Benazir Bhutto (1953 - 2007) was a Pakistani politician and statesman who served as Prime Minister of her country on two occasions. He had a more open social vision than the one that had prevailed until then and sought to modernize the nation during his tenure..
She was the first woman to lead a Muslim state when she became Prime Minister of Pakistan in 1988. She belonged to the Pakistani People's Party, which had been led by her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto..
Bhutto's first term as Prime Minister ended in 1990. Politics returned to Prime Minister in 1993; she and her family were victims of various attacks.
After losing the elections in 1997, she went into exile from her country. Bhutto returned to Pakistan in 2007 and was murdered in December of that same year in a suicide attack with explosives and firearms..
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Benazir Buttho was born on June 21, 1953 in Karachi, Pakistan. She was the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a politician, and her mother was Begum Nusrat Ispahani. The Bhutto family was very powerful in the Sindh region, where they were also related to politics and the aristocracy.
She was the oldest of four siblings and was educated under the English system in institutes located in Pakistan. During Benazir Bhutto's childhood, his father already held high positions in the government such as Minister of Foreign Affairs.
In 1969 Bhutto was sent to study at Harvard University's Radcliffe College, where she received honors as a Bachelor of Arts in 1973. Since 1971 her father, Zulfikar Bhutto, served as President of Pakistan..
After graduation from Harvard, Bhutto moved to England and began studying at the Lady Margaret Hall of the University of Oxford. At the same university, he completed a postgraduate degree in diplomacy and international law at St. Catherine's College.
Bhutto returned to Pakistan in 1977 and began working in various government offices. That same year his father was deposed by a military coup and later he was imprisoned by the new government..
Benazir's brothers were sent abroad, but she remained in Pakistan and occasionally visited their father in jail. Zulfikar Bhutto was sentenced to death and his sentence was carried out in 1979, while his wife and daughter were sentenced to house arrest..
After the death of his father, Benazir Bhutto took on the role of leader of the Pakistani People's Party (PPP), which had been founded by Zulfikar. Bhutto's brothers took up arms and in 1981 hijacked a Pakistan International Airlines plane.
That led to the arrest of Benazir Bhutto and his mother, who was released that same year. However, Bhutto was imprisoned until 1984.
Following his release, Bhutto settled in London and spent time in exile. After the death penalty was abolished in Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto decided to return to his country and did so in 1986.
Then she began to give public speeches and her political popularity increased. In December 1987 Bhutto married Asif Ali Zardari and soon after became pregnant.
The following year, in 1988, parliamentary elections were called and shortly after the dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq was killed in a plane crash..
The PPP won 93 of the 205 seats in Parliament and, in December 1988, Benazir Bhutto became the Prime Minister of Pakistan. She also became the first woman to hold that position in a Muslim country..
Furthermore, she was the youngest prime minister in the world at the time. His most relevant actions of the period were the release of political prisoners and permission to create unions and student associations..
During his government, he did not maintain good relations with the President of Pakistan, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who tried to sabotage Bhutto's mandate in different ways, including by tainting his government with rumors of corruption..
Finally, Khan dissolved the Bhutto government in 1990.
Following their departure from the Pakistani Prime Ministry office, Bhutto and her husband faced corruption charges. Benazir began to act as leader of the opposition at the head of the PPP.
In 1993 Benazir Bhutto's party once again won the majority of seats in Parliament and in October she was sworn in as prime minister for the second time. During this period, she brought her husband and mother into her cabinet, which gave her a reputation for being corrupt and nepotist..
For her second term as prime minister, Bhutto took it upon herself to further support feminist and gender equality causes in Pakistan. Also in those years he moved towards the liberal trend in the economy and supported the privatization of some state industries..
Again in 1996 Benazir Bhutto was separated from her role as prime minister on allegations of corruption. And she, once again, was selected as the leader of the opposition.
In 1999 one of Pakistan's military chiefs, Pervez Musharraf, staged a coup and deposed the legitimate government. From that time on, she and her family left the country and settled between London and Dubai; however, her husband was imprisoned until 2004.
Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on December 27, 2007 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. She had participated in a popular demonstration and leaned out of a window in the roof of the armored vehicle that was transporting her.
The van Bhutto was in received multiple gunshot wounds from a nearby man, and then the attacker detonated a vest bomb he was wearing. The former prime minister was taken to a hospital, but when she arrived at the health center she was already dead.
Another 22 people died in the attack and it is believed that the responsibility was of a Pakistani Taliban group. Politics had returned in October 2007 after an amnesty agreement with Musharraf.
Bhutto had three children, a boy named Bilawal, and two girls, named Bakhtawar and Aseefa. The former was designated the political and leadership heir of the PPP in his mother's will..
- "Democracy needs support and the best support comes from other democracies".
- “To make peace, one must be an uncompromising leader. To make peace, you also have to embody commitment ".
- “Leadership is a commitment to an idea, to a dream, and to a vision of what it can be. And my dream is that my land and my people stop fighting ".
- "Democracy is the best revenge".
- "The Pakistan People's Party and I represent everything they (Al Qaeda members) fear most: restraint, democracy, equality for women, information and technology.".
- "Leadership is doing the right thing by educating and inspiring an electorate, empathizing with the moods, needs, desires and aspirations of humanity".
- "I have discovered that those who achieve peace never accept obstacles, especially those built with fanaticism, intolerance and uncompromising tradition".
- "A people inspired by democracy, human rights and economic opportunity will decisively turn its back on extremism".
- “The oppression does not know the meaning of the provincial borders. Are not our energies better spent fighting the common enemy instead of each other? ".
- "I did not choose to live this life, this life chose me".
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