Benazir Bhutto (1953 – 2007)

It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks about anything anymore.

Though Benazir Bhutto came under a great deal of scrutiny during and after her two stints as Prime Minister of Pakistan, for corruption and for not fulfilling campaign promises, the fact still remains that she was the first woman to serve as Prime Minister in a Muslim country. As a resident of a country which prides itself on being modern and on the forefront of democratic systems of government, and yet has still not had a woman president, I find this to be a pretty decent accomplishment.

At the end of the day, it is really tragic. Her father was assassinated. She herself was imprisoned previously. None of the pro-women reforms that she attempted to make as Prime Minister were ever implemented because of political pressure from the rest of the government. Juan Cole likened the Bhutto family to the Kennedys in his article yesterday. It is a decent analogy. They Kennedys, for all their foibles, were symbols to Americans. In the same way, Benazir Bhutto was a symbol not just to Pakistanis, but to women, Muslims, and people living in politically and socially restrictive states the world over.

Unfortunately, Bhutto will not be remembered for anything that she did: good or ill. She will now only be remembered for having been killed by extremists, ironically as she once supported the advancement of another group of extremists in Afghanistan: the Taliban.

Whether you agree or disagree with Bhutto’s policy decisions 15 years ago, before a self-imposed exile from Pakistan, it is difficult to see her death as anything but tragic. Her untimely demise will be this month’s placard for the pigeon-holing of Muslims as extremists and terrorists. This is as bad as simply forgetting about the murder entirely. There is, however, little chance of this. Now, and for the immediate foreseeable future, her death will be used and abused by everyone from United States politicians to Pakistani party leaders to the men who plotted her murder for their own spin and manipulative plotting.

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