Postcard: Pakistan

By Aryn Baker

The tomb of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the populist Pakistani President who was overthrown in a military coup and executed in 1979, looms over the poverty-stricken salt marshes of rural Sind province. From a distance, the hulking mausoleum resembles a plasticine model of the Taj Mahal squeezed onto too small a foundation. Before Bhutto--who founded the Pakistan People's Party--was hanged, he had requested nothing more than a humble marble slab to mark his grave. But in Pakistani politics, image is everything. It's a lesson Benazir Bhutto learned at her father's knee. Hence her decision a dozen years ago to build him an ornate, 130-ft. (40 m) onion dome in the family's ancestral seat of Larkana.

In her absence--the two-time Prime Minister is scheduled to return to Pakistan on Oct. 18 after eight years in exile--the tomb's marble floors have been chipped and its peeling walls spray-painted with anti-Benazir graffiti. Bhutto fled the country in 1999 when facing charges of corruption, which she contends were politically motivated. "She has disgraced the Bhutto name," says clan patriarch Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, who considers her self-imposed exile in London and Dubai an attempt to escape her sins. "The stigma will stay forever." Not to worry, insists the tomb's custodian, Muhammad Issa. "We will whitewash the walls before she returns," he says.

Of course, Bhutto will need much more than that to restore her image as a tireless campaigner against military rule. The Harvard graduate is heading back to Pakistan only after the increasingly unpopular President Pervez Musharraf granted her amnesty as part of a power-sharing agreement--announced two days before he won the Oct. 6 election--that has infuriated opposition activists. Musharraf's landslide victory was largely due to Bhutto's party members following her directive to abstain from voting. That gave the general, who came to power in 1999 in a bloodless coup and still holds the title of army chief, the legitimacy he craves as head of state. With the Supreme Court scheduled to decide on Oct. 17 whether Musharraf could run for office while serving in the military, critics fear martial law could follow if he is declared ineligible. They are also troubled by Bhutto's failure to negotiate the repeal of a constitutional provision that lets the President dissolve the Parliament at whim.

Even so, many think she is the best hope for loosening Musharraf's dictatorial grip on the government. Her supporters seem willing to overlook the fact that her previous stints in power were tainted by human-rights abuses and widespread corruption. During her tenure, Amnesty International accused Pakistan of having one of the worst records of extrajudicial killings, torture and custodial deaths, and in 1996 Transparency International named the country the second most corrupt in the world. (Nigeria came in first, locals quip, because Pakistan bribed the corruption-monitoring organization.) But faith, hope and loyalty still run strong in Sind, where much of the population is uneducated and depends on landlords, employers and party leaders to tell them for whom to vote. If Bhutto had to make a deal with Musharraf to return to Pakistan, her followers say, then perhaps she knows best. Says Muhammad Ali Sheikh, a Larkana shopkeeper: "If Benazir got a horse and told people to vote for the horse, we would line up to vote for the horse." Even Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, Benazir's fiercest critic, says he plans to vote for her in the parliamentary elections scheduled for January.

Strategists, however, are skeptical as to whether she can pull off a comeback. One indication of how she will do at the polls will be the number of people who line the streets when her plane lands in the Sind capital of Karachi. Millions cheered her return to Pakistan in 1986, after nearly a decade of martial rule. Two years later, she led the opposition coalition to victory in democratic elections. Party leaders say this time, they will be happy if 200,000 people show up to guide her path to Larkana, where she will once again try to pick up her father's mantle.