National Agenda : The Troubled Reign of Bhutto II : * In her second term, Pakistan’s prime minister is long on rhetoric and short on action, some complain. Her political enemies are gaining ground.

Within hours after a humiliating defeat for Benazir Bhutto’s government at a U.N. hearing, a telephone call came through to Pakistan from Islam’s holy city of Medina.

It was Pakistan’s opposition leader Nawaz Sharif on the line to his party colleagues here, taking time out from his pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia to orchestrate their reaction on the home front. They demanded that Prime Minister Bhutto resign.

“Politics in Pakistan can be very rough,” said Sharif’s press secretary, Mohammed Siddique Farooque.

Nobody knows that better than Bhutto, whose populist father was hanged in 1979 by the general who deposed him as Pakistan’s leader, and who herself was thrown out of office in 1990 for her regime’s fecklessness and cronyism.

This time her enemies wanted her head for failing to rally other countries behind a U.N. Human Rights Commission vote in Switzerland to censure India for its treatment of Muslims in disputed, New Delhi-ruled Jammu and Kashmir state.

More than six months into Bhutto’s second attempt at running one of the Muslim world’s most turbulent countries, the disappointing lines of what some Pakistani wags are calling “Bhutto II” have become clear.

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Even her fans despair that Bhutto appears to have learned little since her first 20-month term in the late 1980s.

“Incessant rhetoric that oozed from the government-controlled media about what the government intended to do for the people was a poor substitute for action on the ground,” argues Syed Talat Hussain, assistant editor of the News, a Rawalpindi-based daily.

Many of the decisions of Bhutto II, such as the appointment of female judges and the opening of a police station staffed by women--bold innovations in this traditionally male-dominated Muslim society--”appeared more as staggered, haphazard moves, rather than part of a coherent, long-term policy,” Hussain says.

When, at age 35, Benazir Bhutto became the first female prime minister of a Muslim nation, she appointed more than 70 Cabinet ministers and advisers. This time around, she named only 18, and is serving as her own finance minister.

Task forces she has appointed are drawing up policy guidelines in problem areas such as agriculture and women’s issues, but so far there has been little action.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir’s rakish, silver-tongued father, captivated Pakistanis with his brand of “Islamic socialism.” But the 40-year-old daughter, embracing the doctrine of economic liberalism, is now shifting Pakistan toward privatization and denationalization.

The challenges are stupendous. “Twelve thousand more people will be born in Pakistan this day. Two thousand of them will be dead within a year,” British journalist Christina Lamb has written in the book “Waiting for Allah,” a searing chronicle of the country’s difficult search for democracy.

“More of them will learn to use a gun than to speak the national language. Medieval sports of cockfighting and bearbaiting will provide more of their entertainment than television, and they will have no theaters or concert halls to visit.

“Only a third will have access to clean drinking water, and only 15% will have sewerage. A quarter will go to school. Many will become heroin addicts. This is a country killing its future.”

Things should have been looking up instead. As a result of October’s elections that returned Bhutto to office and the powerbrokering that followed, her Pakistan People’s Party forged a comfortable if sometimes unstable 30-vote majority in the 217-seat National Assembly. Sardar Farooq Leghari, a longtime ally and former government minister, was elected president.

“Benazir is in a better position than any democratically elected leader of Pakistan has been in, her father included,” one Western diplomat commented.

But that may not be saying much in a country where the army has ruled for 25 of the 47 years since independence, and where generals and the military’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency still play a shadowy, uncertain role.

One ominous sign of trouble came in March, when Bhutto failed to get her candidate elected to the politically important post of chairman of the Senate. Even some allies deserted her to back the opposition’s candidate.

This month, she had to send the army into the streets of Karachi after ethnic violence led to at least 26 deaths. The implication was that even in her own power base, the state of Sind, Bhutto has been unable to cobble together a power-sharing agreement embracing both the rural landholding class she was born into and urban-based, Urdu-speaking Muslim immigrants from India.

Election results left opposition forces in charge of two of the four provinces, North-West Frontier and Baluchistan. The Pakistan People’s Party managed to destabilize and then supplant the government in North-West Frontier, allegedly through bribery, but the operation badly besmirched the image of Bhutto’s party.

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Hopes that Sharif might agree to a “loyal opposition” role were dashed almost immediately. Given the claustrophobic and painful history of Pakistani politics--Sharif was a political creation of Zia ul-Haq, the general who had Benazir’s father hanged--civility was too much to ask.

