[NYTr] Dynasty: Benazir's Wil Names 19-Yr-Old Son New Head of PPP

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[Bizarre, when the last will and testament of an assassinated dynasty
politician and billionaire names who's supposed to take up the reins.
The widower, he of the deeply tarnished reputation for corruption, is
also going to help while the 19-year-old kid continues to study at
Oxford.  Is this a political party or a family enterprise? This is what
passes for "democracy" in Pakistan. How much worse is Mush? How much
better are the Bushes? Or the Clintons? The PPP will go along with the
decorative "election" Mush plans, if it's held. Sharif may cave, and
ally himself with the PPP as a united opposition to Mush, according to
the NY Times's Perlez, who's hardly the most knowledgeable source.
However, Juan Cole is also reporting that Sharif has said he will
"reconsider" his decision to boycott the election. See below for all.
Juan Cole has more on the US prexy candidates and how they are handling
this prickly issue. -NYTr]


Channel 4 News - Snowmail (UK) - Dec 30, 2007
http://www.channel4.com

Benazir Bhutto's son has pledged to take up where she left off:
struggling for democracy. Curious though and somewhat ironic that the
Pakistan People's Party should choose dynasty rather than democracy
when it comes to electing a party leader. Not a great start, some have
already observed.
 
The PPP says it will, however, contest the elections which are still
set for 8 January, though there are a number of unconfirmed reports as
I write that the poll could end up being postponed for several weeks.

                                ***

Prensa Latina, Havana
http://www.plenglish.com

Son of Bhutto Named PPP Chairman

Islamabad, Dec 30 (Prensa Latina) The son of assassinated Pakistan
former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was elected on Sunday as president
of the People's Party of Pakistan, the group which was led by his
mother.

After his appointment was announced in the southern city of Naudero,
19-year old Bilawal Bhutto read the will of the late opposition leader.

The PPP vice presidential post is now in the hands of Asif Ali Zardari,
Benazir Bhutto's widower.

"It has been decided that Bilawal should be the president and Mr.
Zardari the co-president," a party official said.

At a meeting, an overwhelming majority of the PPP pleaded for not to
boycott legislative elections scheduled for January 8.

Bhutto's death on Thursday triggered violent disturbances, which make
many to wonder whether the polls can be held.

Pakistan, a key US ally, is immersed in a profound political, social
crisis, which threatens to frighten investors away and affect the
economy.

ef rma alc PL-10

                            ***

Informed Comment - Dec 30, 2007
http://www.juancole.com/2007/12/bilawal-zardari-fahim-to-lead-ppp-will.html

Bilawal, Zardari, Fahim to lead PPP; Will Contest Jan. 8 Polls

The Pakistan People's Party movers and shakers have annointed Bilawal
Bhutto Zardari, 19, the son of slain Benazir Bhutto, as its next
leader. He will continue his studies at Oxford while his father, Asif
Zardari, acts as regent. The PPP will run Makhdum Amin Fahim as its
candidate for prime minister, and will contest the January 8 elections
(apparently they are counting on a sympathy vote, and may also be
afraid the country will slip into martial law if the civil disturbances
continue). The other major party with grass roots, the Muslim League-N,
led by Nawaz Sharif, had said it would boycott the elections. But
Sharif said Saturday he would reconsider the boycott if the PPP decided
to go ahead.

Fahim is what is called in Pakistan a "feudal landlord," with a BA in
political science from the provincial Sindh University. He has been
parliamentary leader of the PPP in recent years. The Pakistan People's
Party was created in the late 1960s by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and has all
along been led by that family and its retainers. "Makhdum," Fahim's
ancestral title, means "served" and is a term applied in South Asia to
a Sufi leader. Great medieval Sufis were given lands to support them by
Muslim rulers like the Mughals, so that in many instances their
descendants are big landowners, and the family's spiritual vocation has
disappeared. Fahim is a secular politician, and like a lot of the
Pakistani elite, likes a good stiff drink of bourbon.

The PPP during the past two decades has been internally split between a
rising middle class urban leadership and the old landowning families.
An alternative to Fahim would have been the smart Punjabi lawyer,
Aitzaz Ahsan, who was jailed for protesting the dismissal of the
justices, and is admired by a lot of the urban activists. Despite
Benazir's own education abroad, her instincts (and now those of her
widower) was always to "run the feudals," and to depend on the
landlords' ability to get out the vote among their own (largely
illiterate and repressed) peasants.

