Benazir Bhutto
In the general elections in Pakistan held on February 18, the Pakistan People’s Party won 87 National Assembly seats, the most seats in the new parliament. This is the party of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto now co-chaired by her husband Asif Ali Zardari. Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) party secured 67 National Assembly seats and emerged as the second largest party after the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). Both parties have agreed to form a coalition government. If she had not been assassinated, Benazir Bhutto would now be Prime Minister.
My wife Beverley and I had occasion to join with Benazir Bhutto and her husband Asif Ali Zardari at a Christian Prayer Meeting in February 2006. Over 3,000 Christian politicians and church leaders from 160 countries attended the Washington Hilton Hotel. Among them were many international political leaders such as the President of Malawi, the King of Jordan, the President of Afghanistan, the Prime Minister of Norway, former Prime Ministers and Presidents, Governors, Senators, US Congressmen, Supreme Court judges, leaders of countries large and small, including the President of the USA.
Many of them gave impressive testimony to their faith then we were led by their prayers including those of Mrs. Benazir Bhutto, the Former Prime Minister of Pakistan who had twice been overthrown by the Army. Her husband was present having just been released from fourteen years jail as a political prisoner of the present regime.
We not only attended large groups but met and prayed in small groups as well. We discussed ways in which we could legislate for a more just and Godly society including issues of drugs, prison reform and Aids. At a dinner for all parliamentarians, I had the privilege of praying for all present. At the same time I also had lunch in the US Senate Dining Room with some Senate members and a visit into the House of Representatives where the night before the President had delivered his “State of the Union” address.
The tragic assassination of Benazir Bhutto, who returned to her country two months previously, is a staggering loss. Worldwide, Christians who are passionate about reaching Muslims with the Gospel should mourn her murder. Pamela Bone, a Melbourne writer, wrote giving some reasons why she was so open in our prayer meetings. She wrote: “My own heart is heavy, as a great woman and honest friend has been taken away. I knew Benazir personally, having debated her at the Oxford Union a few years ago. The day after the debate, she invited me to a private tea in her London home, where we talked about our similar backgrounds. We were both the same age and had grown up in Christian boarding schools: she in Pakistan, and I across the border in India. Though a secular Muslim, she praised her Christian schooling, saying it had made her into the woman she was. She saw the advantages that good Christian schooling could bring to her country and so was eager to create an environment in Pakistan where Jews, Christians, and Muslims could worship and thrive without fear.”
Benazir presented herself as an example of modern-day Islam. Little did she realize that her lifestyle had less to do with Islam than with the freedoms she had so easily adopted while living in the West, brought about by a Judeo-Christian environment. She was open to acknowledging her Christian education and not prepared to hide herself away from the people she loved and went to serve in Pakistan.
She had been warned many times to stay away from large crowds, yet even the attempt on her life the day she returned to Pakistan, barely two months previously, did not stop her from enjoying personal contact with the people of Pakistan. It was this desire that drove her to stand up through the sunroof in her car and so become a perfectly visible target for the assassin’s bullet, followed by the bomb that tore into her car. I recall one of the 9/11 terrorists, now in a US jail, said he was on a mission to kill her. Certainly, she knew the risks of assassination, coming from a family where both her brother and father had been assassinated.
Pakistan has an enormous Muslim population (more than 160 million), and a growing radicalism due to Al Qaeda’s influence. Benazir understood the threat of radicalism better than anyone else. She brazenly and publicly stood up to the Islamists with a clear desire to take Pakistan back to its roots as a freedom-affirming, civilian-ruled republic. She and other Pakistani leaders dreamed of steering their nation firmly toward the Western world, modeled on what she had seen and enjoyed, not only during her Christian education, but also during her many years in London. Where will Pakistan and the world find a woman such as her, able not only to bridge the divisions between peoples, faiths, and nations, but also to give her life so others could share the same freedoms she enjoyed?
I know that some Christians will say her prayers were not genuine, that her prayers were not heard by God because she was not a committed Christian, and that she was part of a world wide Islamic conspiracy that tries to fool Christians by joining in Prayer meetings, indicating their debt to Christian missionaries and so on. The Christian missionary task in the Middle East has now been made so much more difficult.
Bhutto was murdered because to her enemies she was Westernised, a traitor to her culture and an American stooge. She was murdered because she had vowed to bring secularism and democracy to Pakistan. She was murdered because she was all these things, and a woman who had a Christian education. No wonder they hated Bhutto, the first woman to lead a Muslim country, who was not only brave and strong but physically beautiful, her loosely draped Islamic headscarf more an object of adornment than of modesty. No wonder Islamist militants had been trying to kill her for more than a decade.
The West has made more than enough blunders, supporting corrupt dictators wherever it deemed it suitable. But as British writer Nick Cohen notes, what the Islamists hate is not the worst of us but the best of us: human rights, the rule of law, Christian faith, the equality of women and all those other freedoms we take so much for granted.
Rev The Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes, A.C., M.L.C.