Word: benazir
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Benazir Bhutto's assassination is a body blow to the troubled but strategically vital state of Pakistan. It removes from the scene a secular, liberal, pro-Western leader. It gives momentum to Pakistan's jihadis in their campaign to Talibanize the country, and it edges Pakistan closer toward Islamic revolution. Her death is also, of course, a tragedy for her family, including the three children she leaves motherless. But the horror of Bhutto's end should not blind us to her mediocre legacy, and it is misleading to depict her as any sort of martyr for freedom and democracy...
Bhutto's instincts were highly autocratic. Within her Pakistan People's Party, she had herself declared the lifetime president and refused to let her brother Mir Murtaza challenge her for its leadership. He was shot dead by police officers while Benazir was Prime Minister; his wife Ghinwa and daughter Fatima believe Benazir was complicit in having him killed. She colluded in wider human-rights abuses. Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, abductions, killings and torture...
Western commentators tend to see political Islam as an antiliberal and irrational form of "Islamo-fascism." Yet much of the Islamists' success in Pakistan and elsewhere comes from their ability to portray themselves as champions of social justice, fighting Westernized élites--like Benazir Bhutto. Her reputation for corruption was gold dust to these Islamic revolutionaries, just as the excesses of the Shah were to his opponents in Iran 30 years earlier. During Bhutto's government, Pakistan was declared one of the most corrupt nations in the world, and she and her husband Asif Ali Zardari were charged with jointly...
...Islamists in Pakistan. They are the only force capable of taking on the country's landowners and their military cousins. That is why, in recent elections, the Islamists have hugely increased their share of the vote and why they now control much of the west of the country. Benazir Bhutto was a brave, gutsy, secular and liberal woman. But she was a central part of Pakistan's problems, not a solution to them...
...During her four years at Harvard, Benazir Bhutto ’73, the shy girl from Eliot House known as “Pinkie,” prepared for her rise as a political trailblazer. As turbulence rocks her home country after her assassination on Thursday, Dec. 27, classmates remember Bhutto as a student driven by her love for Pakistan and set apart by the vigor of her convictions...