International

After a year, Pakistanis still wonder who Benazir’s assassins were

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan marked the first anniversary of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination with questions why the government, led by her husband Asif Ali Zardari, has not been able to identify her killers yet, and if the country might have fared better had she lived.

As these questions dominated public discourse about the slain leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, thousands of party faithful gathered at Garhi Khuda Buksh in Naudero, her ancestral village in the Sindh province, to pay homage at the mausoleum where she is buried alongside her father and brothers.

The tensions with India only appeared to underline the sense of loss that the country displayed on Saturday, though it will remain a matter of conjecture if Benazir could have prevented the present crisis, or handled the fall-out of the Mumbai attacks any differently or any better.

Benazir Bhutto was killed in a shooting-cum-suicide attack on her jeep last December 27 as she left Rawalpindi’s Liaquat Bagh after addressing a rally ahead of the January 8 parliamentary elections. The elections were postponed to February 18 after her killing.

The government — Pervez Musharraf was the President — blamed the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Beithullah Mehsud, for the killing.

But the PPP did not accept this version. Senior leaders gave Mehsud a clean chit, and pointed instead to a letter written by Benazir, in which she said General (retired) Musharraf would be to blame in the event of her death.

Five people, who police say are linked to Mehsud, have been arrested in connection with the attack, and have been charge-sheeted in an anti-terrorist court in Rawalpindi. But the case has hardly moved since the first arrest in January 2008.

Instead, the washing down of the site by Rawalpindi city authorities within no time of the attack, and with it, all the forensic evidence that could have helped in the investigation, fuelled the belief that General Musharraf was somehow responsible for the attack. At the request of Mr. Zardari, no post-mortem was carried out and several versions abound of the number of injuries she sustained.

Ten months have gone by since the elections that brought the PPP to power, followed by the ascendance of Mr. Zardari to the presidency. Commentators have asked why he has not shown alacrity in tracking down his wife’s killers, despite having the entire government at his disposal. With Mr. Zardari’s unpopularity only growing, especially after his refusal to restore the deposed Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary, this has been added to his list of failures.

It has been suggested that, acting under pressure of a “friendly government”, he let General Musharraf off the hook.

Benazir loyalists within the party, who feel sidelined by her widower, are openly voicing their unhappiness.

Analysts are also speculating that Benazir may have done a better job of pulling Pakistan out of its multiple crises because of her political experience, her Western liberal education, her charisma and her diplomatic bridges with the rest world.

“Despite her shortcomings of which she had several, she was just that curious mix that could have attempted to take us out of the rut we are in,” said a commentator in The Nation.

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