[mukto-mona] Revised: The Benazir Bhutto Assassination and Politics of Hypocrisy?

The Benazir Bhutto Assassination and Politics of Hypocrisy‏

 

By Partha Banerjee

http://www.geocities.com/chokmoki

 

December 28, 2007

 

 

The news that Pakistan's former prime minister and a popular, elite-liberal politician Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated sends shock waves throughout South Asia and around the world. Riots have now broken out all across the poverty-stricken country, and common peoples' lives have again been put in harm's way.

We must keep a close eye on the events and also watch how major media put a spin on the story. Already, so-called foreign-policy experts are distorting facts and playing their usual, biased blame games. The fact remains that all these developments are major and could prove to be a new playfield for the jingoist establishment that's looking for ways to begin a new war. The new turn of events leading to mass turmoil and political instability in the country adjacent to Afghanistan and India could be used and exploited by current and future administrations to justify another military invasion. It also conveniently diverts peoples' attention from the bloody turmoil and genocide in Iraq, at least for the time being.

According to first news reports, Bhutto was gunned down in her car by one or more suicide bombers who then blew themselves up. It happened after she spoke at an election rally in garrison city Rawalpindi, in the midst of an "extremely tight security." We must condemn such a barbaric assassination as well as the inept -- some say indifferent or complicit -- role of the U.S.-blessed military dictator Musharraf, who even CNN says failed to protect one of the few elected woman leaders in the Muslim world. According to a recent email Benazir Bhutto wrote to CNN, a communique the channel's news anchor Wolf Blitzer made public last night, the Pakistan Peoples' Party slain leader said she'd directly implicate Musharraf in the event she got killed.

 

Even though it's not clear yet who were behind the killing, it is clear that General Musharraf and the Pakistani army have always been aghast at the idea of Bhutto becoming the next prime minister at the January 8 elections. In fact, it was the Pakistani army and their puppet president Golam Ishaq Khan that forcibly threw Bhutto, then elected prime minister, out of power in early nineties. The biggest beneficiaries of the grotesque murder of the courageous woman leader are those who would not want a transition of power and break from the status quo in Pakistan, a country that has lived practically all of its 60-year-old existence through war, violence, political assassinations, coups, dictatorships and extreme repression of people and dissent. Benazir's father, former prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto -- one of the handful of democratically elected leaders of Pakistan -- was imprisoned and later hanged in 1979, on corruption charges, by military dictator Zia-ul Haque. The fact is, the U.S. has been the biggest political, military and economic sponsor of Pakistan's dictatorial regimes. New York Times recently reported that at least half of the massive $10 billion aid General Musharraf received from the U.S. to fight and eliminate post-9/11 Al Quaida insurgency was never used for the intended cause; the Bush government has so far failed to ask the dictator for a balance sheet.

 

The new development in Pakistan is more significant in the light of the fact that in another Muslim-majority South Asian country Bangladesh, two former elected prime ministers -- both women -- have recently been put in prison by a military-backed, so-called caretaker government, an administration that has virtually clamped down on free speech, democratic processes and voices of dissent. We have enough reason to believe these woman leaders' lives are in jeopardy too. South Asia is no strange territory for political assassinations. In India, popular elected leader Indira Gandhi was gunned down in 1984 by, many say, CIA-backed extremist separatists. In neighboring Sri Lanka, then-president Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga survived a suicide attack in 1999, but lost one eye.

General Musharraf and the Pakistani army are U.S. government's misplaced allies in its so-called war on terror. We know that Pakistan's trigger-happy army generals are no friends of popular elections and a democratic society. The Bush government knows it too. It's preaching democracy on the surface, yet practicing war and violence on the ground. We must condemn that politics of hypocrisy.

 

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