Bracing for Bhutto: Pakistan Prepares for Former Prime Minister’s Return

Interview with Hassan Abbas

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is coming home today. What awaits upon her return is anybody’s guess.

Pakistan’s first elected female leader has spent the last eight years in a self-imposed exile, after her government was overthrown under charges of corruption and mismanagement. A deal with sitting President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 coup and has promised to give up command of the army if he secures a new term as president, has provided Bhutto amnesty from the corruption charges and all but paves the way toward a return to power as Prime Minister of a three-pronged government that may include Musharraf as president and a third military branch.

Returning to power may be the least of the popular Bhutto’s problems, however, as she returns to a now-nuclear nation that faces conflicts on its borders with both India and Afghanistan, enduring poverty and an increasing militant presence that already has marked her for death.

But, according to Hassan Abbas, a research fellow at the Belfer Center’s Project on Managing the Atom and International Security Program at Harvard University who served as an official under Bhutto from 1995 to 1996 and Musharraf from 1999 to 2000, Bhutto may be Pakistan’s best shot at true democracy. Having lost her father, Pakistan People’s Party founder and former Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, after his execution in 1979 and having lost two of her brothers to politically motivated killings, Bhutto’s stake in Pakistan’s future is quite large.

How is the return of Benazir Bhutto being received in Pakistan?

There are all sorts of festivities in Karachi, with people coming from all over Pakistan just to welcome her. In the next phase, the political campaign will start, and it is not a given that she will garner as much support as she had previously. In the middle class, there is frustration about the fact that she is representing a party that has always been against military dictatorship and, now, has taken a political deal. The view will be much different among rural Pakistanis. They still think of the dream of Bhutto, her father and all her party stands for.

Read the rest of the interview at the Metro Boston website.