From Benazir’s ashes

Prashun Bhaumik |

Asif Ali Zardari may well be the right man as President of Pakistan as he has plenty of experience of the politicking over which he now presides.

By Sonya Fatah

ISLAMABAD: With Asif Ali Zardari’s experience in manoeuvering through tricky situations, he may, oddly, be the right man to lord it over Pakistan’s troubled political cauldron. For the people of Pakistan, however, Zardari’s fifth-gearing into power is a puzzling reality, merely another indication that politics here remains elusive to the common man, and an elite domain.

“Only Allah knows what happens in politics in Pakistan,” said Mohammad Farooq, an electrician, who said he was appalled at the news. “How did this man move from becoming the curse of our country to the President? Even Mohtarma Benazir had pushed him aside.”

Benazir’s widower Asif Ali Zardari is quietly stealing the limelight soon after the international airport has been renamed the Benazir Bhutto International Airport. Counselling cells now go by the name Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Women Centres. A major district in Sindh province has named after her. Posters, billboards and banners bearing enlarged photographs of the late former prime minister still hang in key locations in Islamabad and the country’s other major urban centres.

Turnarounds are not uncommon in Pakistani politics, where horse-trading and under the table deals mean politicians are forever seeking fresh opportunities under new administrations. Still, Zardari, 53, has pulled off a coup of sorts. Until 27 December 2007, he was quiet, living away from Pakistan and staying out of matters relating to his wife Benazir Bhutto’s political rebirth. As Bhutto moved from city to city campaigning for her party, the Pakistan People’s Party, she was surrounded an entourage of future power-sharers but Zardari was conspicuously absent. After her death, however, he has gradually moved to centrestage, taking charge not only of internal party matters, but somehow securing for himself the mantle of President.

There is a modicum of good news in Zardari’s ascendancy. His election is constitutional and legal, a considerable departure from the previous presidential elections that saw a military chief grant the Presidency to himself and buttress his position with additional power.

“There is certainly a cause for optimism in [Zardari’s] election,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, of Human Rights Watch. “It is markedly different from the election of his predecessor in that it is legal, that there is an electoral college, and that he will be elected through constitutional means.” But a tired Pakistani nation is anxious about its political future.

After all, Zardari, despite the legal and democratic triumph that his election was, is not the most popular of men in Pakistan today. He has risen like a phoenix out of the ashes of his late wife, the country’s twice-elected former prime minister, who was assassinated during a rally last year. The irony of Zardari’s sudden rise has been discussed over and over again in cafes and tea stalls, in the homes of the elite and the homes of the country’s vast poor.

Born in Karachi in July 1955 – a month after the birth of his future wife in the same city — to Sindhi landlord Hakim Ali Zardari and his wife, Asif Ali Zardari was schooled at St Patrick’s High School for boys, a Catholic institution that educated many of the city’s well-to-do, including Zardari’s predecessor, General (retd) Pervez Musharraf.

Zardari hailed from a feudal background but his family lost much of their wealth when he was a young man. His friends recall that as a teenager in Karachi Zardari grew smart off the streets by selling movie tickets in black outside his father’s cinema, Bambino.

Over the years, stories about Zardari have become the stuff of legend, with many ordinary Pakistanis telling unique stories of fearful encounters.

But those came to light only after Zardari married Benazir Bhutto, the then 32-year-old heir of her father’s political dynasty. The two had met only a few times before their marriage, and Bhutto said she had agreed to marry in an arranged marriage sort of way, because she knew that in Pakistan being single would go against her.

“In a Moslem society, it’s not done for women and men to meet each other, so it’s very difficult to get to know each other, and my being the leader of the largest opposition party in Pakistan, it would have been a lot of grist to the rumour mill and bad for the image if I had chosen another course,” she was quoted as saying in a New York Times article announcing her marriage in the summer of 1987.

Indeed, Bhutto decided to marry largely because her election as the Muslim world’s first woman prime minister was imminent. The following year the military dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq would collapse after his sudden and mysterious death in a plane crash, Bhutto, at the age of 33, would be elected prime minister.

