Bhutto Compares Fight for Pakistani Democracy to Fight Against Apartheid in South Africa
by Benazir Bhutto
Johannesburg – August 7, 2001
Speaking before the top one hundred women business and political leaders of the Republic of South Africa, Opposition leader Benazir Bhutto compared Pakistan’s fight for democracy to South Africa’s Fight against Apartheid.
Bhutto, who flew into Johannesburg yesterday received wide coverage in the South African print and electronic press.
She received a warm welcome from the professional women at the Women’s Conference to commemorate Women’s Week in South Africa. The title of the Conference was Women and Leadership: Against the Odds. She was the key note speaker.
Extracts of the Speech follow:
It is a particular honor for me to be with you this morning at this gathering of women as part of your Nation’s historic celebration of Women’s Day.
What makes this more special is that we meet in South Africa. All during the time I was growing up in Pakistan, and going to school in America and England, the words “South Africa” were a metaphor for injustice, and terror and inhumanity.
And then, miraculously, the words “South Africa” were transformed into a metaphor for people all over the world who are oppressed. South Africa became a metaphor for hope, for the triumph of justice, and a demonstration that determination and courage can create miracles.
Ladies and gentlemen, if apartheid can crumble in South Africa, racism, sexism and bigotry can crumble in every corner of this planet.
I stand here with you truly in the epicenter of world freedom. Yet the world still is complex; a world that defies simple explanations and simple solutions; a world that is still very much in transition from one set of political realities to another.
The world is less the simple place than we had dreamed it would be in the late eighties, with communism disintegrating and democracy taking root all over Eastern Europe, Southeast and Southwest Asia, and Africa.
In those days, the World talked about how to spend the anticipated on domestic needs and international responsibilities. And in Pakistan, we were finally coming to grips with restoring democracy and economic reform after a decade of bitter, brutal Martial law.
But, the forces of dictatorship did not relinquish their iron grip of my country so easily. Today, I travel to South Africa to speak with you at a difficult time for me, and my country. And in light of your bitter history of political repression, I would hope that you would open your hearts to the suffering of my people.
This is a time of crisis and tragedy in Pakistan.
History has sadly come full circle on the subcontinent.
A military regime once again rules my homeland with an iron fist. The last vestiges of democratic institutions are being assaulted and dismantled.
No Parliament. No state assemblies. No independent judiciary. No human rights. No free press. No independent labor organizations. Heavily controlled and regulated NGOs.
Women are being thrown back into another era, into another century of repression and exploitation.
We witness a tragic rise in exploitation of religion for political purposes.
A stalemate between India and Pakistan in Kashmir.
An unsuccessful summit between the two nuclear-armed nations of South Asia only last month collapsing in shambles.
It is not a pretty picture. It is a dangerous picture.
This is Pakistan in the year 2001.
The disintegration of democracy in Pakistan did not come overnight, and it did not come in one military coup. Since my government was overthrown four years back Pakistan has drifted rudderless in a sea of conflict and violence — an agenda of vengeance and a hijacking of democracy.
The heirs to the dictator General Zia ul Haq who terrorized Pakistan with an iron fist for a decade, were resurrected with new names and new methods.
My successor elected in a military backed fraudulent election imposed a one party dictatorship on Pakistan.
I was the first victim. And then my party. And then the constituencies across the breadth of my country that supported the agenda of democratic and economic reform.
And then the Prime Minister attempted to topple the one institution that brought him to power and that could defend itself.
His attempt to topple the Army failed. But now we all pay the price.
The military stepped in to restore order and democracy in our Nation. It succeeded in neither. And the last pretenses of democracy and democratic institutions have evaporated.
To tighten their grip on political opposition, the President of our country was toppled. The power of the courts was usurped. Judges were sacked. Journalists were assaulted. Censorship was imposed. The rights of women were thrown back a generation.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Just as in South Africa during the terror of apartheid, supporters of democracy and human rights were forced into exile once again.
I know it has become the fashion both in the developed and developing world over the last decade, to destroy leaders’ reputations by innuendo, allegation and rumour. This strategy now even has a name — the politics of personal destruction.
This is true not just in Pakistan, but even in the most developed democracies.
But the scale to which this was orchestrated in Pakistan against my party defied anything seen in the world. It was a relentless, devastating and overt assault on justice in an attempt to eliminate my leadership and to destroy me personally.
Bureaucrats, businessmen and cabinet members were arrested and tortured to perjure themselves to fabricate false charges. I was truly blessed that they remained strong and would not be tortured and threatened into betraying me. But their failure to coerce witnesses didn’t stop my successors from proceeding.
I was pressured and humiliated in increasingly desperate attempts to force me to quit politics.
My own husband was accused of even more ridiculous and scurrilous charges, including, the unspeakable slanders of murdering my own brother and trafficking in drugs. And his father was arrested to pressure him.
