Pakistan’s dynasty-bashing heir apparent discusses how Obama and corruption legitimize the Taliban, her work to include women in Pakistani politics, and why she will never run for office (it’s not why you think). From Guernica:
Fatima Bhutto
The story of Pakistani politics for the last four decades can be told through one family: the Bhuttos. Two Bhuttos have been heads of state, but four have been slain in the violence that riddles modern Pakistan. Fatima, the twenty-seven year old poet, stands in the wake of this carnage and is its heir. Her grandfather, Pakistan’s first democratically elected head of state and founder of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was executed three years before Fatima was born by General Zia-ul-Haq (who overthrew him in a military coup). Fatima’s Aunt Benazir was shot in her car on December 27, 2007, while campaigning. Her uncle was poisoned in exile. And when Fatima was just fourteen, outside her home in Karachi, her father was shot by dozens of police in one of Pakistan’s famous “encounters.” From that same home, Fatima insists that this violence points back to the family; she believes not only that her aunt was morally responsible, but that she played a direct role.
Fatima’s father, Murtaza Bhutto, had been campaigning one night in September 1996. Fatima, her brother (then six), and stepmother had been waiting for him. They thought he might come home only to be arrested; he’d been criticizing Benazir over her government’s corruption and challenging her to return the PPP to their father’s original manifesto. He’d also been critical of her Operation Cleanup against the Mohajir ethnic group, which allegedly claimed three thousand Mohajir in two years of extrajudicial killings. On this night, police and armored vehicles surrounded the house. But instead of the arrest the family was told to prepare for, Murtaza and several of his men were shot from the street and from treetops in an Operation Cleanup-style barrage of gunfire. Murtaza himself was shot point-blank in the jaw and dumped bleeding to death in a clinic known not to treat gunshot wounds. Young Fatima watched her father die, insisting today that given better treatment, he could have lived. For his death, she unequivocally blames her Aunt Benazir; she certainly has her reasons, which she discusses below. More:
