The real Bhutto: against the myth-making.(PAKISTAN)(Benazir Bhutto)

IN the days since Benazir Bhutto's assassination, much has been revealed, though little about the murder itself. Its culprits and even its means remain a mystery shrouded in rumor. What did become all too clear in the aftermath of the murder was the gullibility--and sometimes the dishonesty--of Benazir's many influential Western friends, in particular the journalists she cultivated so brilliantly.

The torrents of sorrowful praise for Benazir--much of it in the form of solipsistic articles with titles like "The Benazir I Knew"--testify to the Anglophone media's blinding vulnerability to a certain kind of glamour. It's a glamour that has everything to do with power, money, and proximity to great political drama, as well as Benazir's good looks and unthreatening Easternness. One pundit has called her "Ahmed Chalabi in lipstick," but Chalabi is unlikely to be the subject of gilded reminiscences by Tina Brown and a herd of influential fifty-something graduates of Oxford and Harvard.

Furthermore, unlike the controversial Iraqi, Benazir had been a world-famous figure since her early 20s, and the record from her two terms in office can be set against her rhetoric of democracy and women's rights. And like so many children of foreign leaders and kleptocrats who go to American or British colleges for polishing, Benazir came from a class background that few of her elegant friends would have understood or sympathized with.

The giant mausoleum was the giveaway. Most of the news cameras at her funeral focused on the crowds of supporters and family retainers performing the rite of public grief. But the few shots of the Bhutto mausoleum near Larkhana, where Benazir is now buried next to her "martyred" father, showed a multi-domed building on the scale of the Taj Mahal towering over the plains of Sindh. It's rare for foreigners to get a visual sense of what it means when Pakistanis talk about "feudal families"--the private armies and prisons, the tenants voting for the family's preferred candidate under watchful eyes. But this was it: a marble manifestation of Pakistani feudalism as it has evolved for a theoretically democratic age.

If the sight of the mausoleum wasn't enough to undermine the modern, progressive image that Benazir had constructed with the help of her Western friends, then the bizarre succession process within her Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) ought to have done the trick. Apparently the PPP's "Chairperson for Life" wrote a "political will" in October and entrusted it to her Filipina servant Seeta. This was duly read out to the family and party faithful on December 30 by Benazir's 19-year-old son, Bilawal. It anointed her semi-estranged husband, Asif Ali Zardari, as her successor (together with Makhdoom Amin Fahim, the deputy chairman of the party).

Zardari, who seemed impressively untroubled by grief, then announced that he would be a sort of regent until Bilawal was ready to inherit his mother's mantle (25 is the minimum age for electoral office in Pakistan). He also announced that all three of Benazir's children would be adding Bhutto to their surname. (Benazir had kept her maiden name for similar political reasons.)

People often refer to the PPP as Pakistan's only genuine mass political party, but it isn't really a political party in the Western democratic sense. Founded as the Sindh Peoples Party by Benazir's grandfather, Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto, it has never had an internal election. It enjoys a huge and faithful mass following largely because of her father Zulfikar Bhutto's brilliant but faithless populism. A convert to democracy after serving in Gen. Ayub Khan's dictatorship, Bhutto promised massive land reform but failed to deliver in any significant sense, and he invented a doctrine of "Islamic socialism" that all but destroyed Pakistan's economy. Akind of Pakistani Peron before he flagrantly rigged the 1977 election and was deposed in a coup, Zulfikar fatally politicized the efficient and honest civil service Pakistan had inherited from the British Raj. It was also Bhutto pere who made Red China the key arms supplier of Pakistan, sponsored the first Islamist revolutionaries in Afghanistan, bombed Baluchi separatists into submission, and initiated Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program.