Bhutto ends exile, parades thru’ Karachi

FE Team | Published: October 19, 2007 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00

KARACHI (Agencies): Former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto ended eight years of self-exile Thursday, returning to Karachi where more than 200,000 supporters poured onto the streets to welcome her home.
Bhutto returned to lead her Pakistan People's Party into national elections meant to return the country to civilian rule.
For years Bhutto had vowed to return to Pakistan to end military dictatorship, yet she is coming back as a potential ally for President Pervez Musharraf, the army chief who took power in a 1999 coup.
Before saying goodbye to her two daughters and husband, Asif Ali Zardari, in Dubai, Bhutto described Pakistan as being at a crossroads between democracy and dictatorship.
Musharraf is going through his weakest period, and there is strong speculation he will end up sharing power with Bhutto after national elections due in early January.
The United States is believed to have quietly encouraged their alliance in order to keep nuclear-armed Pakistan pro-Western and committed to fighting al Qaeda and supporting NATO's efforts to stabilize Afghanistan.
Meanwhile another report adds, amid speculation that martial law would be declared if it rules against President Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's Supreme Court on Thursday said it attached "no value" to such "threats" and would give its judgment on legal challenges to the General's re-election within 12 days.
"These threats have no value for us. This is an issue to be decided in accordance with the law and according to the merits," Justice Iqbal, who heads the 11-member bench, said as he resumed hearing on the five petitions challenging Musharraf's candidature while in uniform for the October 6 presidential poll
Justice Iqbal told the court that the bench would decide the petitions "within 10 to 12 days".
Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, on Wednesday, had rejected the bench's recommendation that all 18 judges of the Supreme Court, including the CJ, should decide whether Musharraf was eligible to contest the poll without quitting the post of army chief.
Bhutto's return is the latest chapter of a rollercoaster life that saw her become the Muslim world's first woman prime minister, only for her two governments to fail amid allegations of corruption.
Born June 21, 1953, into a wealthy landowning family in southern Pakistan, Bhutto picked up the heavy political legacy of her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
The former president and prime minister sent his eldest daughter to study politics and government at Oxford and Harvard.
But his ouster in a 1977 military coup and execution over the death of a political rival put Benazir on a steep and treacherous learning curve.
Benazir was detained several times during the rule of Gen. Zia-ul Haq then released into exile in England in 1984. Two years later, she returned to lead mass rallies for the restoration of civilian government.
After Zia's death in a mysterious plane crash in 1988, Bhutto gave birth to the first of her three children, led her party to an election victory and became the first woman to lead a modern Muslim nation.
However, she soon clashed with Pakistan's powerful military-led establishment and her administration was dismissed 20 months later amid allegations of corruption.
She was re-elected in 1993. But three years later, her family suffered another blow when her brother Murtaza died in a gunbattle with police in Karachi.
Her youngest brother, Shahnawaz, had died under mysterious circumstances in France a decade earlier.
Benazir accused President Farooq Leghari of involvement in Murtaza's death, and Leghari dismissed her second government amid fresh allegations of misrule.
After defeat at the hands of archrival Nawaz Sharif in 1996, Bhutto was hit by a deluge of corruption allegations.
She left in 1999, just before a court convicted her of corruption and banned her from politics. The verdict was later quashed, but she has stayed away.
Bhutto says she has had on-off contacts with President Gen.
Pervez Musharraf since he ousted Sharif in a 1999 coup, but that only now has the general agreed to restore democracy.
An amnesty signed by Musharraf last week that quashes longstanding corruption cases against Bhutto and others has drawn criticism for allegedly encouraging more looting of state resources.
But Bhutto insists it will take some of the debilitating venom from Pakistan's political culture and allow her to lead a democratic push against Islamic militants.
"I know I am a symbol of what the so-called 'Jihadists,' Taliban and al-Qaida, most fear," she wrote in her autobiography "Daughter of the East."
"I am a female political leader fighting to bring modernity, communication, education and technology to Pakistan."