Benazir Bhutto

Benazir Bhutto (1953-2007), Pakistani political leader who was assassinated in December 2007 as she campaigned for a third term as prime minister. She served as prime minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990 and from 1993 to 1996. Bhutto was the first democratically elected female prime minister in any modern Islamic country. She was born in Karāchi, Pakistan, to a prominent landholding family. She attended Harvard’s Radcliffe College in the United States and the University of Oxford in England, where she was the first Asian woman to be elected president of the Oxford Union.

Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, became prime minister of Pakistan in 1971. Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan in 1977, planning on a career in the foreign service, only days before General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq staged a military coup that unseated her father. Following her father’s imprisonment in 1977, Bhutto and her mother, Begum Nusrat Bhutto, assumed the leadership of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). In 1979 Zia’s military regime imprisoned Bhutto, placing her in solitary confinement, and shortly thereafter executed her father. Released from prison in 1984, Bhutto went into exile in Britain until 1986, when martial law was lifted in Pakistan. Supported by tumultuous crowds, Bhutto again called for fresh elections, resulting in another short prison term that same year. She also had to contend with internal dissension among the anti-Zia forces.

In 1988 Zia was killed in an airplane crash, less than three months after announcing that elections to restore a civilian government would take place. In the November elections the PPP gained a huge plurality in the National Assembly, and in December 1988 Bhutto became prime minister of Pakistan. In August 1990, however, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan dismissed her, charging her with incompetence and corruption, and dissolved the National Assembly. The PPP was soundly defeated in the elections that followed, and Bhutto became an opposition leader in the parliament. Meanwhile, she published her autobiography, Daughter of Destiny (also published as Daughter of the East), in 1989.

In October 1993, following the joint resignations of Ishaq Khan and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Bhutto was again elected prime minister. However, in 1996 her government was once again dismissed by the president amid allegations of corruption. New elections in 1997 brought only a small number of seats to the PPP, ruining Bhutto’s chances of regaining her former position. Bhutto faced multiple corruption charges, which she denounced as politically motivated. She went into self-imposed exile in 1999 shortly after being convicted for failing to appear in court. The Supreme Court of Pakistan overturned the conviction in 2001.

With corruption charges still pending against her, Bhutto faced arrest if she were to return to Pakistan. However, in October 2007 Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf granted Bhutto amnesty, and she returned to her country to make a political comeback. Suicide bombers attacked Bhutto’s homecoming procession in Karāchi, resulting in at least 136 deaths. Bhutto pledged to fight Islamic militancy in Pakistan. She faced a dangerous campaign trail as she worked to lead the PPP to victory in the parliamentary elections due in January 2008. Bhutto sought a constitutional amendment allowing her to serve a third term, as a two-term limit had been imposed on the prime ministership in 2002. However, in late December 2007, as she campaigned in Rāwalpindi, Bhutto was killed by an attacker who first shot at her and then blew himself up. Bhutto’s final work, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West, was published posthumously in 2008.