Murdering South Asian leadership

The bloody saga of extending terrorist threats on our heads of states

by Dhaneshi Yatawara

Friday the 28th December 2007: "We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat (the) mujahadeen'," al-Qaeda Commander and spokesman Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid has told the Italian news agency Adnkronos International (AKI) in a phone call from an unknown location claiming the responsibility over the assassination of Madam Benazir Bhutto, Press Trust of India reported.

On the fateful evening of Thursday the 27th of December 2007 Benazir Bhutto, the 54-year-old former Pakistan Premier died after being shot by a suicide attacker, who subsequently blew himself up near the venue of her election rally in Rawalpindi in Pakistan. Her husband Asif Ali Zardari and three children returned to Pakistan from Dubai late Thursday night and accompanied her body in a special military aircraft from Rawalpindi to her ancestral village in Sindh province.

Just hours before her assassination, Benazir has spoken to her three children - Bakhtawar (19), Bilawal (17) and Asifa (14) - over the phone, news reports flowing from Pakistan states.

Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto inspects a Pakistani post in Siachen Glacier with army officers

Benazir Bhutto sworn in as the Prime Minister of Pakistan in 1988

Madam Benazir Bhutto, the two-time Prime Minister of Pakistan ended her life or was forced by terrorists to end her life attesting the de facto threat from terrorism on the South Asian leadership.

Currently, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) finds it is difficult to appoint a similar charismatic personality to replace Bhutto's position - equally popular and influential.

Once in an interview with America's popular three hour national morning show 'TODAY' on 22 October 2007 Bhutto said, "Look into the eyes of the people who came to receive me at the airport, the joy, the happiness, the singing, the dancing, before the terrorists struck," said Bhutto. "They were celebrating my return because they want hope. If I don't come back, the 160 million people of Pakistan won't have hope of a future free from terrorism, a future that there will be democracy," when the presenter questioned about Bhutto's return to her homeland despite her fantastic opportunity to live in London safely with the children.

Former President John F. Kennedy, one of the most popular Presidents of USA once said that "Men die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on".

During the signing ceremony of her Autobiography in Dubai May 2007 Benazir said, "My Father was arrested, released, rearrested and finally hanged.

When I took my leave of him from the dark death cell in which the tyrants had imprisoned him, I promised to keep alive his dream of a democratic Pakistan. Since then I have never wavered in my commitment to democracy."

She added, "The battle for democracy has not been an easy one. I lost my two brothers who were both victims of political assassination. My husband spent eleven and a half years of our married life behind prison walls.

I was imprisoned for almost six years as was my Mother. We were hunted, hounded and exposed to psychological warfare to break our spirit. Our faith in God, the people of our country and the righteousness of our cause sustained us through the bitter days and nights.

I raised my children as a single parent coping with the demands of a family, a political career and litigation. As a Mother, I suffered the most when I had to leave my children when they were small. I had shifted them to London and then Dubai while I continued to live in Pakistan for a while."

Bhutto's actual encounters with maltreatments was soon after the dismissal of her father's government in 1977 and his execution in 1979 as she intensified her criticisms of the then Government of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and attempts to organize a political movement against him.

S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike	Mahatma Gandhi

Repeatedly put under house arrest, she was finally imprisoned under solitary confinement in a desert cell in Sindh province during the summer of 1981.

"The summer heat turned my cell into an oven. My skin split and peeled, coming off my hands in sheets. Boils erupted on my face. My hair, which had always been thick, began to come out by the handful. Insects crept into the cell like invading armies. Grasshoppers, mosquitoes, stinging flies, bees and bugs came up through the cracks in the floor and through the open bars from the courtyard. Big black ants, cockroaches, seething clumps of little red ants and spiders. I tried pulling the sheet over my head at night to hide from their bites, pushing it back when it got too hot to breathe," Bhutto describes those hellish settings in her autobiography "Daughter of Destiny".

Rajiv Gandhi	Ranasinghe Premadasa	Indira Gandhi

In 1984 she was finally allowed to travel to England to receive treatment for a serious ear infection and she remained in exile there until after Zia lifted Martial Law in December 1985. A huge crowd numbering in the hundreds of thousands turned out on the streets to greet her when she returned to Lahore in April 1986. Bhutto's stirring oratory, familiar name, and striking appearance helped give her a strong mass appeal.

During a speech she made at the Indiana University, USA in November 2004 Bhutto said that she had known both successes and setbacks but she had never wavered from the commitment she made in the death cell with her Father stating it is a commitment to fight for democracy and human rights and that she would continue to do so.

Born into a wealthy landholding family with a tradition of political activism in southeastern Sindh province of Pakistan, Bhutto enjoyed a privileged childhood. Bhutto was born June 21, 1953, in Karachi, Pakistan as the only daughter of former Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto an inspiring political leader and Nusrat Bhutto former Member of Parliament and Deputy Prime Minister of Pakistan.

She went on to study political science and philosophy at Radcliffe College and Oxford University. She excelled academically and planned to work with her father's government as a professional diplomat upon her return to Pakistan in June 1977.

Only two weeks later, however, military officers led by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq - capitalizing on public protests of disputed parliamentary elections - overthrew Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in a bloodless coup. Benazir Bhutto spent the next eighteen months in and out of house arrest as she struggled to rally political support to force Zia to drop fallacious murder charges against her father.

