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Benazir Bhutto: Countries
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The central commemoration ceremony in connection with the chehlum of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has begun with the recitation of the Quran (Quran Khawni) in Garhi Khuda Bux in the countrys Sindh Province on Thursday morning. ANI
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Bhutto later claimed that she had warned the Pakistani government that suicide bomb squads would target her upon her return to Pakistan and that the government had failed to act. She was careful not to blame Pervez Musharraf for the attacks, accusing instead "certain individuals [within the government] who abuse their positions, who abuse their powers" to advance the cause of Islamic militants. Shortly after the attempt on her life, Bhutto wrote a letter to Musharraf naming four persons whom she suspected of carrying out the attack. Those named included Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, a rival PML-Q politician and chief minister of Pakistan's Punjab province, Hamid Gul, former director of the Inter-Services Intelligence, and Ijaz Shah, the director general of the Intelligence Bureau, another of the country’s intelligence agencies. All those named are close associates of General Musharraf. Bhutto has a long history of accusing parts of the government, particularly Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agencies, of working against her and her party because they oppose her liberal, secular agenda.
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Like her country, Bhutto is a riddle. Brilliant, beautiful, fearless, she is ... ruthlessly ambitious, devious and corrupt. The first question that perplexes an American: How could Bhutto — Harvard- and Oxford-educated, unapologetically secular — have become the first woman elected to lead a Muslim country? In part, the answer is that in dynastic Pakistan, she is effectively royalty. The second question: Why should this election matter so much to America? That answer is simpler.
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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.
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It was a death foretold when a suicide bomber killed former Pakistan Prime Minister and opposition leader Benazir Bhutto after an election rally of her Pakistan People's Party (PPP) in the garrison city of Rawalpindi on December 27. That perhaps was why grief so rapidly turned into fury. PPP supporters took to the streets in violent protest in Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi and a dozen other cities. Thirty-one were killed in gun battles, including several police. More may fall after Bhutto's tumultuous funeral in her ancestral home of Larkana on Friday. With two weeks to go before elections, Pakistan is a country on a precipice.
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Bhutto, who is the chairwoman of the prominent Pakistan Peoples Party, is seizing on a very low moment in Musharraf's popularity to bargain with him. His long alliance with George Bush, his failed attempt at firing Pakistan's popular supreme court chief justice last March and his authorization of a raid last July on an Islamabad mosque, which killed 100 people, all weigh heavily in her favor. An independent poll conducted in late August showed Musharraf with only a 38 percent approval rating, George Bush with nine percent -- and Osama bin Laden with 46 percent. Bhutto held a 63 percent approval rating.... She hopes to use that advantage to restore democracy in her country with herself at the helm, and then convince the Pakistani people that America's antiterrorism agenda is preferable to the al-Qaeda alternative.
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