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...assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was named co-chair of her Pakistan People's Party (PPP) at a party meeting in the Bhuttos' ancestral town on Sunday. Bilawal, a 19-year-old student at Christ Church, Oxford, will lead the party with his father Asif Ali Zardari. "I stand committed to the stability of the federation," Bilawal said in an extraordinary and emotional press conference following the meeting. Speaking in English, his voice rising to a youthful shout towards the end of his short initial statement, and fighting back tears, Bilawal told supporters, "My mother always said democracy...
...carried reports on Saturday that Bilawal would be made the new leader, which the channel said accorded with Benazir Bhutto's wishes. The teenager will become the third leader of the 40-year-old center-left party, one of Pakistan's most powerful. Bilawal will follow his grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who founded the PPP in 1967, led Pakistan as Prime Minister for four years in the mid 1970s and was hanged in 1979 by a military government, and Benazir, who took over from her father and was killed in a shooting and suicide bomb attack two days...
...name that retains incredible power and vote-winning influence in secular Pakistan despite - or perhaps because of - the tragedies and controversies the family has faced. It is not the first time a young Bhutto has taken over from a dead parent. "This was also the situation when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was murdered," says Babar Awan, a PPP Senator and close ally of Benazir. "Benazir was a teenager, she was a student at Harvard in 1979 [when Zulfikar Ali was hanged]. It is basically the hard core of the PPP that rallies around their great hope and that they attach...
Many people had tipped Benazir's husband Asif Ali Zardari for the top spot - and he will serve as co-chairman of the PPP. An experienced politician, Zardari served as Environment Minister in his wife's second administration. But he is also a controversial figure in Pakistan, and has spent a total of 11 years in prison on various charges including blackmail and corruption, for which he earned the nickname "Mr. 10%." Supporters dismiss these charges, most of which have been thrown out of Pakistani courts (a few are still pending), as politically related mischief. "He's a strong...
Other possible runners had included Benazir's sister Sanam, though she seemed incredibly reluctant to join the family firm, or Fatima Bhutto, the daughter of Zulfikar Ali's eldest son Murtaza. Fatima, however, had split with her aunt Benazir, whom she once described as "the most dangerous woman in Pakistan." The decision to go with Bilawal appears to have come after his father turned down the job in deference to the slain Benazir's expressed wishes. The senior PPP official, who requested anonymity to allow him to speak more openly, told TIME that Bilawal will head the party, and that...