General News: A Great Woman Remembered

By Nancy Peckenham

She was more than a name, a world leader in a tumultous country half a world away. When I saw the news flash that Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated, I thought of the person I had spent some time with nearly 15 years ago.

I met Benazir Bhutto in the airport in Atlanta. I had talked my way past the customs guard to greet our guest who was coming to speak at a broadcasting conference I had organized at CNN. Carrying a dozen roses, I waited until I saw her and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, walking towards me, a bit rumpled from their long flight from Pakistan.

Within moments, she had relieved me of any need to stand on formality with a former head of state. She spoke immediately of her long recovery from the birth of her third child several months earlier. She smiled and congratulated me when I told her I was expecting my first child within five months.

The next day when I introduced her to the room full of world political leaders, journalists, and assembled dignitaries, I reminded them of her family's deep roots in Pakistan: the death of her father, who had served as prime minister in the 1970s, by hanging. Her own careful grooming at privileged private schools in Pakistan, then at Harvard and, finally, Oxford, prepared her to lead the Pakistan Peoples Party, which her father, then her mother, had both led. In 1988, I said, she was elected that country's leader ? the first woman to head a Muslim country.

When she took the podium that day in Atlanta, she talked about her commitment to bettering the role of women in her country, of fighting the tide of ignorance that threatened progress and human rights. She also spoke of the persecution that pursued her family, particularly her husband, who had been jailed several times on corruption charges.

Six months after we met in Atlanta, Bhutto was re-elected as prime minister of Pakistan. She enacted reforms and attempted to rule a country passionately divided by ethnicity, religion, and class. A member of the upper-class, Bhutto's education and modern ideas chafed many. Corruption charges, many of them quite weighty, ended her term as prime minister in 1996.

Whenever I heard Benazir Bhutto"s name on the television, I felt a personal connection to the person who had committed her life to building a political party to try and affect social change. During the past ten years as she lived in exile with her family, I wondered if she would remain part of Pakistan's past, a former player on the world scene whose name was slowly being erased from current memories.

In October when she returned from exile, intending to make a run for political power again as the head of the Pakistan Peoples Party, I saw for myself that the small connection I had harbored for more than a decade had been kept vibrantly alive by thousands of Pakistani people. Huge, crushing crowds of her supporters lined the streets to welcome her as her caravan inched along for hours. Adored, worshipped by many, she was also feared and hated by those who set off bombs to try to kill her on the day she arrived and again, successfully, today.

I share these memories from our village of Cornwall-on-Hudson, feeling a river breeze perhaps, but fully shielded from the intense winds that blow through Pakistan. But in that soft breeze I am reminded that greatness and humility found rare expression in the person of Benazir Bhutto and her death is a loss to us all.

Comments:

Add a Comment: