By Zofeen T. Ebrahim, IANS
Naudero (Pakistan) : On foot, on bullock carts and tractors and motorbikes, an estimated 35,000 nameless faces, braving the cold weather and the violence that erupted all across Sindh following Benazir Bhutto’s death converged to Naudero, the ancestral home of the Bhuttos, 550 km from the southern city of Karachi, to bid a final farewell to their beloved leader.
Teary-eyed, some unable to keep their emotions, many beating their heads, tens and thousands of grieving supporters and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) workers had reached the graveyard to attend her funeral rites.
However, conspicuous by their absence were her political opponents and government officials although President Pervez Musharraf has announced a three-day national mourning with the flag to be flown half-mast.
Also absent was her mother, who is so ill, she does not even know her elder daughter is no more.
Her sister Sanam Bhutto, the only Bhutto who is not in politics, flew in from London. Putting aside their differences, Ghinwa and Fatima Bhutto, her sister-in-law and niece respectively, of her brother Mir Murtaza Bhutto, also came to pay their last respects.
Benazir Bhutto, 54, twice-elected Pakistani premier, was assassinated Thursday evening in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, just as she was leaving a public rally as part of her election campaign in the historic Liaquat Bagh ground.
Incidentally it is the same place where Pakistan’s first premier Liaquat Ali Khan was assassinated 56 years ago in 1951.
Ending her eight-year self exile, the first female Muslim premier, also the youngest (only 35 when she was first elected), Bhutto returned to Pakistan on Oct 18 to a rousing welcome that ended in a bloody suicide attack on her convoy. She had returned to contest parliamentary elections for the third time. While she survived the attempt on her life, over 140 died and hundreds more were injured.
She was buried in the ancestral graveyard in the village of Garhi Khuda Bux, eight km from Naudero, in Larkana district, next to her father, the country’s first popularly elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was ousted in a military coup in 1977 and hanged two years later in 1979. Her two brothers, Shahnawaz and Murtaza, also died violent deaths, and are buried there.
Some 700 km from the Bhutto village, in the southern port city of Karachi, Bilawal House, her home in Karachi named after her eldest, a son, in the more upbeat part of the city, wears a deserted look. The security provided by the government was nowhere to be seen.
Remnants of last night’s violence – a charred police mobile van, a torched gas station – are a cruel reminder of the destruction that the city witnessed all across. According to latest news reports, a total of 1,000 vehicles have been burnt and two police stations torched.
“It is like a ghost town,” said Abdullah Matcheswala, a jeweller, who ventured out of his house to buy bread in the afternoon only to find that “everything was closed with not a soul on the street”.
“It is so quiet, it is almost eerie,” said Fouzia Mapara, a journalist who decided to put aside her fear and go to work. “But once on the road, I was actually scared.” She says she didn’t see anyone on the road, just “a couple of police mobiles”.
But this surreal calm, many fear, is just a prelude to more violence that has temporarily been stalled till the burial.
For why else would the Sindh home department call the centre for deployment of the military in three sensitive cities of Sindh, namely, Karachi, Hyderabad and Larkana? Along with attack on public buildings, banks and factories, a group taking advantage of the fear factor has resorted to looting in major cities. Asif Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s husband, has pleaded to the people to keep calm.
“There is complete anarchy and the hopes of the people have completely been dashed,” explains Masood Lohar, coordinator from Hyderabad, 164 km north of Karachi, where violence was unprecedented.
“There is complete chaos and there is not a single street from where smoke is not coming out,” Lohar told IANS over phone and believed “more is yet to come. Things have come to a tipping point and now there is nothing left but civil war,” said Lohar, the coordinator of UNDP’s SGP-GEF programme, who remained trapped in his office Thursday night.
He said the law enforcement agencies are all but missing after PPP supporters attacked over two dozen police stations in interior Sindh Thursday evening.