The PPP leadership had a chance to become the party of the future and
to galvanize the new middle class, which has spearheaded the challenge
to Musharraf over his gutting of the judiciary. It has instead run the
feudals again. Fahim seems to me unlikely to generate the sort of
excitement that Aitzaz Ahsan would have. But then, the PPP will
probably get a big sympathy vote. Once in power, however, unless it
pursues policies that benefit urban classes, it will find itself
eclipsed.

Barnett Rubin's WSJ op-ed on Bhutto's assassination is now available in
full at our group Global Affairs blog here:
http://icga.blogspot.com/2007/12/musharraf-problem-full-text-from-wsj.html


                            ***

The New York Times - Dec 30, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/world/asia/30cnd-pakistan.html


Bhutto’s Son and Husband to Lead Party

By JANE PERLEZ

LAHORE, Pakistan — Three days after the death of Benazir Bhutto, the
Pakistan People’s Party on Sunday chose her 19-year-old son, Bilawal,
and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, as co-leaders of the party, the
biggest and most potent in Pakistan.

During a meeting of the party executive in Naudero in the western
province of Sindh, Ms. Bhutto’s will was read, and the new political
line up, which follows the dynastic tradition started with her father,
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the party founder, follows her wishes, party
officials said.

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, a tall and composed Oxford student, took the
center chair at the news conference at the Bhutto family enclave as he
read the announcement that the party would contest the coming election.

“The long and historic struggle for democracy will continue with
renewed vigor,” he said. “My mother always said democracy was the best
revenge.”

Ms. Bhutto’s husband, Mr. Zardari, said the party had passed a
resolution that would be sent to the United Nations calling for an
international inquiry into the circumstances of her death. He specified
that the British government should help in the inquiry. He added the
government did not accept the inquiries being conducted by the
government of President Pervez Musharraf.

The decision to contest the election is seen as a pragmatic move to
attract the massive sympathy vote that the party expects in the wake of
Ms. Bhutto’s assassination. Some analysts said they believed the party
could top the government party’s vote, and command a new parliament.

But the government indicated Sunday that the election, scheduled for
Jan. 8, would likely be delayed, perhaps as much as four months,
leaving vast uncertainties over the volatile political scene here.

The news conference was an emotional affair, dominated by Mr. Zardari,
who spoke in Urdu, often in a voice of near rage. Mr. Zardari, known as
Mr. Ten Percent during his reign as Minister for Investment during Ms.
Bhutto’s second term as Prime Minister, was jailed in Pakistan for
eight years on corruption charges. Mr. Zardari still faces corruption
charges in Switzerland, his lawyer there said earlier this week.

On Sunday, he said the coming election would be a “war against the
people in the government of Pakistan now.” It was not a war against the
army, he added.

He was particularly tough on President Pervez Musharraf, calling his
political party, a faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, the “Qatil”
League.The word “Qatil” in Urdu means murderer.

When reporters began directing questions at his son, Mr. Zardari
stepped in saying that Bilawal was still of a “tender” age, and that
one question was enough. In answer to that question, Mr. Bhutto Zardari
said he would return to run the party full time once he had completed
his studies at Oxford.

Mr. Zardari urged the main opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, who heads a
faction of the Pakistan Muslim League and promised to boycott the
election, to contest the election, too. Mr. Sharif is likely to follow
the recommendation.

For the last several days, Mr. Sharif has gone out of his way to show
conciliation towards the Bhutto clan, showing up at the hospital as
soon as she was pronounced dead and then following up with a visit to
her family compound to offer prayers after her burial.

Mr. Sharif said that together his party and the Pakistan Peoples Party
party can make common cause against the Musharraf government.

As pressure increased on Pakistan to accept an international inquiry
into Ms. Bhutto’s death, the team of doctors who frantically tried to
revive her Thursday said they had requested an autopsy but were
rebuffed by the chief of police in Rawalpindi, according to a member of
the board of the hospital where she was treated.

The question of an autopsy has become central to the circumstances of
Ms. Bhutto’s death because of conflicting versions put forward by the
Pakistani government of how she died.

On the night Ms. Bhutto died, an unnamed Interior Ministry spokesman
was quoted by the official Pakistani news agency as saying that the
former prime minister had died of a “bullet wound in the neck by a
suicide bomber.”

The next day, Javed Iqbal Cheema, the Interior Ministry spokesman, said
at a news conference that Ms. Bhutto had died of a wound suffered when
she hit her head on a lever attached to the sunroof of the vehicle that
was carrying her through a crowd after a political rally. “Three shots
were fired, but they missed her,” Mr. Cheema said. “Then there was an
explosion.”

