SINDHA AGHA
Gargoyle staff reporter
Posted Friday, Jan. 4, 2008

ON DEC. 27, the former prime minister and leader of Pakistan’s largest political party, Benazir Bhutto, stood up through the sunroof of her bulletproof vehicle after a campaign rally and waved to the crowds of supporters.

Moments later, three shots rung out in the famous park in Punjab, Pakistan, and down fell one of history’s greatest icons. Those three bullets also took with them what many call the last breath of hope for a nation of oppressed minorities.

Daughter of Pakistan’s former prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto collectively served as prime minister for five years. She was educated at Harvard University and Oxford University before she returned to Pakistan to begin her political career, where she represented disenfranchised groups and the poor.

Bhutto was a Pakistani of Sindhi descent, an ethnic minority which is subject to much discrimination in Pakistan. She was also a Shia Muslim by faith, which is the minority denomination of Islam in Pakistan often denounced as heresy by orthodox Sunnis. She was a woman, a gender particularly underrepresented and mistreated in Pakistan. She also pushed for the rights of all of the people, minorities included.

It wasn’t just her image that was controversial, but her actions. She challenged the military as seen in her statement to the World Sindhi Institute, or WSI, from October 2004, where Bhutto described her mission as “to end military dictatorship and give our great country back to our great people.” Later, in the same statement, she, a politician in a country where politics is noisy with secrets, said, “We fight for truth for battles of truth are historic.”

The Pakistani government is often suspected of being in cahoots with the Islamic extremists whom the government claims to oppose. Bhutto openly opposed these extremists, condemning the terrorist acts of the Taliban. She recognized the need for a safe and just nation, and said to the WSI in the aforementioned statement that “Citizens in our country feel unsafe.”

Her goals to improve her peoples’ nation included giving job opportunities to the youth, improving the state of hospitals and universities, providing an adequate water supply to the large populations suffering from drought (particularly in Sindh), improving the conditions for women whose rights, she said, had been “thrown back a century.”

Bhutto also emphasized the fact that media in Pakistan feel silenced within the tight grip of authority, and that if the media can’t feel a journalistic freedom to speak of the truth, then justice will fail to ensue and will be muted out.

She opposed the huge expenditure on the military at the expense of education and health care. In Pakistan, the military spending is 20 times greater than that on education, although the majority of the population is illiterate.

In the aftermath of her assassination, it’s the people who are silenced most. She was a voice speaking for a myriad of quieted demographics, and now the streets of her homeland are mottled with riots; distressed Bhutto supporters wander the streets burning any signs of government. They are insulted, outraged, and fed up. Sindhis want to be separated from Pakistan more than ever, and women have lost their ray of hope.

While there have been some deaths, the protesters’ rioting has not been violent against people. The government’s response? They’ve imposed a curfew, and the police have orders to "shoot to kill."

In one incident, teenage boys were playing cricket on the streets of Karachi and were shot by troops. Several of the boys were killed.

Friends of my family in Pakistan haven’t been able to leave their house since the assassination to purchase groceries, so this family, along with many others in Pakistan, must depend on their dwindling supply.

As if to emphasize the truth of her words regarding the oppression of concerned journalists, all Sindhi TV stations were shut down by the government for several days, preventing them from providing their angle on the tragedy. When they were finally allowed to run, they were only permitted to air mourning songs and sentiments, but no news.

When my mother rushed into my room last Thursday morning, announcing to me the death of Benazir Bhutto, a woman whose life we as a family had been closely following the previous few days, I felt so much shock and grief, more than I would have expected from myself in response to the assassination of a political figure.

Reflection caused me to recognize that the tragic event was more than an assassination of a political figure; it was a blow intended to bring down a movement, or, perhaps more correctly, the movement, that anyone, anywhere could relate to. Bhutto’s movement was described by some as a movement to modernize or Westernize Pakistan, but at the root it was a rejection of ways that deprive people of justice.

We all have connections to oppression. Whether we are the oppressed, or we know the oppressed, we have felt at least a ripple of oppression. If we cannot be driven by sheer empathy to help those who have lost their small sliver of power, we must be driven by knowing that the stability of Pakistan, a nuclear power, affects the safety of all. When the suffering people of Pakistan lose that voice, Benazir Bhutto’s voice, we too lose an important element of global stability.