TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/88/88capwrd.pk1

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                                                                                November 28, 1988

PAKISTAN

Addressing the Future, Avenging the Past


Despite a storybook election victory, Benazir Bhutto wonders if
she will get the right to rule


"Stand up to the challenge. Fight against overwhelming odds.
Overcome the enemy."  The late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto regularly
exhorted his eldest daughter with such maxims. Benazir proved
to be a keen listener. "In the stories my father had told us
over and over again," she writes in her new autobiography,
Benazir Bhutto: Daughter of the East, "good always triumphed
over evil."

To Benazir Bhutto, last week's national elections in Pakistan
must have seemed the storybook fulfillment of her father's
fantasies. In the first truly free elections since the late
President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq began his eleven years of
autocratic rule, voters catapulted her Pakistan People's Party
to dominance in the nation's politics and put Bhutto within
reach of the prime-ministership once held by her beloved father.
Dreams do come true. Scores do get settled.

The P.P.P. captured 92 of the parliament's 237 seats,
decisively beating the Islamic Democratic Alliance, its nearest
competitor and the relic of Zia, who died in a plane crash three
months before the vote. The Alliance won only 55 seats. A
surge of ethnic support thrust the fledgling Mohajir Qaumi
Movement into the third and pivotal position with 13 seats.

Under Pakistan's complex electoral system, more seats have yet
to be decided, so a Bhutto government remains in doubt. By
week's end, odds were perhaps 50-50. But the results are an
unmistakable personal victory, whether she becomes Prime
Minister or opposition leader. "The People's Party has emerged
as the single largest party," she declared. "The acting
President should now call on the People's Party to form a
government."

Acting President Ghulam Ishaq Khan is not bound to invite Bhutto
to form a government. But it is hard to imagine his
side-stepping her without unleashing a furious reaction. Bhutto
handily won all three National Assembly seats she contested (two
of which will have to be filled in by-elections), and her party
was carried to victory mainly on the strength of her blazing
speeches and dazzling charisma. Standing in a convoy of speeding
jeeps, her head held high and covered with a colorful dupatta,
or scarf, this 35-year-old Western- educated wife and mother
attracted frenzied adulation. To deny her the right to govern
could just as easily turn those adoring crowds into mutinous
mobs.

The President could still give the Alliance first crack at
fashioning a governing coalition, but its two main leaders
failed to win Assembly seats. Command of the Alliance was ceded
to Mian Nawaz Sharif, chief minister of Punjab and a Zia
protege, who won two seats.

Ishaq Khan hinted he would not automatically bypass Bhutto:  "I
think a woman Prime Minister might be a good change."  In the
male- dominated Muslim society of Pakistan, it would be an
astonishing one. That did not daunt Bhutto. She immediately set
out to solicit coalition partners. By Thursday night she
claimed, "We already have a simple majority in the parliament."
But Nawaz Sharif is also scrambling to assemble a majority, and
likewise predicts he will succeed.

Whatever its makeup, Pakistan's new government will be the first
run by civilians since Zia came to power. Four months earlier,
the country's 102 million people would not have dared to hope
for such an outcome. When Zia announced elections last July,
he almost certainly planned to ban political parties. Only when
Zia died in the still unexplained crash of his C-130 transport
on Aug. 17 did the prospect for party participation emerge.

Even so, Pakistanis feared a repetition of the violence and
ballot- box fraud that rapidly destroyed nearly all the
country's previous attempts at democratic rule. The quiet this
week at the 33,328 polling stations was hailed as a triumph of
restraint. "Peace has not broken down," wrote Maleeha Lodhi,
editor of the Muslim, an Islamabad-based daily. "Violence has
remained well within the limits of subcontinental
acceptability."

For Bhutto, the election was a battle among ghosts. She was
driven by a fierce longing to avenge her father's death. Amid
charges of corruption, election-rigging and autocracy, the elder
Bhutto was toppled from power in 1977 by Zia, who two years
later authorized Bhutto's execution. "I told him on my oath in
his death cell, I could carry on his work," Benazir Bhutto once
said. In achieving victory by playing up her father's name and
his strong populist appeal, she in effect vindicated his chaotic
5 1/2-year rule. Moreover, by besting the eight-party Alliance,
which included many supporters of Zia's policies, she wreaked
posthumous vengeance on the man who had her father put to death.
Says Mushahid Hussain, a Pakistani journalist:  "I think that
Zia has finally been buried with this election."

