Unique Lives and Experiences Lecture Series
Ms Benazir Bhutto
Leader of the Opposition
Speech delivered at Minneapolis – USA
29 April 1998
Honoured guests, ladies and gentlemen,
I am no stranger to North America. As many of you may know, I spent four of the happiest years of my life as a student at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Those days now seem like a distant dream.
For the last eighteen months, since the democratically elected government in Pakistan was toppled, my party, my family and myself have been persecuted, victimized, harassed and in some cases tortured.
My husband has remained in jail since the first day my government was seized, and has remained incarcerated, despite his desperate need for medical treatment, despite the fact that he is an elected member of the Senate of Pakistan, despite the fact that he has been convicted of no crime.
He languishes in prison, a hostage to my political career.
Ladies and gentlemen, 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.
Governments rise and fall not on performance but on personality, not by accountability but allegation, not on facts but on slurs.
I have seen it in country after country, and we now see it targeted against the President of the United States.
But I am afraid what has been done to me and to my party is beyond anything attempted anywhere in the world.
For what has happened to me, what is happening in Pakistan, may not in fact be unique, but part of a growing and disturbing trend as the world approaches the new millennium.
The attacks against me are a more extreme version of what seems to be a universal deterioration of civil dialogue in politics, not just in Pakistan, but all over our world.
The search for political consensus, the main characteristic of a democratic society, has degenerated into partisan hysteria, a rule or ruin philosophy.
The breakdown of cooperation threatens the legitimacy of democratic values and norms in the modern, post Cold War international society.
Let me read you some thoughts that capture what I am trying to say to you today.
“Partisan politics is polluting our most important legal and ethical processes…and is damaging our political system. Proceedings, while billed as impartial, have become little more than witch hunts designed to humiliate the opposing political party…The scandal machine that has developed bankrupts individuals, who are little more than pawns in larger political agendas. It threatens the ability of the political system to attract the bright, dedicated people that our nation deserves.
It undermines public confidence in government and its leaders.”
These are not my words, but they could be.
This is not written about Pakistan, but it might as well be.
What I have quoted to you are the words of Robert Bennett, a distinguished American lawyer, from an essay attacking the subjugation of the legal and ethical process to a blatantly partisan political agenda.
The Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels once said that “if you repeat a lie five times, it becomes the truth.
With the Clinton episode, the Goebbels adage has shifted to “if you make ten allegations, it suddenly becomes a fact.”
The fascist government of Pakistan has attempted to divert Pakistani public attention from their total incompetence and failure to manage the economy and the social infrastructure of the country, in a flagrant ruse to assassinate my reputation as a political leader.
I have been accused of every crime under the sun. My husband has actually been accused of the murder of my own brother. Outrageous claims of graft and corruption have been leveled in the press to sully my name.
$12 million of public money has been spent on hiring detectives, stealing documents and launching a media campaign.
A new law, the Accountability law, has been passed with retrospective effect. It has been thrice amended to suit the convenience of the regime.
A member of the ruling parliamentary group has been given vast police powers to launch a one-sided, partisan inquiry with the sole purpose of framing, by hook or by crook, the former Prime Minister and leader of the Opposition.
The regime seeks to disqualify my family and myself for it fears that if I am not disqualified it will lose the next general elections to me and to my Party.
The regime seeks to disqualify me so that it can dismantle the democratic system and impose a one party dictatorship.
Yet, in all of this attempt to destroy me before the jury of public opinion, slurs have never been substantiated, allegations never proven, witnesses never deposed, a case of financial impropriety never made.
Over the last eighteen months of witch hunts and special courts, not a single notice of corruption has been lodged against me. Despite the efforts at extortion and manipulation, the fascist junta has failed in their attempt to destroy me with the people.
Day after day, our strength on the street grows, the number of political parties in our coalition expands, the time of the collaborators of dictators grow short. As in the past, truth, justice and the forces of history cannot be denied.
The last 18 months have been but one more difficult period in my 44 years, which has seemingly been filled with enough experiences, triumphs and tragedies to fill ten lifetimes. It is painful for me in Pakistan, but I have endured worse, much worse.