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
