By IANS
Garhi Khuda Baksh (Pakistan) : The dust clouds swirled Friday as Pakistan’s slain former prime minister Benazir Bhutto was laid to rest, leaving behind a restive country with mobs trawling the streets and 22 people killed in clashes. All the while the clamour for President Pervez Musharraf’s resignation grew louder.
Pakistani officials said at least 22 people had been killed and about 500 private and government vehicles set on fire in Lahore, Rawalpindi, Karachi and Peshawar, all of which saw spontaneous protests erupting Thursday evening, soon after Bhutto was assassinated in Rawalpindi.
Five of the deaths in the street violence were reported in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest and reputedly most violent city, and 14 in Bhutto’s home province Sindh even as it prepared for the funeral of the former prime minister.
At least three people were killed in the North West Frontier Province, where too Bhutto commanded wide support despite its proximity to the Pakistan-Afghan border region where Islamic hardliners opposed to Bhutto operate.
The violence sent Pakistan into a tailspin of bloodshed and further polarised its complex politics. This was brought home rudely to the tens of thousands of mourners here who congregated from all over the country to bid adieu to the woman who was nicknamed ‘daughter of the East’.
There was shocked silence, silent tears but also loud wailing and slogans against Musharraf, holding him responsible for her death – like her colleague and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and husband Asif Zardari did.
Musharraf was not there as she was lowered into a mud walled grave in the ornate, white mausoleum she had built for her father Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in her dusty home ground near Larkana, about 550 km from the port city of Karachi.
But there were thousands of grieving supporters of her family and party who recalled that less than 24 hours earlier, the two-time prime minister was getting ready to address a rally in Rawalpindi as the nation uncertainly moved towards elections on Jan 8.
At precisely 6.16 p.m. Thursday, an assassin’s bullets rudely cut short her political aspirations and put a question mark on the future of her volatile nation.
The woman, who had in 1988 become the world’s youngest prime minister at the age of 35, left behind three teenaged children, her politically ambitious husband Asif Zardari, an ailing mother Nusrat – who at one time was acting chairperson of her PPP – and younger sister Sanam. And millions of people for whom she personified hope for a better tomorrow and a more democratic Pakistan.
“She came to save Pakistan,” a tearful Zardari told an Indian television channel shortly before burying his wife of 21 years. “But they killed her.”
It was a brutal end to a star crossed life for a woman born to fame – and tragedy. She saw her father being hanged to death and her two brothers dead at the prime of their lives.
She left days after her father’s hanging in 1979 to return in 1986 – after being in exile abroad for the first time – when crowds of over a million greeted her homecoming in Lahore, leading many to compare her return with “Caesar’s return to Rome”. That road led to her first stint as prime minister – she again became prime minister in 1990.
Her last homecoming, just two months ago was equally portentous. She came home after an eight-year exile on Oct 18. But a devastating blast ripped through her homecoming rally leaving 140 people dead.
Bhutto escaped. But only for two months and 10 days – till another rally in another town on Dec 27, 2007.