Benazir Bhutto's niece calls b.s. on Aunt Benazir

i'm not entirely sure why i'm so fascinated with the happenings in pakistan... maybe it's that they are, in a broken mirror kind of way, illustrating many of the same dynamics that go on here in the u.s., to say nothing of the kind of people the u.s. government chooses to support...

once again, pakistan, pervez musharraf and benazir bhutto are in the news... this time, one of musharraf's principal opponents has been arrested, pervez says he'll give up his military role, and bhutto calls for him to resign... but, as bhutto's niece notes, in this la times op-ed, bhutto remains in a comfortable house arrest...

Aunt Benazir's false promises

Bhutto's return bodes poorly for Pakistan -- and for democracy there.
By Fatima Bhutto
November 14, 2007
KARACHI -- We Pakistanis live in uncertain times. Emergency rule has been imposed for the 13th time in our short 60-year history. Thousands of lawyers have been arrested, some charged with sedition and treason; the chief justice has been deposed; and a draconian media law -- shutting down all private news channels -- has been drafted.

Perhaps the most bizarre part of this circus has been the hijacking of the democratic cause by my aunt, the twice-disgraced former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. While she was hashing out a deal to share power with Gen. Pervez Musharraf last month, she repeatedly insisted that without her, democracy in Pakistan would be a lost cause. Now that the situation has changed, she's saying that she wants Musharraf to step down and that she'd like to make a deal with his opponents -- but still, she says, she's the savior of democracy.

The reality, however, is that there is no one better placed to benefit from emergency rule than she is. Along with the leaders of prominent Islamic parties, she has been spared the violent retributions of emergency law. Yes, she now appears to be facing seven days of house arrest, but what does that really mean? While she was supposedly under house arrest at her Islamabad residence last week, 50 or so of her party members were comfortably allowed to join her. She addressed the media twice from her garden, protected by police given to her by the state, and was not reprimanded for holding a news conference. (By contrast, the very suggestion that they might hold a news conference has placed hundreds of other political activists under real arrest, in real jails.)

Ms. Bhutto's political posturing is sheer pantomime. Her negotiations with the military and her unseemly willingness until just a few days ago to take part in Musharraf's regime have signaled once and for all to the growing legions of fundamentalists across South Asia that democracy is just a guise for dictatorship.

It is widely believed that Ms. Bhutto lost both her governments on grounds of massive corruption. She and her husband, a man who came to be known in Pakistan as "Mr. 10%," have been accused of stealing more than $1 billion from Pakistan's treasury. She is appealing a money-laundering conviction by the Swiss courts involving about $11 million. Corruption cases in Britain and Spain are ongoing.

It was particularly unappealing of Ms. Bhutto to ask Musharraf to bypass the courts and drop the many corruption cases that still face her in Pakistan. He agreed, creating the odiously titled National Reconciliation Ordinance in order to do so. Her collaboration with him was so unsubtle that people on the streets are now calling her party, the Pakistan People's Party, the Pervez People's Party. Now she might like to distance herself, but it's too late.

naturally, the wapo gives us NOTHING of benazir's background, and i'm certainly not the only one who notices... this from a commenter on the wapo article...

Bud0 wrote:
Do we have to paint everything in black and white? Musharraf is a dictator, but that doesn't make Bhutto (or Sharif or Imran Khan) a saint.

I think readers deserve to know that these are all millionaire aristocrats who got into politics so they could siphon the national treasury to their family's bank account.

And the dirtiest of the three is Bhutto, whose wealth is estimated at $1.5 billion, since her father and her both took turns looting Pakistan's coffers.

She also faces criminal money-laundering investigations in both Spain and Switzerland.

This woman is no Aung San Suu Kyi. In fact she has a lot more in common with Ahmed Chalabi.

That's why I get antsy when the Post seems to push her. Everyone knows she's Bush's new chosen puppet, that the US govt engineered her return. Is she now to be wafted in to power on a magic carpet of uncritical media coverage?

context-free journalism... gotta love it...

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