But the general's army is still alive and well. Its looming
presence compelled Bhutto to moderate her father's
nationalist-socialist program. She declared her devotion to
free speech and free markets, and repeatedly assured the
military they had nothing to fear from a P.P.P. regime.
Praising the army's restraint as "critical to the restoration
of democracy," she embraced the military's interests: close ties
with the West, continued support for the mujahedin in
Afghanistan and development of Pakistan's unacknowledged
nuclear- weapons capability.

The military has signaled its intention to honor the election
results. Just eight days after Zia's death, army Chief of
Staff Mirza Aslam Baig instructed his officers, "Stick to your
assigned job, leave politics to the politicians."  However
nervous at the prospect of another Bhutto government they may
be, the generals have made no move to intervene.

A keener obstruction to Bhutto's authority may be the
traditional attitudes of Pakistan's Islamic people. Not all are
eager to live under the first Muslim government headed by a
woman. In the days prior to the election, 40 mullahs issued a
fatwa, or religious verdict, warning that a nation headed by a
woman cannot prosper and risks falling "into the pit of Western
cultural degeneration."

If Bhutto takes the helm, she will no doubt soften the literal
reading of Islamic law espoused by Zia. But after enduring
military rule for much of its 41 years, Pakistan is likely to
find its experiment with democracy nothing less than tumultuous.
The people have signaled their desire for a popularly elected
government that is measured in years, not months. Now it is
time for Benazir Bhutto to lay to rest the shades of her own and
her country's past and see what kind of maxims she can write for
Pakistan's democratic future.

--By Jill Smolowe.  Reported by Edward W. Desmond/Lahore


--------------------------------------------------------- "A
Sense There Is Justice"

To her supporters, she is an avenging angel who promises to
restore democracy. To opponents, she is impetuous, arrogant
and inexperienced, a menace intent on undermining Islam and
order. Angel or devil, Benazir Bhutto, 35, now holds the keys
to the kingdom.

Nothing in her upbringing as the indulged eldest daughter of a
wealthy landholding Sindhi family, or in her education at
Harvard and Oxford, prepared her to shoulder her father's legacy
so much as the trials she endured after his execution. Jailed
or detained for more than five years, and exiled for two more,
she returned triumphantly in 1986 as the leader of the Pakistan
People's Party (P.P.P.). Deaf to criticism of her autocratic
father, she seems determined to do what is necessary to restore
his reputation. TIME correspondents Ross H. Munro and Edward
W. Desmond spoke with her at home.

Q. People have called you arrogant.

A. Perhaps one mellows with age. It is good to have the
idealism of youth. But there is a lot more pragmatism to life.

Q. You, your mother and your father-in-law are candidates for
national Assembly seats. Why not your husband?

A. Asif is making a sacrifice. For the sake of a harmonious
life, he determined to give up his own political constituency.

Q. We were struck by surprising words in your manifesto:
deregulation, fair taxes, privatization.

A. Yes. We need money, technology, investment. We tried
nationalization in the 1970s, but that led to tremendous
polarization in society. We want to avoid that.

Q. Will the army let you reduce its power?

A. We should think of this as a country where the military is
seeking any pretext to intervene. I would not like to provide
the pretext.

Q. Where do you stand on Afghanistan?

A. We will abide by the agreements made by the Pakistani
government.

Q. Would you halt all efforts to develop nuclear weapons?

A. We believe in a peaceful program for energy purposes and
nothing else.

Q. You feel obliged to follow in your father's footsteps?

A. My father used to say politics is a passion. It's never
been a passion for me [but] a sense of duty. In the worst
moments, that sense did not allow me to become demoralized.

Q. Your autobiography shows how you felt about what Zia had
done to your family.

A. The biggest challenge was overcoming bitterness. We don't
believe in a politics of vindictiveness or persecution. History
must know whether the end was the right end or not.

Q. How does it feel to have succeeded?

A. It is very much a sense that there is justice.