Blowing hot and cold against the military regime in Pakistan, former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto believes that she alone is capable of bringing the beleaguered country back to the centre-ground of democracy.
Scheduled to land in Karachi on Thursday, Bhutto has asked the Pervez Musharraf government to provide jamming devices and other security measures to her cavalcade to ensure that her return to the country after years of exile is incident-free.

“I am on schedule to return to Pakistan on 18 October. I am excited and looking forward to it. I can feel the weight of expectations, responsibility and hope generated by my return among the people of Pakistan,” she told Sky News on Tuesday evening. Bhutto alleged that people close to the government in Pakistan had fired and created other obstacles in the way of thousands of people who had reportedly travelled hundreds of miles to receive her on Thursday. Banners welcoming her were being pulled down, she claimed.

She said she did not think much of any risk of being assassinated after landing in Pakistan. She said that as a former prime minister of Pakistan, she was entitled to security, and had asked for full security from the Musharraf government. Bhutto said: “I am the person who can bring back Pakistan to the centre. Pakistan is already divided. There is deep polarisation — dictatorship versus democracy. Extremists have stepped in to fill the vacuum in moderate leadership.

She said she was excited and yearning to go back home after several years. The people of Pakistan, she claimed, had suffered military dictatorship for many years, and they saw her return as a sign of a better future.
Bhutto claimed in the interview that she had positive reports about people gathering to receive her in thousands. However, many of the reception centres had been fired upon by people close to the Musharraf government, she alleged.

Niece’s challenge
As former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto prepares to return home on Thursday after eight years of self-imposed exile, her 25-year old niece is planning to challenge her attempts to return to power, a media report said on Wednesday, PTI reports .

Fatima Bhutto, a poet and granddaughter of the late prime minister Zulfiqar Ali, told The Daily Telegraph that her aunt’s return would blight any hopes for Pakistan’s future. “It will be a disaster,” she said. “She has already had two opportunities to run the country and has failed.” Fatima, who is tipped to become a future political star, is known in Pakistan as a Bhutto ki tasweer (a copy of Bhutto) and possesses both the earnestness of a young idealist and the hauteur characteristic of leading members of the Bhutto clan, the report said. Fatima, the daughter of Benazir’s late brother Murtaza, fired the first salvo against her aunt by publishing a scathing article last month, on the 11th anniversary of her father’s death.

Murtaza, whose relations with his sister were strained as he felt he should inherit their father’s political mantle, was shot dead by police in front of his home in 1996.

The family is riven by dynastic feuds and she revived allegations that her aunt was implicated in her father’s death and that she and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, should face corruption charges.


RETURN OF THE NATIVE
The rise of the Begum cult

His children wear headbands with Benazir Bhutto’s picture, but Abdul Raziq has not come to pay any ordinary tribute to the former Pakistani premier — he has doused them and himself in petrol, AFP reports from Karachi.
“I love Benazir and I will burn us all if the government does not back down,” the wide-eyed 40-year-old labourer says after authorities in Karachi ordered pro-Bhutto billboards in the city to be torn down.

His sons Rajaba Ali and Ali Raza, aged four and six, weep as they are drenched in the flammable liquid while daughters Rakhshanda, seven, and Iqra, 10, look bewildered as a crowd cheers outside the Karachi press club.
Eventually senior members from Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) who had been holding a press conference inside the building intervene, taking a cigarette lighter from Raziq, and the family are led off. Even if there is a whiff of stage management to go with the petrol fumes, the scene nevertheless raises questions about the personality cult that surrounds Bhutto, her late father Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and their party. This port city of 12 million people, Pakistan’s economic hub, has been decked with countless posters of Bhutto ahead of her planned homecoming on Thursday from eight years in exile.