For Zardari, the powerful world of high politics was enthralling. Very soon, he had earned a reputation for being an extremely charming person who would go to any lengths to get what he wanted. Among these pleasures was the popular Pakistani sport of polo. When his wife was in the prime minister’s spot for the second time, he frustrated the nation by building air-conditioned stables in the prime minister’s house to keep his horses cool under the sweltering South Asian sun. It was a move that didn’t endear him to the millions living in sun-baked poverty.

But much more serious stuff was in the offering. When in 1996 Bhutto’s brother, Mir Murtaza Bhutto was assassinated in a drive-by shooting, many alleged that Zardari, with whom Murtaza had acrimonious ties, had arranged for his murder. There was no evidence to back up this allegation but it stuck like wallpaper to Zardari and Bhutto’s reputation. When Bhutto’s first government collapsed in 1990, Zardari was accused of blackmail and corruption and thrown into jail. But that term ended in 1993 when Bhutto returned to power.

Over the years he continued to accumulate charges that ranged from corruption to murder. A plethora of cases stacked up against him but were used against him when his wife was out of office. He was jailed between 1997 and 2004 but his cases never went to trial stage, and no evidence was ever shown to back up the charges.

When interviewed in London in July 2007, Bhutto insisted that the charges against her husband and herself — mostly for corruption — were falsified and were politically motivated by opposition governments and those who did not want her in power.

No doubt Zardari’s fortunes suffered a massive blow when the Nawaz Sharif government came to power and put him behind bars. Some weeks ago, the Financial Times published a story revealing that Zardari’s psychiatrists believed that he was mentally unstable, potentially suicidal and deeply affected by his time in prison, as a result of possible torture during his 11 years in Pakistan’s prisons.

The PPP says that Zardari has fully recovered. It has succumbed to his leadership in son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s absence, and accepted his presidential nomination even if Bhutto, anxious to redress the stigmas of her past failed governments, had cast him aside.

While the corruption charges for which Zardari was put behind bars were never proven because the case went to trial, Bhutto’s widower earned himself the distinguishable title of ‘Mr Ten Percent.’ The allegation of corruption haunted Bhutto’s governments and seemed likely more than a smear campaign that was politically motivated. Cases popped up in Swiss courts too, with Swiss authorities accusing Zardari of money laundering. At the end of last month Swiss courts stopped all proceedings against Zardari and unfroze the $60m that were in his Swiss accounts.

“Zardari is everything a good friend would want,” said a friend who did not want to be quoted. “He’s deeply loyal, and you see that his good friends are all around him. But he can also be downright ruthless. Absolutely ruthless.”

But some analysts say that the man with the most scarred of Pakistani political pasts may not be the worst of Pakistani leaders.

He will be inheriting the position just as Pakistani enters another difficult phase of international cooperation in the war on terror. With two US strikes on Pakistani ground that have incensed the public, and with a new American President soon in office, it is Zardari who will have to handle both internal and external matters of security. To do this, Zardari will have to watch out for his own skeletons.

“His presence as President of Pakistan means that he will be the target for anything that goes wrong,” cautioned Lt. Gen. (retd) Talal Masood, a political and defense commentator, who believes that Zardari’s downfall may be his control-seeking temperament.

“He is trying to over-centralise power because he is insecure. If he becomes President he will not need any indemnity.” For now, Zardari has promised that he will do away with a sticky resolution that gave enormous powers to the President, and that he will redistribute the power equilibrium between his position and that of the prime minister.

“The PPP has repeatedly said that it will restore the balance between the prime minister and the President and return Pakistan to a parliamentary democracy,” said Hasan.

Zardari has first to prove this. Then he must juggle with the counter-terrorism portfolio, and attempt to change the way in which counter-terror operations were handled under General Musharraf. In addition to the challenge of growing terrorism, Zardari will have to build good relations with the military and save the country from worse economic decline.