The curious case of Benazir Bhutto

Filipinos may find the story of Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto familiar.  Bhutto, to date the only female prime minister Pakistan has ever had, directly opposed the Musharraf regime and was exiled for her party leadership, on charges of corruption.  She returned in December 2007 to run against Musharraf in the 2008 elections, defiant and stubborn about her resolve to come home in the face of assassination threats.

As far as political assassinations go, Bhutto was not the first to go the way that she did.  I wrote my thesis on another assassinated political figure–the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino, who in 1984 was shot dead as he took his first few steps back in the country from a period of exile.  At the time, Aquino was largely regarded in the Philippines as the leader of the opposition to the martial-law Marcos government, even as he lived for much of the time in prison and in exile.

When Aquino was assassinated, public outrage over the incident was tremendous.  To this day, the downfall of Marcos is  ironically credited to this event as it sparked a national protest culminating in the 1986 Edsa Revolution.

I recall getting a text message from my dad the day Bhutto was assassinated and running to e-mail my thesis advisor, David Eisenhower, about it, only to find that he’d already sent me a note.  Months ago, we had spoken about the similarities between Pakistan under Musharraf and the Philippines under the Marcos regime.  Bhutto, he said, would be assassinated if she went home.  The day that news broke out of her death, we both thought of the conversation and wondered about the wider repercussions.

It is interesting to note that her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, now holds the presidency, just as Corazon Aquino did after the revolution.  And the Philippines, more than twenty years after the revolution and another ousted leader down, continues to be a hotbed of corruption and traditional politicians.  The similarities are chilling.  It is disquieting to think that Philippine politics today remains close to Pakistan’s.

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The AP reports that Benazir Bhutto has just been posthumously awarded the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights.  It is hard to know what to make of this.  While I may admire Bhutto for many things, her human rights record is not one of them.

Filed under: Politics, philippines, south asia

Revisiting Ron Paul

“Who doesn’t love the smell of libertarianism in the morning?”  Stephen J. Dubner asks.  Since coming to work for a free market thinktank, I have to say I’ve been ensconced in it.  And surprisingly, happily.  While I cannot seem to let go of an unshakeable belief in some of the things that I believe a government should provide for, I have to say there is something very appealing about the true relationship that a government and its people must have when it comes to respecting personal choices and oh, say freedom.

So, libertarianism — would you be my happy medium?

Ron Paul, arguably its most vocal champion, has had a history of proposing the most audacious solutions (like getting rid of the Fed and taking a “non-interventionist” bare-bones approach to foreign diplomacy) that would never in a million years really fly in the real world, but I will give him this — maybe there is merit to proposing the crazy, if after taking a long, hard look at the foundations of this country, one finds that the current state of government compromises much of the true liberty promised to its people.

I suspect it may be as my mom fears — I’ve gone soft on liberalism.

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Ron Paul on Sarah Palin –

At first, I thought it was a pretty savvy choice from a political perspective. I also knew that she had said some nice things about me in the past. At the same time, I knew that to be on the ticket, she would have to toe the line on foreign policy and the war, so that tempered a lot of my enthusiasm.

Filed under: libertarianism

Mumbai

Mother Sharda Janardhan Chitikar, left, is consoled by a relative as she grieves the death of her two children in terrorist attack in Mumbai, death toll rises to 125 and 327 injured. (AP Photo/Gurinder Osan)

It was a somber prelude to Thanksgiving to hear about the Mumbai terror attacks, like something out of a bad dream you’ve had one time too many.  It was a Friday night, maybe, as I recall, we were searching for cheap flights in vain, when my friend gasped on the phone.  There’s been a bombing in Bombay, she said.  Shock, and sharp intakes of breath all around.  A pause.  We fumble for words about the news a little — it is always jarring, no matter how many times one hears about these things — but we are jolted out of it momentarily.  It didn’t take long to return to what it was we’d been doing before we heard of it. 

How terrible to think now of that day and how little attention we paid to it, how the news of a “bombing” easily slipped through our minds like an everyday occurrence, how accustomed we’ve become to news of such violence.  An embassy bombed in Afghanistan.  Over 100 casualties in the latest suicide bombing.  Headlines that will never capture a tragedy’s true meaning.

This week, it chilled me to read of the bloodbath in Mumbai, even days late, for we never read about the killings, never learn the names behind the faceless victims, never feel the brunt of the senseless violence in the articles that read “20 killed in a marketplace attack” day in and day out.  Did it have to take the storming of a city, the heartless shooting of husbands before wives, the massacre of a Jewish rabbi and the Hasidic Jews of Mumbai, and the  indiscriminate open fire at unarmed civilians to shake a world already desensitized?“My bleeding city. My poor great bleeding heart of a city. Why do they go after Mumbai?”  It is an all-too-familiar cry, like a scene out of a nightmare you’ve had ever since you were a child.  And though we pray never to experience the same anguish, we know all this never really comes to an end.

In the Bombay I grew up in, your religion was a personal eccentricity, like a hairstyle. In my school, you were denominated by which cricketer or Bollywood star you worshiped, not which prophet. In today’s Mumbai, things have changed. Hindu and Muslim demagogues want the mobs to come out again in the streets, and slaughter one another in the name of God. They want India and Pakistan to go to war. They want Indian Muslims to be expelled. They want India to get out of Kashmir. They want mosques torn down. They want temples bombed.

That all of this must boil down to a deep-seated callous hatred born of centuries of ignorance is sad and maddening.  Hatred, especially that fueled by ignorance or vengeance, is a terrifying thing.  I keep remembering a scene I saw in a movie of the 1993 Mumbai riots, where Hindus burned, pillaged, and massacred whole Muslim communities in the city.  I was frozen to my chair, unwilling to believe this could have been real.  It happened.  People took sticks and beat women and children and burned houses down for being on the other side of the fence.  To think it is happening all over again, and it’s been happening since God-knows-when, and no one side is blameless — it is a wonder life goes on sometimes.

Just as cinema is a mass dream of the audience, Mumbai is a mass dream of the peoples of South Asia…  In other cities, if there’s an explosion, people run away from it. In Mumbai, people run toward it — to help. Greater Mumbai takes in a million new residents a year. This is the problem, say the nativists. The city is just too hospitable. You let them in, and they break your heart.

Terrorists are seen in the Chatrapathi Shivaji Terminal railway station in Mumbai on November 26, 2008. Teams of gunmen stormed luxury hotels, a popular restaurant, hospitals and a crowded train station in coordinated attacks across India’s financial capital, killing people. (AP Photo/Mumbai Mirror, Sebastian D’souza)

Filed under: south asia, terrorism