Benazir’s Murder: Who Killed Her?

Benazir died the way she had lived all her life: tumultuously. Her lifestyle, notwithstanding her much-ballyhooed sobriquet of being a daughter of the east, was a far cry from the conventional wisdom surrounding a role-model ‘daughter of the east.’ She rather fitted the western module of a woman-on-the-move, all the time.

That said, it wasn’t ordained that she should be killed in the manner of Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, Liaqat Ali Khan—shot and killed at the same venue in Rawalpindi, since named after him, 56 years ago—or like the mysterious murder of one of 20th century’s most admired icons, President John F. Kennedy.

Both those murders, still wrapped in mystery, bear an eerie, striking, resemblance with BB’s heinous murder. Liaqat, 56 years- old (BB was 54) was at the peak of his power and popularity when he was gunned down, apparently by a lone assassin, in broad daylight of October 16, 1951. The people of Pakistan fawned on him as the worthy successor of the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and looked up to him to lead them for years to come in a democratic Pakistan. But the powerful feudal barons, itching to lay their grubby hands on the levers of power in Pakistan loathed him, because as long as he was around they couldn’t have succeeded in their designs to suffocate democracy. So they murdered him, and what followed in Pakistan is a history written with toil and blood—of the innocent and the disenfranchised befuddled masses of Pakistan.

Liaqat’s lone assassin was killed on the spot by another conspirator. But, to date, the conspiracy that first targeted Pakistan’s democratic track remains shrouded in uncertainty. No government in Pakistan, in 56 years, has bothered to make the inquiry report public. On has every reason to doubt if the original report still survives in the dungeon of the national archives, or ‘secrets,’ in popular parlance.

John Kennedy was also, for the record, killed by the bullets of a solitary assassin. That’s how the Warren Commission, headed by one of United States’ most respected jurists, had concluded. But the lone assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself killed by a ‘distraught’ (in the jargon of the establishment) Kennedy admirer, night-club-owner, Jack Ruby, who then served a life sentence for his crime. But, like Liaqat’s unresolved murder mystery, common sense and conventional wisdom has never bought the establishment version that Oswald or Ruby were their own masters.

The jury in BB’s callous murder will, in all likelihood, remain out for a very long time to come, if not forever. The establishment in Pakistan is far too well organized to allow any chinks in its armor to be pried open. It has already set about with a clear agenda to cover its flanks and shroud the tracks that could provide valuable leads to an independent inquiry committee or commission looking for clues.

It’s unthinkable in a law-abiding and civilized society that forensic evidence of the crime perpetrated against the life of a national icon that Benazir most certainly was should be washed away with obscene haste. But the world was made to witness, live on its television screens, that invaluable forensic evidence on the ground of the murder venue being washed away with powerful water jets, literally within hours of the murder. What was the compulsion behind that move, other than covering clues to guilt?

And why wasn’t BB’s body post-mortem not carried out? It sounds so naïve and unconvincing that the post-mortem was dispensed with at the request of Asif Zardari, BB’s spouse. How come the writ of the state, so much touted in jarring bombastic by the establishment apologists and errand boys, was made subservient to the personal whims of a man as maligned in the ruling circles of Islamabad as Zardari?

It’s a basic, unavoidable, requirement of law in law-abiding societies to carry out a post-mortem in order to determine the cause of death in the first place. Its absence offers fodder to the rumour mills, already churning in over-drive, voicing concern that the establishment wasn’t, and also isn’t, interested much in plumbing the depth of the tragedy of BB’s murder, or the conspiracy behind it.

The regime of a de-frocked Musharraf is busy, in fact, in tying itself in all sorts of knots—of innuendoes, fabrications and outright lies, of which there are several factories working round the clock in Islamabad.

The regime’s Goebbels, the retired Brigadier Cheema, in control of the Interior Division, had no compunction, or speck of morality, in holding court in Islamabad, the day-after BB’s murder, while her body was being interred in the family grave-yard at Garhi Khuda Baksh.

Cheema found it politically expedient to pin the blame, without much ado, on Al-Qaeda and its Pakistani face, the notorious Baitullah Mehsud. He was playing to the neo-con gallery in Washington. Isn’t it fashionable there, too, to pin every bomb blast or some such crime on Al_Qaeda’s chest and proclaim it guilty by suspicion? So Cheema was out to court favour with his boss, Musharraf’s mentors in high places in the Bush administration, believing they would just lap it up without a question asked.

But the days of the neo cons are numbered in Washington. Hillary Clinton, whose star is shining bright on the American firmament for next year’s presidential election, has not been impressed by Cheema or his master. She has dismissed the Pakistani government’s sanitized version of BB’s murder and called for an international tribunal, a la one looking into the February 2005 murder, in BB-like circumstances, of the Lebanese icon and PM, Rafik Hariri, in broad- daylight on the streets of Beirut.

There’s virtually zero chance of Musharraf warming up to Hillary’s call for a international and independent tribunal, although BB’s global stature and persona clearly warrants one. He and his minions and henchmen are anxious to wash their hands of the murder of Pakistan’s only icon that could galvanise the nation against his corrupt and oppressive rule. The former commando’s anxiety to have this dastardly crime behind him is understandable. Benazir had star qualities and attributes in her lifetime and has the potential to become a greater pain in the general’s neck from her grave.

Obviously on cue from their power-obsessed, megalomaniac, boss, Cheema and sundry other Musharraf acolytes are desperate to sell their version of the murder of Benazir. They want the world to gulp and swallow the fabricated ‘fact’ that BB was neither killed by the assassin’s bullet, or shrapnel of the bomb exploded by him or his cohort, or cohorts. Rather, going by Cheema’s macabre, cock-and-bull, version of the ghastly drama staged outside the blood-friendly Liaqat Bagh, BB was killed from the latch or lever of the sun-roof of her armor-plated car.

The medical report, from the doctor who attended BB in her last moments, earlier spoke of bullet wounds bleeding her to death. However, in line with Cheema’s bizarre explanation of BB’s cause of death the very same doctor, and his other associates, have quickly tailored their report to fit the official parameters.

It may take months and years, if ever, for the real cause of BB’s cold-blooded murder on the streets of Rawalpindi—the garrison town boasting of being the cradle of Pakistan’s self-styled Bonapartes and ‘national saviours.’

But the Musharraf regime has already been as conspicuously lacking in grace in dealing with the aftermath of BB as it was in its treatment of her in life.

Musharraf could have put some brakes on the free-fall of his popularity and legitimacy as Pakistan’s uncrowned king if he could have mustered a little grace to accord BB a state funeral. She deserved every bit of it as a two-term leader of Pakistan, who also happened to have the most-easily recognizable Pakistani face in the world chancelleries and news media. Would Musharraf have ceded any morsel of his unbridled power if he had had the human quality to bury the hatchet in death and act as a statesman by ordering a 21-gun salute for the fallen hero, or a national shroud of Pakistan’s flag for it? No. On the contrary he could have considerably shored up his sinking fortunes. But the man simply remains obsessed with power and to watch over it like a hawk.

The regime’s appalling dignity-deficit in dealing with a crisis of not just Pakistani but international proportions exposes the real face of a cruel, inhumane and morally corrupt oligarchy holding Pakistan in its thrall since it extinguished the life of Liaqat, more than a half-century ago. It remains unapologetic in its ways, and will simply not mend its ways.

The jury, as said earlier, may remain out on the conspiracy to murder Benazir. We may never know what and who killed her. But what’s certain is that BB from her grave would continue to haunt the power usurpers and feudal barons holding this nation of 165 million to ransom in their insatiable lust for power.