RIP Benazir Bhutto
Jonny_Paycheck
17,825 Posts
Tragic.
Jonny_Paycheck
17,825 Posts
Comments
Indeed
______________________________________
Former PM Bhutto assassinated at Pakistan rally
Last Updated: Thursday, December 27, 2007 | 11:17 AM ET
CBC News
Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto was killed Thursday in an apparent suicide attack at a campaign rally in which at least 20 others died.
Bhutto died around 6:16 p.m. local time (8:16 a.m. ET) at Rawalpindi General Hospital after undergoing emergency surgery for wounds sustained in the attack at the city's Liaqat Bagh park, her senior spokesman Farhatullah Babar said.
"We are in the hospital where her dead body is lying," Babar told CBC News in a telephone interview from Rawalpindi.
Bhutto's spokesman said she had just finished addressing the rally and was waving from the roof of a vehicle to the crowd of supporters gathered at the park's main gate when the bomber struck.
Conflicting accounts have emerged over whether Bhutto was killed by the blast or by gunfire heard ahead of the explosion.
Rehman Malik, Bhutto's security adviser, told the Associated Press she was shot in the neck and chest before the attacker blew himself up.
An Associated Press reporter at the scene also counted about 20 bodies, including police, and could see many other wounded people.
Bhutto escaped an assassination attempt in October when twin explosions ripped through crowds in Karachi welcoming her home from eight years of exile. Nearly 150 people died in the attacks.
Upon hearing reports of her death, thousands of Bhutto's supporters gathered outside the hospital chanting "Dog, Musharraf, dog."
"I can see outside now the massive amounts of people," Babar said from inside the hospital.
Security requests ignored: adviser
The Western-educated Bhutto enjoyed high popularity at home and abroad and was leading Pakistan's largest political party heading into the Jan. 8 parliamentary election.
Bhutto's chief rival, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, told the BBC her death was a tragedy for "the entire nation."
Questions were immediately raised about how a suicide bomber could get so close to Bhutto after previous attacks.
Many observers were left to speculate whether the government of President Pervez Musharraf or Pakistan's security forces were involved in the attack, said Tariq Amin-Khan, an assistant professor of politics and public administration at Toronto's Ryerson University.
"Security has been very lax," Amin-Khan told CBC News in a telephone interview from Karachi. "One could fault the government for what it has not done."
Musharraf himself has been the target of numerous attacks blamed on Islamist militants, who have reported ties with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.
"I find it difficult to believe that Musharraf would be directly involved, but you can't put it past the security service agencies," Amin-Khan said.
Bhutto's security adviser also said the government had ignored requests for beefed-up security, including bomb-jammers, which can thwart signals sent to detonate explosives.
"We repeatedly informed the government to provide her proper security and appropriate equipment including jammers, but they paid no heed to our requests," Malik said.
Observers said Bhutto's death would spark fierce protests in a country where political bloodshed is common.
'You will see lots of riots'
"All of Pakistan is in danger now," said Ibrahim Daniyal, secretary of the Pakistan Peoples Party Canada's ad hoc committee. "You will see lots of riots ??? lots of blood."
The 54-year-old Bhutto, eldest daughter of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, served two terms as prime minister of Pakistan.
She went to the United States in 1969 to attend Radcliffe College in Massachusetts, then Harvard University and then to England where she studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford.
After her studies, she returned to Pakistan where her father was charged with conspiring to commit a political murder and executed in 1979.
Bhutto was placed under house arrest for five years shortly before her father's execution, and then went to Britain where she became leader-in-exile of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP).
Coalition government
After Bhutto's return to Pakistan in 1988, the PPP won 39 per cent of the popular vote and she was sworn in as Pakistan's prime minister in a coalition government.
She was deposed 20 months later on allegations of corruption, but was re-elected again in 1993, only to be sacked in 1996 on similar charges.
Meanwhile Thursday, four people were killed during a gun battle between pro-government supporters and backers of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif at a rally outside Pakistan's capital, Islamabad.
A spokesman for the party said Sharif was about two kilometres away when pro-government party supporters opened fire.
On Dec. 15, Musharraf ended a month-long state of emergency that saw crackdowns on opposition supporters, independent media and the purging of independent judges from the country's Supreme Court.
