Benazir Bhutto, heiress to one of the world’s most powerful and star-crossed political dynasties, pursued both her destiny and Pakistan’s – while trying to avoid the same fate that doomed her family.
She weathered two assassination attempts, five years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, eight years of self-imposed exile, a cancer scare and an arranged marriage to someone described as the “most hated man in Pakistan.”
She was denounced in her homeland as being too Western, too secular and too aristocratic. She was accused of being a crook, a bad Muslim and a traitor to the political legacy of her father, a former prime minister.
Her relatives hardly faired better. Her father was overthrown and hanged. One of her younger brothers was killed in a shootout with police and another died in French exile, possibly poisoned.
“I know the past is tragic,” Bhutto said, still charismatic and attractive at 54, when she emerged from exile in September. “But I’m an optimist by nature. I put my faith in the people of Pakistan.”
That was one month before she returned to her homeland to rally the opposition to President Pervez Musharraf.
But she barely escaped death after a suicide attacker targeted her homecoming parade in Karachi, killing more than 140 people. And fate caught up with her yesterday with yet another assassination attempt that kept her from trying to regain the glory she enjoyed as the Muslim world’s first female prime minister.
She was born on June 21, 1953, the first child of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, heir of a wealthy landowning family in southern Pakistan and founder of the populist Pakistan People’s Party.
By the time Benazir was 4, her father had become the youngest member of Pakistan’s UN delegation. She attended a school in Karachi while her father became Pakistan’s youngest Cabinet member and then foreign minister.
At 16, she left Pakistan for higher education in the United States, at Radcliffe, then part of Harvard.
“I was on my own for the first time,” she recalled in her autobiography.
“My mother stayed with me for the first few weeks, setting me into my room at Eliot Hall and calculating the location of Mecca so I would know which direction to pray.”
She graduated cum laude from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in comparative government, and picked up a Phi Beta Kappa key. She also learned Western ways, shedding her Pakistani dress for jeans and sweatshirts and saying she was flattered “when my friends told me I looked like Joan Baez.”
Before she moved on to post-graduate studies in Britain, her father had been elected president of Pakistan and then prime minister. In England, she studied economics, diplomacy and international law and was the first Asian woman elected head of the Oxford Union debating society.
Her father’s administration came under the criticism for corruption, the same charge that would be repeatedly leveled against his daughter during her two terms. But he was re-elected in March 1977.
Four months later – and two weeks after Benazir had returned to Pakistan – she was sleeping in the prime minister’s residence in Rawalpindi when her mother rushed into her room and exclaimed to her and sister Sanam, “Wake up! Get dressed! The army’s taken over! The army’s taken over!”
She discovered that her father had been ousted in a coup by Gen. Zia-ul Haq. He was condemned to die two years later after being convicted of engineering the murder of a political opponent.
Benazir visited him the day before he was hanged. “I told him on my oath in his death cell, I would carry on his work,” she recalled years later.
She and her mother were placed under house arrest. Both vowed to pursue her father’s political goals and they fought for control of his party, with her mother backing her brother, Murtaza, over her.
Benazir was detained seven times in the two years after the arrest and put in solitary confinement in 1981. During her imprisonment, her health failed and, at one point, she underwent an operation after being told she had uterine cancer at age 28.
She was freed in 1984 in order to seek medical treatment abroad, and became leader in exile of her father’s political party.
While she was in England, her brother Shahnawaz, 28, died on the French Riviera. No charges were brought, but the family was convinced he had been poisoned.
She also became estranged from Murtaza and his family.
He accused her of veering from their father’s beliefs and fought her for support of their party. Yet she wept for 45 minutes over his body in the morgue when he was slain in a 1996 shootout with Pakistani police.
Benazir said it was “prompting of my family” that led her to accept an arranged marriage in 1987 to Asif Ali Zardari.
“An arranged marriage was the price in personal choice I had to pay for the political path my life had taken,” she said.
More than 200,000 people attended the public reception following their marriage.
The next year was pivotal in her personal and public life. She gave birth to the first of her three children and tried to juggle family affairs with Pakistan’s turbulent politics.
After Zia was killed in the mysterious bombing of his plane, her party swept to power in the nation’s first democratic elections since the coup. At 35, Benazir Bhutto became the youngest leader of a Muslim state in modern times.
Her administration ended after 20 months in a flurry of corruption charges and clashes with Pakistan’s powerful military. A Zia protégé succeeded her.
She managed a comeback when she was re-elected in 1993. After three more turbulent years – marked by an assassination attempt against her – her government was dismissed by President Farooq Leghari, whom she said she once considered as close as a brother but became convinced was involved in Murtaza’s death.
She sought to lead a third government in 1996 but lost. She blamed her efforts to energize the Pakistani economy – and malicious gossip about herself and her husband, whom she had made investment minister.
“When people have to pay more, they are unhappy. When they are unhappy, they are prone to sensational stories that are spread,” she recalled in 1997.
“Even though my husband and his friends were maintaining the upkeep of their own horses, the nation was fed stories that their horses were eating marmalade and milk, which is totally untrue.”
She left Pakistan under a cloud in 1999, declaring she never wanted to be prime minister again.
Shortly afterward, she and her husband were convicted in absentia of taking kickbacks from a Swiss company hired to fight corruption. She was banned from Pakistani politics for life.
Later that year, Musharraf, the head of the armed forces, seized power in a bloodless coup.
Bhutto began a new life in the United Arab Emirates and stayed in self-imposed exile even after her conviction was quashed. Last September, she said she said she recognized the dangers that faced her if and when she returned.
“They don’t want democracy, they don’t want me back, and they don’t believe in women governing nations,” she told CNN. “So they will try to plot against me. But these are risks that must be taken.”
She stayed away until October when Musharraf, under US pressure, signed an amnesty for her.
Her return after eight years of self-exile was triumphant, despite Musharraf’s arrest of thousands of her supporters and terrorist threats against her from Taliban sympathizers.
On Dec. 1, she launched her election campaign, based on a return to democracy and opposition to Islamic fanatics. She remained defiant as she looked ahead to the Jan. 8 elections and yet another comeback.
“Bhutto is alive! Bhutto is alive! Bhutto is alive!” she shouted at a rally in December.