I read a little bit about Benazir Bhutto’s past this morning, wanting to find out more about the alleged history of corruption that accompanied her time as Pakistan’s prime minister.  Especially interesting was the Wikipedia entry on Bhutto, which went into some detail regarding the less than savory aspects of her “public service” in Pakistan.  (Since it’s Wikipedia, I try to take what it offers with a grain of salt.  But the article sounded fairly authoritative, so I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.)

In the above paragraph, I enclosed the term public service in quotation marks because it seems that, in the case of Ms. Bhutto, public service and personal enrichment were interchangeable concepts.

Here are some excerpts from the Wikipedia entry:

French, Polish, Spanish, and Swiss documents have fueled the charges of corruption against Bhutto and her husband. Bhutto and her husband faced a number of legal proceedings, including a charge of laundering money through Swiss banks. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, spent eight years in prison on similar corruption charges. Zardari, released from jail in 2004, has suggested that his time in prison involved torture; human rights groups have supported his claim that his rights were violated.

A 1998 New York Times investigative report indicates that Pakistani investigators have documents that uncover a network of bank accounts, all linked to the family’s lawyer in Switzerland, with Asif Zardari as the principal shareholder. According to the article, documents released by the French authorities indicated that Zardari offered exclusive rights to Dassault, a French aircraft manufacturer, to replace the air force’s fighter jets in exchange for a 5% commission to be paid to a Swiss corporation controlled by Zardari. The article also said a Dubai company received an exclusive license to import gold into Pakistan for which Asif Zardari received payments of more than $10 million into his Dubai-based Citibank accounts. The owner of the company denied that he had made payments to Zardari and claims the documents were forged. Bhutto maintained that the charges leveled against her and her husband were purely political. An Auditor General of Pakistan (AGP) report supports Bhutto’s claim. It presents information suggesting that Benazir Bhutto was ousted from power in 1990 as a result of a witch hunt approved by then-president Ghulam Ishaq Khan. The AGP report says Khan illegally paid legal advisers 28 million Rupees to file 19 corruption cases against Bhutto and her husband in 1990-92.

The assets held by Bhutto and her husband have been scrutinized. The prosecutors have alleged that their Swiss bank accounts contain £740 million. Zardari also bought a neo-Tudor mansion and estate worth over £4 million in Surrey, England, UK. The Pakistani investigations have tied other overseas properties to Zardari’s family. These include a $2.5 million manor in Normandy owned by Zardari’s parents, who had modest assets at the time of his marriage. Bhutto denied holding substantive overseas assets.

To my surprise, there is also a passage in the Wikipedia article hinting that Ms. Bhutto had a disturbingly elitist (and racist) attitude regarding current Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf:

Arthur Herman, a U.S. historian, in a controversial letter published in The Wall Street Journal on 14 June 2007, in response to an article by Bhutto highly critical of the president and his policies, has described her as “One of the most incompetent leaders in the history of South Asia”, and asserted that she and other elites in Pakistan hate Musharraf because he was a muhajir, the son of one of millions of Indian Muslims who fled to Pakistan during partition in 1947. Herman has claimed, “Although it was muhajirs who agitated for the creation of Pakistan in the first place, many native Pakistanis view them with contempt and treat them as third-class citizens.” Nonetheless, as of mid-2007, the US appeared to be pushing for a deal in which Musharraf would remain as president but step down as military head, and either Bhutto or one of her nominees would become prime minister.

So what gives here?  Was Bhutto a prime minister (public servant) or a broker between foreign industry and the government of Pakistan?  It sounds like both to me.

She was a crook, in my opinion, and it makes me wonder how she attained the messiah-like stature she enjoyed among many Pakistani voters.

But then who really cares?  She was only going to be the prime minister of…Pakistan.

As an aside, I have noted that Pakistan seems to be a fairly interesting place.  I especially enjoyed the spectacle of Bhutto supporters converging on Rawalpindi General Hospital following the assassination.  The scenes of people hopping up and down, hooting and hollering, pushing and shoving each other, flagellating themselves and the people closest to them, and waving automatic rifles in the air were striking to the outside observer.

And then there’s this tasty tidbit from the Times of India:

ISLAMABAD: The decision not to conduct an autopsy on slain ex-premier Benazir Bhutto’s body was taken by the Rawalpindi police chief even though a medico-legal report based on a mandatory post-mortem examination is a must in a murder case under Pakistani laws.

“Even if the family of a murder victim refuses to allow the autopsy, no investigation can be completed if doctors do not perform the autopsy and conclusively find the cause of death,” said Athar Minallah, a top lawyer and a member of the board of management of Rawalpindi General Hospital where Bhutto was taken after the attack on her on Thursday.

He said doctors, who treated Bhutto, had told him that they wanted to conduct the autopsy but the Rawalpindi Police chief had not agreed to this.

“The doctors were worried that their initial report, which did not determine the definite cause of death, is being politically twisted,” he told The News .

Minallah’s statement runs contrary to the contention of Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema, who had said on Friday that the autopsy was not done at the request of Bhutto’s husband Asif Ali Zardari.

Cheema said the doctors had performed only an “external post-mortem” using X-rays while Minallah argued that avoiding the mandatory autopsy on the body of Bhutto “was a violation of the Criminal Procedure Code.”

Why, there’s nothing fishy going on in Pakistan at all.

I think I’ll run right down to my travel agent and book a vacation in Rawalpindi….

For another (appropriately) cynical look at Pakistan’s Dragon Lady, read Sigmund, Carl & Alfred’s post about “Hillary’s Soul Mate.”

Chumps and loonies, indeed!

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