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Benazir Bhutto

Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated today at a rally near Islamabad. A suicide bomber reportedly shot her at close range then detonated an explosive, killing Bhutto and 20 others. Bhutto was a complicated woman—underneath the traditional veils she was a graduate of Oxford and Harvard, who spoke flawless English. But then under all that she was also a political creature who had mastered the sort of shape-shifting needed to cast herself as a historic figure in the mold of Indira Ghandi or Joan of Arc. This sharp sketch of Bhutto in the New York Times last month suggested that under all the compelling Western-sounding rhetoric, Bhutto was really no different than centuries of predecessors—doling out political favors and reportedly treating the government coffers as the family cookie jar.

What kind of woman survives multiple assassination attempts and persists in attending huge political rallies in an open vehicle? Perhaps if your father and brothers are killed all around you, that starts to feel quite normal. 

In a diary she wrote for Slate just over 10 years ago, Bhutto offers a few clues. Balancing her duties as opposition leader in the National Assembly of Pakistan against her responsibilities to her children, she sounds like any working mother: “I do not like my children watching cartoons,” she writes “But I am feeling guilty. I have to catch a flight to Islamabad where the Parliament is based. So I cave in.” But what really pervades this weeklong account is a feeling of walls closing in on her. When she hears of threats to burn down her home in Islamabad, she acts to relocate her children to schools in Dubai. From her veil that keeps slipping off to the inability of an unaccompanied woman to “hail a taxi or drive a car,” in Pakistan anymore, Bhutto seems forever pressed to be smaller than she wants to be. References abound to retorts she doesn’t offer and comebacks left unsaid, “I get angry. Stop it, I say. That's what they want. You are not going to play their game.”

Interspersed between the almost mundane recitations of who in her government has been kidnapped, arrested, or released each day are Bhutto’s frequent references to the small indulgences—the pizza binges and chocolate cakes and the books—Western trappings in which she indulges almost helplessly.

After finishing Caesar's Women by Colleen McCullough, Bhutto reflects “Here we are heading towards the third millennium, and the conduct of men and women still mirrors the style of Caesar's age.”
“Does time go forward or backward or just stand still?” she continues. “Do we fight the same demons in each era and in each century only with different methods and in different styles? Are we condemned to a cycle of patterns that keeps turning and ending up where it started?” For Bhutto, at least, the choice was to repeat the patterns set by her family—fighting her way to center stage, and dying larger than life.

In her diary there is an exchange with her then-7-year-old daughter, Bakhtwar, that reveals a Bhutto who may have nevertheless believed she could defy that pattern. As her mother leaves for the airport Bakhtwar looks up at her mother and waves casually, "Bye, it was nice seeing you. Come back soon," she breezes.
"What do you mean," replies Bhutto. "I am your mother. I am stuck to you like that arm of yours for life."
"But, Mama, my arm keeps going away," she complains.
"But it always comes back," says Bhutto.