“The moment that she shows any flexibility, Nawaz jumps in with his ranting rhetoric and accuses her of selling out the country,” the Western diplomat said.

The problem with the bitter government-opposition deadlock is that for any vote involving changes to the constitution, Bhutto needs Sharif--who himself was prime minister from 1990 to 1993--and the votes he can muster. For now, the two rivals are unable even to implement their shared desire for abolition of the power held by the country’s otherwise largely figurehead president to dissolve government and Parliament, a power to which both have fallen victim.

Like Sharif’s tenure as prime minister and Benazir’s own initiation into power, Bhutto II kicked off with a scramble for the spoils of office. Many Pakistanis blame Bhutto’s abrupt removal in August, 1990, on the unsavory reputation acquired by her husband, Asif Zardari, a polo-playing contractor dubbed “Mr. Ten Percent” for the rake-off he was said to take from government contracts.

Signs are clear that Zardari, who spent 28 months in jail on charges including kidnapings, extortion and misappropriation of government funds before being acquitted, has lost none of his clout. An Indian journalist who came to Islamabad the day after Bhutto was sworn in watched as high officials, including the defense and interior ministers, trooped respectfully through her office. “They weren’t there to see her,” the journalist said. “They wanted to see the husband.”

Corruption, cronyism and the spectacle of politicians seeking power for its own sake disgust many Pakistanis who have lost hope that Bhutto or anyone will improve the ordinary citizen’s lot. “Nobody at the highest circles has the intention of providing services to the people,” declared a Pakistani woman who works for a U.N. agency. “And I mean that in the present tense.”

In Bhutto II, the prime minister has had not only her enemies to worry about but people dear to her as well. Her Iranian-born mother, Nusrat, who last December lost a power struggle with Bhutto for control of the Pakistan People’s Party, and her younger brother, Murtaza, whom Benazir has allowed to be jailed for allegedly masterminding both the 1992 hijacking of a fishing boat and the 1981 pirating of a Pakistani airliner, have been among her most vocal and damaging critics.

Friends had hoped that the family feud was one trouble that Benazir Bhutto could solve swiftly. But at a rally last month marking the 15th anniversary of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s execution, Nusrat and Murtaza were absent. Murtaza rejected a government offer to attend the ceremonies under police escort, and Nusrat stayed away because only her estranged daughter, and not her son, was there.

Changing of the Guard in Pakistan Benazir Bhutto, who became prime minister for the second time more than six months ago, caps a long list of government leaders in the country’s 38 years as a republic.

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March, 1956, Pakistan declared a republic. Iskander Mirza is first president. *

October, 1958, Mirza declares military rule, but later that month, martial law administrator Muhammad Ayub Khan boots out Mirza and takes over as president. *

March, 1969, Ayub Khan is forced to resign because of widespread unrest. He is replaced by Gen. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan; martial law is reimposed. *

December, 1971, After civil war, East Pakistan becomes independent Bangladesh. Yahya Khan resigns; military rule ends. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto becomes president. *

August, 1973, New constitution makes Bhutto prime minister. *

July, 1977, Bhutto is deposed in bloodless military coup. Gen. Zia ul-Haq becomes chief martial law administrator. *

September, 1978, Zia is named president. *

April, 1979, Bhutto is executed for the murder of a political opponent, touching off riots. *

February, 1985, election of a new national assembly. *

May, 1988, Zia dismisses prime minister and Cabinet, dissolves national assembly and provincial assemblies. *

August, 1988, Zia is killed in the suspicious explosion of a Pakistani air force plane.

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December, 1988, Benazir Bhutto, daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, is named prime minister. *

August, 1990, President dismisses Bhutto on corruption and incompetence charges.

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November, 1990, Nawaz Sharif is elected prime minister. He ends the state of emergency and appoints a new Cabinet, with many of Zia’s former officials.

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May, 1991, Parliament decrees that Islamic law takes precedence over civil legislation. *

April 1993, President dismisses Sharif on charges of corruption; Parliament is dissolved. Assembly member Mir Balakh Sher Mazari is sworn in as acting prime minister. *

May, 1993, Supreme court overturns the dismissal. Parliament gives Sharif vote of confidence. July, 1993, The army demands a resolution of the standoff. President and prime minister resign; new elections called. *

October, 1993, Elections re-establish Bhutto as prime minister. *

sources: The 1994 Information Please Almanac; The Europa World Year Book