My husband and father-in-law are still behind bars, hostages to my political career.
The full extent of the plot against me was revealed through the extraordinary release of bugged conversations, proving beyond doubt that the charges against me were contrived.
I used to think, naively, that an election alone could change things for the better. Now I realize that a country needs more than democratic elections, it needs the rule of law.
An election can bring in a new Parliament and a new government.
It cannot, however, bring in a new bureaucracy or intelligence system.
It cannot, without an independent judiciary, lift the veil on the Machiavellian intrigues that take place that are both brutal and barbaric and undermine civil society.
It cannot give acknowledgment, without fair hearing, to the victims of tyranny — those who lost their lives, then livelihoods, their families, their peace of mind, who were tortured, imprisoned or forced to flee to foreign lands for refusing to commit perjury and destroy the path of justice.
Does it sound familiar, ladies and gentlemen? South Africa of the seventies. Pakistan today.
The suffering is not of one person, not of one family, not of one political party, but of an entire nation.
Ladies and gentlemen, an edifice built without law collapses, just as a skyscraper built without a foundation will ultimately crumble.
Pakistan is in turmoil and with it the stability in the region is threatened.
Issues of poverty, gender equality and minority rights are calling for attention, as are the issues of unemployment and inflation.
As the military junta rules, religious fundamentalists take up more political space at the cost of political forces. Pakistan could be threatened with an Islamic revolution. But this revolution would be nuclear armed. The “Talibanization” of Pakistan can literally threaten world peace.
Ladies and gentlemen, the story of Pakistan did not have to turn out this way, and I am convinced that ultimately things will be very different.
The democratic government I led did its best to create a new, modern Pakistan. With the mandate and support of the people we marketed the country as a crossroads to the Gulf, Central and South Asia.
We advanced our country as a model of Islamic moderation.
We committed ourselves to education, with special programs targeted to female illiteracy.
We committed ourselves to immunization and children’s health. We committed ourselves to family planning and population control.
We transformed the country into a center for financial and commercial investment, creating jobs and wealth. We created the physical infrastructure, the roads, the electricity, and the power plants, to sustain a modern, developed economy.
After my overthrow and charges of corruption, the international community stepped back and foreign investment in Pakistan dried up. . Businessmen clearly prefer stable economies and stable markets, in countries governed by the rule of law, where contracts are honored and commitments fulfilled.
The absence of law also intimidated domestic investment as well. Martial law and economic development are mutually exclusive, they cannot exist together.
The dignity of our financial system is correlated with the destruction of legitimate political institutions, proving once again, just like the international divestiture movement against South Africa under apartheid, democracy and economic development must proceed simultaneously.
It is such times that test the mettle of real leadership. Ironically, but repeatedly, history tells us that the best of leadership is constructed in the worst of times.
I welcome the Commonwealth’s and the international support for democracy in Pakistan.
Under that pressure, the Generals recently permitted local elections. My party supporters emerged as the single largest winners even though they fought without me on the ground and without the party symbol on the ballot. We proved against all odds that democracy is irrepressible, that ultimately the people will prevail.
The question before my nation is how many will suffer imprisonment, deprivation, discrimination, poverty and even death before justice and the forces of history restore the democratic order.
And although I know not the answer to that question, I know it is my obligation to lead this battle once again, no matter what the personal price, to restore a democratic Pakistan.
It is not necessarily the life I would have chosen for myself. But it seems to be the life that chose me. And in the words of President John Kennedy, “I do not shrink from this responsibility, I welcome it.”
For leadership is born of a passion, and it is a commitment. A commitment to an idea, to a people, to a land. I travel, never knowing when I will be able to see my husband. He has been in prison for the fifth year running, a hostage of my political career.
I travel and miss my children. They are all under thirteen. It is difficult explaining to little children why their mother can’t be with them, why their father is a political prisoner.
I am reconciled to the fact that the needs of my 140 million people come first, and will always come first.
For those in the feminist movement who say that woman can have it all simultaneously, I urge they look at my life. Women can have it all but Women have to make difficult choices, often choices that men are not forced to make. And we must live with the consequences, for better or worse.
It is not always easy. But we do it for all the woman who came before us who gave us this opportunity. And most of all, we do it for all woman who will come after us — the baby girls yet unborn!
Ladies and gentlemen, to succeed as a political leader, one must be on call all the time, like an Emergency Room doctor, but unlike a doctor, without a moment’s break. On call for good news and bad. On call to respond quickly, to think quickly to move quickly.
I was brought up in a political family. In a way, I was groomed for politics. Yet, a political role was not one that I actively sought. It came to me through an accident of fate.