The military dictator ignored worldwide appeals for clemency and had Zulfikar Bhutto hanged in April of 1979.

Bhutto led the PPP to victory in 1988 in the Pakistani elections, country's free election held after eleven years, and Bhutto instantly thrust in to political centre stage in the back drop of General Zia's death in a mysterious airplane crash in August 1988. She swore into office as the Prime Minister in December - the first female Premier in any Islamic country on the globe.

In August 1990 after having been in office less than half of her tenure, the then President Ghulam Ishaque Khan dismissed her government unilaterally and called for fresh elections.

While ensuring that her Party was not returned to power, the then President and the acting Prime Minister filed a series of references against Benazir Bhutto and in addition her husband Asif Ali Zardari was arrested and imprisoned for over two years on a number of trumped up charges.

In July 1993, the President of Pakistan dismissed the Government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on corruption charges and called for fresh elections.

The Pakistan Peoples Party went to the people in October, 1993 with a new "Agenda for Change". Benazir Bhutto was again elected as the Prime Minister after achieving strong popular support in all the four provinces of Pakistan.

In 1998 during Prime Minister Nawas Sherif's regime, Bhutto leaves Pakistan for exile on basis of political threats on herself and her family.

"It was no secret to me that I could be attacked. I chose to return and put my life on the line to defend a principle I believe in. I never forced anyone to come out to the airport to receive me. They chose to come because they wanted to bring change, to bring democracy and to save their motherland from disintegrating," Bhutto stated further during 'TODAY'- the American morning show in October, commenting on her return to Pakistan in 2007.

Ironically, in one of her speeches at the Political Parties Conference held in Bangkok during November 22- 24 in 2002 Bhutto says, "As an Asian leader in the twenty first century the greatest challenge I see is to overcome terrorism. Asians need peace, freedom and free markets to fight poverty, hunger, unemployment and conflict.

A brighter future is anchored in peace, in freedom, in equal opportunity and in breaking the chains of fascism and dictatorship.

These were the values our forefathers fought for in confronting colonialism.

There are the values that can sustain and strengthen us in this new century," urging all Asian political parties to stand by the values of peace, of freedom and of equal opportunity.

Madam Benazir Bhutto is not the first or the last to face such tragedy in the path of protecting democracy and paying the price with life for such great causes - and not of course the first in Rawalpindi. Pakistan's first Prime Minister, Liaqat Ali Khan, was shot twice in the chest while attending a public meeting in Rawalpindi on October 16, 1951 - just three years after Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated at a prayer meeting in the very heart of the Indian capital.

The bloody saga of assassinations of leaders in our region starts with those fatal shootings on Mahatma Gandhi by a lone killer named Nathuram Godse, who shot him from close range at Birla House on the morning of January 31, 1948 during a prayer meeting.

We Sri Lankans witnessed our first major political assassination when a terrorist disguised as a Buddhist monk shot dead President S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike on September 26, 1959 in Colombo.

In 1993, three decades later, Sri Lanka's 3rd Executive President Ranasinghe Premadasa was killed when a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber strapped with explosives blew up at a May Day rally held in Armour Street in the Colombo city.

In 1994, Gamini Dissanayake the then opposition leader was killed in a suicide attack triggered by the LTTE, during one of his campaign rallies as a Presidential candidate.

In Bangladesh, country's founder leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and most of his family were shot and killed on August 15, 1975 by a group of irritated Army personnel. Bangladesh was found in 1971 after a bloody struggle against the Pakistani military.

President Zia ur Rahman, who took power soon after Mujibur Rahman's death, was also killed by army officers in the port town of Chittagong on May 29, 1981.

Indira Gandhi - the 3rd and the 6th Prime Minister of India, was assassinated by two of her many body guards namely Satwant Singh and Beant Singh with machine guns on October 31, 1984 in the garden of the Prime Minister's Residence at No. 1, Safdarjung Road in New Delhi. Both the killers were Sikhs and Indira Gandhi, during that period was highly critisized on the controversy over the killings took place in the Golden Temple - Sikhism's holiest shrine. In September 1981, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, a freedom fighter associated with a separatist Sikh militant group took up positions within the precincts of the Golden Temple and Gandhi ordered the Army, to enter the site with full military force in an attempt to kill Bhindranwale despite the presence of thousands of civilians in the Golden Temple complex at the time who were paying pilgrimage to Guru Arjun Dev Ji's martyrdom anniversary. Many of the pilgrims caught in the crossfire and were killed.

Rajiv Gandhi, the 7th Prime Minister of India and son of Indira and Feroze Gandhi was killed by the LTTE suicide bomber Thenmuli Rajaratnam also known as Gayatri and Dhanu on May 21, 1991, while campaigning for the Sriperumbudur Lok Sabha Congress candidate in a village approximately 30-miles from Chennai, Tamil Nadu.

South Asia continues to face this huge challenge of terrorism. The massacres, assassinations, displacements of victimized people amplify the prevailing social, economical problems with in the region. Necessity of leaders with a vision and charisma, who can make a greater impact in the international arena, is becoming intense.

Hence, the leaders of the region should have a vision and a mission to combat terrorism or at least immobilize terror tactics in order to let the future generation, the future leaders to breath freely in our societies where terrorism and extremism has no say.

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