Ahmed Shah Massoud and Daniel Pearl, a standard bearer.

All those who have not yet given up on freedom in the land of Islam must gather behind that standard. Her name must become another password, bloody but beautiful, for those who still believe that the good genius of Enlightenment will win out over the evil genius of fanaticism and crime.

It is for us, citizens of Europe and the United States, to mourn, to display the grief that our leaders have, at least for the moment, shamefully avoided.

Mr. Lévy is the author most recently of "American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville" (Random House, 2006). This essay was translated from the French by Sara Sugihara.

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