Word: sind
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...tomb of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the populist Pakistani President who was overthrown in a military coup and executed in 1979, looms over the poverty-stricken salt marshes of rural Sind province. From a distance, the hulking mausoleum resembles a plasticine model of the Taj Mahal squeezed onto too small a foundation. Before Bhutto--who founded the Pakistan People's Party--was hanged, he had requested nothing more than a humble marble slab to mark his grave. But in Pakistani politics, image is everything. It's a lesson Benazir Bhutto learned at her father's knee. Hence her decision a dozen...
...worst records of extrajudicial killings, torture and custodial deaths, and in 1996 Transparency International named the country the second most corrupt in the world. (Nigeria came in first, locals quip, because Pakistan bribed the corruption-monitoring organization.) But faith, hope and loyalty still run strong in Sind, where much of the population is uneducated and depends on landlords, employers and party leaders to tell them for whom to vote. If Bhutto had to make a deal with Musharraf to return to Pakistan, her followers say, then perhaps she knows best. Says Muhammad Ali Sheikh, a Larkana shopkeeper: "If Benazir...
Strategists, however, are skeptical as to whether she can pull off a comeback. One indication of how she will do at the polls will be the number of people who line the streets when her plane lands in the Sind capital of Karachi. Millions cheered her return to Pakistan in 1986, after nearly a decade of martial rule. Two years later, she led the opposition coalition to victory in democratic elections. Party leaders say this time, they will be happy if 200,000 people show up to guide her path to Larkana, where she will once again try to pick...
Bhutto has thus far failed to transform her personal popularity into political power. When she and other People's Party leaders were arrested in August during a government crackdown, the party called for a nationwide protest. Riots followed in Karachi and rural Sind province, the Bhutto family's traditional power base, but there were no large-scale demonstrations elsewhere. Some opposition leaders criticized Bhutto, who was kept in jail for 25 days, for forcing a premature confrontation. Leftists in her own party complained that she had refused to engage in anti-American rhetoric or to blame...
After Bhutto's release from prison last month, her lieutenants fell to wrangling over why the wave of protest against her arrest had never materialized. Intraparty squabbles broke out in Sind province and in more populous Punjab. Particularly distressing was the resignation of the party's president in Sind, Makhdoom Khaliq Uzzaman, who insisted on quitting even though Bhutto begged him to stay...