Benazir Bhutto Has Sights Set on Power--and an Old Foe

Veiled in black, Benazir Bhutto sat beside the graves that have made her both a national martyr and a matriarch and listened in stony silence as an Urdu poet called for revenge against the man who helped fill the family cemetery.

“We are mourning your death, Oh Shahnawaz,” the poet wailed at the tomb of Benazir’s elder brother, who was poisoned three years ago while in exile in France. “And we have it in our hearts that Zia the dictator should be fired upon by his people and finished.”

The occasion this week was an intensely private affair: the third anniversary of the death of Shahnawaz Bhutto. Shahnawaz’s mysterious demise is blamed by many on President Zia ul-Haq, who had also ordered the execution of Bhutto’s father, former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, after overthrowing him in 1977.

But in this troubled Islamic nation of 100 million people, even such personal occasions in the Bhutto ancestral village in southern Pakistan have taken on deep political meaning.

At 35, after more than a decade in jail, under house arrest, in exile and in mourning, Benazir Bhutto is now at the helm of a burgeoning political movement that many analysts say may well dislodge one of Asia’s longest-serving military leaders.

In the two months since Zia vowed to hold the first free and fair national elections here in nearly two decades, Benazir Bhutto has emerged as an even stronger threat to Zia than she has been before.

Zia has yet to announce an election date, but his aides hint that the announcement is likely any day. Western diplomats believe that Zia’s hold on power, in the face of a growing challenge from a unifying opposition under Bhutto, is more vulnerable than at any time since he seized power.

Although she is five months pregnant, Bhutto, who is married to businessman Asif Ali Zarardi, has in recent weeks been touring the country at a breakneck pace. She has drawn crowds of more than 200,000 to rallies in Punjab, the vote-rich province that has been the bedrock of Zia’s support.

Catalyst in Alliance

She has brought together leaders of the most powerful of the country’s nearly 100 opposition parties, playing the role of catalyst to forge a unifed alliance against Zia. Day after day, in well-publicized speeches and statements, she has pictured Zia, 63, as an aging dictator increasingly isolated from his people and from the U.S. government, which has supported him with billions of dollars in aid.

“The sand is now shifting from under Zia’s own feet,” she declared in one recent speech. “In the darkness of his own misdeeds and follies, he is groping for a hold. But time and power are slipping from his grip, like dry sand between the frail fingers of a child’s hand.”

She has attacked Zia’s economic policies, which, according to opposition leaders, have almost bankrupted Pakistan despite the foreign aid. She has appealed to village merchants and national leaders to join the crusade, and she has even toned down her criticism of the army, of which Zia remains commander, appealing to soldiers to think of the nation before continuing to support an unpopular president.

More important, in gathering what independent analysts have called unprecedented momentum for the opposition, she has proved to be a shrewd and astute politician, something that no one expected when she returned in April, 1986, from three years of exile in London.

“The girl of 1986 is now a woman,” the Karachi daily Dawn said last week in an editorial, commenting on her July 13 appearance before a huge crowd in Lahore. “Two years ago, she was a rather shrill Joan of Arc. The other night, she was as serene and suave as her mother used to be when she was the First Lady.”

A newspaper in Lahore headlined its story of the rally: “Benazir Does It Again.”

U.S. State Department and White House analysts have begun privately to cast Bhutto as a potential alternative to Zia, a cunning and charming leader who has cleverly used his political acumen and the long war in neighboring Afghanistan to make Pakistan one of the world’s leading recipients of U.S. economic and military aid. And, they note, he has accomplished this even though Pakistan produces a third of the illicit heroin consumed in the United States and despite suspicions that Pakistan is developing a nuclear weapon.

Parallel to Philippines

In explaining the shift in U.S. perceptions, these analysts invariably draw a parallel between Pakistan and the situation in the Philippines three years ago.

“Certainly there are some inevitable parallels between Benazir Bhutto and Cory (President Corazon) Aquino,” a U.S. official in Washington said, asking not to be identified by name.

In 1985, Aquino led a campaign to dislodge then-President Ferdinand E. Marcos. Marcos, too, had clung to power for more than a decade, with U.S. support that began eroding and shifting to Aquino in the election campaign. He was forced from power in February, 1986.

Analysts here believe that the Reagan Administration has been opening new lines of communication with Bhutto in recent months, and Bhutto has been courting the Americans in an effort to make clear that she is neither anti-American nor a socialist, as Zia has suggested. In an interview this week, she said that despite the opposition’s dissatisfaction with U.S. support for Zia, “We are not in the least anti-U.S., and we believe the United States has a tremendous role to play in the development of Pakistan.”

She said that she and her Pakistan People’s Party were “tremendously encouraged” by Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s recent statement that Zia must permit free elections soon or risk damaging his relations with Washington.

“This is a big switch-over, as far as we’re concerned,” she said. “Zia has been the American man for so long, and here we see some very encouraging new signs.”

Bhutto’s political savvy has its roots in her upbringing and education. She holds degrees from both Harvard and Oxford universities.

A friend of the family, Naheed Khan, said: “Benazir’s father indicated several times . . . that he was grooming Benazir as his successor. Once . . . Mr. Bhutto said of Benazir: ‘She is not my daughter. She is my son.’ This is probably the biggest difference between Benazir Bhutto and Corazon Aquino. Aquino was not a politician; she was thrown into power by accident. Benazir Bhutto has been a politician all her life.”

Aquino’s eight years in the United States were spent in Roman Catholic schools. In contrast, Bhutto spent four years earning a degree in comparative government at Harvard between 1969 and 1973, when the student movement was at its peak. She said this helped form her own views politically.

“Those years at Harvard were the happiest of my life,” Bhutto said, “because I was completely anonymous. My father was not yet prime minister, so no one there knew me as anything but another student. I do relish my privacy, and I never thought of politics as something to enjoy. I went into it out of a sense of responsibility and duty. I had always wanted something safer and more private.”