Musharraf came to power in 1999 in a bloodless coup that saw Sharif go into voluntary exile for eight years.
She was apparently shot at close range, and then a bomb went off. There are at least a dozen other fatalities.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/benazir-bhutto/why-im-returning-to-paki_b_62792.html
if you want real entertainment, read the HuffPo comments to todays story; all blaming Bush and wishing he and Cheney had been blown up instead, classic stuff.
I wonder why they were in New York for her husband's heart condition. You would think they would have gone to Cuba, or the Netherlands or some other country with a superior public health system?
lets hope so. rip.
but she had to be aware that this was practically her destiny. makes what she kept doing all the more vital...lady gave her life for it. hopefully, like any threatened opposition group should, the ppp has people to fill her shoes and carry the torch.
hopefully her life's work and martyrdom will produce positive changes in the near future.
rest in peace BB
That sucks.
regardless of her flaws, if i live in Pakistan, her party gets my vote.
"Flaws" isn't a strong enough word. She did virtually nothing for Pakistan and ended up a wealthy, corrupt politican utterly beguiled by her own image as suffering opposition leader. If lesser-evilism is your game, then she's your lady. Let's not pretend otherwise.
i'm not debating her flaws, just vouching for her political affiliation, and i suppose her political ideals, or at least as she has recently described them.
I was gonna say. I'm no expert on modern Pakistani politics, but as soon as she rode back into the spotlight it wasn't too hard to find articles highlighting to her corrupt rule and human rights abuses.
wait, hillary clinton was first lady of pakistan too?
^^^ DESPERATE. ^^^^
Well, we'll never know now if she was going to do better this time for a significantly different country than that of the late 1980s, on a different world stage with different players and conflicts.
Who do you think is better suited - I am asking without sarcasm.
Would you ask this same question about, say, George Bush? Bhutto is wanted in several countries for money laundering. She had her political opponents murdered when she was in power. In exile she opportunistically supported our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq --after supporting the Taliban when she was PM. She failed to follow through on any of her promises for reform when she had the chance. She completely betrayed the progressives and dissidents in her country. Many many many have written books and articles about this.
Ask yourself why Washington wanted her in a position of power...
A leopard doesn't change its spots.
take that shit to the RIP Tatiana thread.
I'm curious - does this mean we are supposed to assume her
millions of supporters within Pakistan and abroad are completely
misguided or have been hoodwinked? I don't dispute what you are
saying, but I don't think she can be so easily dismissed as having
been completely without purpose or merit in the representation of her people.
The one question I had was not answered.
Why Washington wants anyone in power is the same reason no matter what country we are speaking about. The answer to why any government would want one leader over the next in another country is always the same.
I am not placing her on a pedestal. Whatever one thinks of her, her assassination and the death of all the others whose names we will never hear means more chaos, possibly a civil war, for Pakistan. I understand her history, but shooting her at a rally is not doing much for the country either.
Who do you like better for the leadership?
This situation is so common I'm at a loss as to how to reply. In the absence of a free press, and especially given the nature of poverty (no access to information), how do you think the citizenry could possibly inform itself? And this is, of course, to give too much credit to a free press --after all, ours is presenting Bhutto as a martyred force for good when she was really just a crook and a narcissist.
Didn't every living American president attend Nixon's funeral and eulogize him for his alleged great qualities? I'm sorry to be cynical, but the facts on the ground demand it. We wanted Bhutto to share power with Musharraf because neither would rock our boat and both care(d) only for themselves.
It's also worth pointing out that Nawaz Sharif, not Bhutto, was leading in the polls last week...
Bhutto could be a crook and a narcissist, but die as a martyr. I don't think the writers, lawyers and judges who were silenced and imprisoned by Mushareff do not have access to a newspaper, tv or the internet. The citizenry isn't informed? That's why they are marching for Bhutto?
Perhaps the fact that people are living in fear of fundamentalists and under a Mushareff ordered police state, means that they are less worried about Bhutto's history of corruption, and more concerned with getting a democratic, secular govt that will restore civil rights, freedoms.
Can you hear the feet skidding to a stop?
We're here to amuse you.