I had just completed my education and returned to Pakistan in 1977 when the tanks rumbled up the road in Rawalpindi and troops took over the Prime Minister’s House. My younger siblings had to go back to their studies.
I stayed behind and was pulled into the political campaign by the arrest of senior party leaders. That put an end to my career goal to join the Foreign Service in Pakistan and become High Commissioner to England or Ambassador to the US, the two countries I had studied in and knew well.
Fate took over my life and my destiny was no longer in my hands.
Thus, some are born to leadership, whilst others have leadership thrust upon them. Many women leaders, particularly in South Asia, have been thrown into political waters. The assassin’s bullet, the sound of boots or tragedy has thrust them into a role they might otherwise not have chosen. Yet they are more than extensions of the male members of their families.
Each woman leader has had to win her badge of courage and recognition.
As a child of my age, in the late sixties, I was influenced by the social ferment around me. The worldwide students movement, from Rawalpindi, to France, to Washington, were important factors in my youth. The fight against apartheid shaped the ferocity of my commitment to stand up for principle. Kate Millet and the burgeoning movement for women’s race empowered me and emboldened me.
As an Asian at Harvard, I bitterly resented the war in Vietnam and joined up with American students to protest a war that they thought was unjust and did not want to fight.
It was also the time of the impeachment against President Nixon. A time of moral reawakening, as Martin Luther King spoke passionately about justice and injustice in America and in South Africa.
These important steps helped shape my outlook on life, helped me focus on fighting injustice, promoting freedom and safeguarding the rights of the weak and dispossessed.
But above all, in America during the Vietnam War I saw the awesome power of the people changing policies, changing leaders, and changing history.
From Harvard I went to Oxford.
While I was at Oxford, the Conservative party chose a woman, Margaret Thatcher, as the Leader of Opposition.
At Oxford, I was the first female foreigner to be elected as President of the Oxford Union. It was there that I learned to debate, slowly gaining confidence before an audience.
As the Prime Minister of Pakistan I appeared before an historic Joint Session of the United States Congress in 1989. In that address, the most meaningful line to me was my simple message to the woman of America, my message to the women of the world. Three simple, powerful words: YES YOU CAN!
Don’t accept the status quo. Don’t accept no for an answer. Don’t accept traditional roles and traditional constraints. And don’t think that leadership and being female are contradictory.
My victory was a victory for women everywhere. It broke the mind cast of the past.
I was the first woman ever elected head of government in the Muslim world. Now four others, two in Bangladesh, one in Turkey and in Indonesia, have followed in my path. One more glass ceiling is shattered. But thousands are left to break.
The day is not far off when women will join even the Armed Forces of Pakistan, an idea that I discussed with my service chiefs in my last tenure. They already began the journey of joining the judiciary in my last term. The appointment of women judges is something I am very proud of, as well as the creation of a Women’s Development Bank to make small loans to women entrepreneurs.
And as women enter the work force, it becomes more sensitive too, to the needs of women and the difficulties in their lives.
Your record on human, political and economic rights for woman in South Africa should inspire women all around the world to keep on pressing, keep on fighting, keep on working for the rights of equality that cannot forever be denied.
I have attempted, throughout my career, to combine the best of different experiences.
To build for my people a modern world.
By heralding in the information revolution, introducing fax machines, digital pagers, optic fiber, cellular telephones, satellite dishes, Internet, the e-mail and even CNN into Pakistan.
Under my leadership of de-regulation Pakistan integrated into the global economy becoming one of the ten emerging capital markets of the world.
The International Labor Organization’s data showed that the largest job generation in Pakistani history took place in the PPP government.
The World Bank called our energy program a model to the entire developing world.
The President of the World Health Organization gave me a gold medal in recognition of our efforts to improve the health of our children by eliminating polio and reducing infant mortality.
We increased literacy rates by one third and secured women’s rights by signing the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women in Beijing.
We brought down the population growth rate whilst we took up the economic growth rate.
It was a remarkable transformation of a society for our downtrodden and under privliged people.
That is my legacy to the people of Pakistan.
We believed in education, and we believed in markets.
We believed in opportunity and we believed in foreign investment.
We believed in giving our people hope in a better future.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Despite the travails of the last four years, I am not bitter.
In my father’s last letter to me before he was murdered by one of Pakistan’s many military tyrants, he quoted Tennyson: “Ah, what shall I be at fifty if I find the world so bitter at 25.”
He had then turned fifty and I twenty five.
He asked me never to be bitter. I have honored my father’s dying wish.
I look at South Africa today and tears come to my eyes. My faith in humanity and my faith in God are strengthened by the miracle that has happened here. You — the people of South Africa – inspire and empower all of the oppressed, all over the world. My nation and I remain optimistic about the future, knowing in our hearts that time, justice and the forces of history are on our side.
Thank you ladies and gentlemen.