The explanation was greeted with disbelief by Ms. Bhutto’s supporters,
ordinary Pakistanis and medical experts outside the government.

Pakistani and Western security experts said they believed the
government’s insistence that Ms. Bhutto was not killed by a bullet was
designed to deflect attention from the lack of government security
around her vehicle as she left the park in the city where the Pakistani
Army keeps its headquarters, and where the powerful Inter Services
Intelligence agency has a strong presence, Pakistani and Western
security experts said.

Dr. Mohammad Mussadiq Khan, the principal professor of surgery at the
hospital, said on the night of her death that Ms. Bhutto had died of a
bullet wound, according to the account of Athar Minallah, the board
member of the Rawalpindi General Hospital.

Mr. Minallah released the medical report written by Dr. Khan and six
other doctors together with an open letter supporting the doctors in
their call for an autopsy.

The report did not mention a bullet because the actual cause of the
head injury was left to the autopsy required under Pakistani law when a
person dies under suspicious or criminal circumstances, Mr. Minallah
said.

The report said the doctors had tried for 41 minutes to revive her. It
said “the patient was pulseless and was not breathing” when she arrived
at the hospital.

“A wound was present on the right temporoparietal region through which
blood was trickling down, and whitish material which looked like brain
matter was visible in the wound,” it said.

Although Mr. Cheema, the government spokesman, insisted that Ms. Bhutto
did not die of a bullet wound, he also insisted that Baitullah Mehsud,
a Pakistani militant linked to Al Qaeda, was responsible for her death.
In short, his contention at his briefings was this: a gunman fired, but
missed; a suicide bomber from Mr. Mehsud’s group then blew himself up,
and as Ms. Bhutto ducked from the attack, she hit her head on a lever
on the sunroof of her car.

An account of Ms. Bhutto’s death that did not involve a gunshot wound
was the optimal explanation for the government, said Bruce Riedel, an
expert on Pakistan at the Brookings Institution in Washington, and a
former member of the National Security Council in the Clinton
administration.

“If there is a gunshot wound the security was abysmal,” Ms. Riedel
said. The government did not want to be exposed on its careless
security approach, he said.

As the government’s explanation raised questions, new images of the
gunman, dressed in a sleeveless black waistcoat and wearing rimless
sunglasses, were splashed across the front pages of Pakistan’s Sunday
papers.

The man with the gun who is seen opening fire on Ms. Bhutto just a few
meters from her wore a short haircut similar to those of plainclothes
intelligence officials. He is seen standing in front of a man whose
head is covered in a shawl in the style of Pashtun men from the
Pakistani tribal areas where Al Qaeda has strongholds. He is described
in the newspaper, Dawn, as the suicide bomber who detonated a bomb
after the shots were fired.

In the open letter that Mr. Minallah distributed along with the medical
report to the Pakistani news media and to The New York Times, Mr.
Minallah suggested the doctors felt they were being pressured by the
government to back the theory that she had died by hitting her head on
the lever of the car’s sunroof.

But the doctors had stressed to him that “without an autopsy it is not
at all possible to determine as to what had caused the injury,” Mr.
Minallah wrote in his open letter.

The chief of police in Rawalpindi, Aziz Saud, “did not agree” to the
autopsy request by the doctors, Mr. Minallah added.

                                ***

Channel 4 News - UK - Dec 29, 2007
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/politics/international_politics/pakistan+crisis+continues+/1243647

Pakistan crisis continues

By Jonathan Rugman

The violence that has gripped Pakistan since Mrs Bhutto's assassination
continued today with running battles fought between police and
protestors on the streets of Rawalpindi

Within the last hour new photographs have been released which appear to
show gunman who shot the Pakistani opposition leader at a rally in
Rawalpindi on Thursday and a separate suspected bomber who detonated
explosives.

Thousands of troops were deployed across the main cities as the
government sought to regain control.

Three of Mrs Bhutto's supporters were shot today bringing the death
toll in this latest crisis to 44. At a press conference the Interior
Minister at press conference claimed rioting had destroyed almost 200
banks as well as 18 railway stations and that 100 prisoners sprung from
jail.

The war of words between the government and Mrs Bhutto's supporters
continued today. One of her aides dismissing as "ludicrous" claims that
she died after hitting her head on the car sunroof during the attack.