{"id":76489,"date":"2023-04-04T15:41:10","date_gmt":"2023-04-04T15:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pppp.org.pk\/website\/?page_id=76489"},"modified":"2023-04-04T15:41:10","modified_gmt":"2023-04-04T15:41:10","slug":"the-other-side-of-the-bhutto-story","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/pppp.org.pk\/website\/the-other-side-of-the-bhutto-story\/","title":{"rendered":"The other side of the Bhutto story"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The other side of the Bhutto story
\n<\/strong>by Bashir Riaz – August 30, 2003<\/p>\n

Islamabad’s military dictatorship discovered a new life for its campaign against the democratic leadership of Benazir Bhutto in a Swiss Magistrate’s finding. The Swiss Magistrate’s finding follows an investigation triggered by politically motivated allegations by Bhutto’s rivals made in 1996. The finding puts \u00a0the cart before the horse. A crime has yet to be established in Pakistan. The \u00a0issue of corrupt money laundered through Swiss banks can arise after a crime is \u00a0proven in\u00a0Pakistan. None has. Therefore the Magistrate’s finding, coming on \u00a0his last day in office, is surprising. The allegations against Bhutto are regularly repeated in a slow drip poison effort to tarnish her image and eliminate her leadership.<\/h6>\n
Bhutto was tried on charges of influencing the award of a pre shipment \u00a0inspection award to a Swiss company in the nineties. That sentence was set aside \u00a0when dramatic audio taped evidence emerged proving the government influenced the \u00a0judges in sentencing her. It is a maxim of the principle of double jeopardy that a person cannot be \u00a0tried for the same offence twice. Bhutto is facing triple jeopardy. She is being \u00a0retried in Pakistan on the same offence and, if the Swiss Magistrate has his \u00a0way, a third time in Switzerland. Her husband Asif Ali Zardari is in a worse \u00a0situation. He faces triple jeopardy from behind prison walls. It’s unlikely that \u00a0the Musharraf regime will free him thus denying him the right to freely \u00a0defend himself. This smacks of foul play. Perhaps the celebrity status of the Bhutto name was hard to resist for an \u00a0elected Swiss magistrate. Or, perhaps, the Magistrate was convinced by Bhutto’s \u00a0opponents who can pervert justice.<\/h6>\n
This is evident from the presence of \u00a0political exiles who fled after pressure to perjure justice. It was also proved in \u00a0Pakistan’s Supreme Court. Consequently two judges were forced to retire in 2001. Successive governments in\u00a0Islamabad\u00a0reportedly spent millions of dollars in \u00a0hiring lawyers, investigators, wire-pullers, agents, detectives and sending \u00a0domestic teams to several countries across continents to dig up dirt on Bhutto. \u00a0They failed to find a smoking gun. The lawyer managing the disputed Swiss accounts has exonerated Bhutto \u00a0according to the report of the Magistrate. The attempt to tie it to her through the \u00a0purchase of an expensive piece of jewelry fails to convince. There are \u00a0affidavits proving otherwise.<\/h6>\n
According to the finding of the Swiss magistrate, a commission of two percent \u00a0was paid by SGS to a Swiss lawyer for consultancy purposes. Two percent \u00a0consultancy is recognised internationally as a commission. An amount under ten \u00a0percent fails to fall into the international definition of “kickback” or “bribe”.<\/h6>\n
More importantly for the Pakistani public and its first elected woman prime \u00a0minister, none of the disputed accounts are Bhutto’s. Bhutto’s lawyer \u00a0disclosed after meeting Swiss authorities that they “had no information, which could \u00a0be used against Mrs Bhutto personally and were not aware of any assets of Mrs \u00a0Bhutto in Switzerland”.<\/h6>\n
Bhutto’s Party has called for the release of correspondence between Islamabad \u00a0and its Swiss lawyers on meetings with Magistrate Devaud. They believe that \u00a0this will expose the politically motivated campaign against her. The battle for \u00a0justice is far from over. Islamabad’s anti democracy factions are busy \u00a0declaring that this is “the last nail in Bhutto’s political career”.<\/h6>\n
Unfortunately \u00a0for them, such predictions made earlier were proven wrong. The ability to frame Bhutto failed domestically for a clear reason. The \u00a0special laws and special courts convinced the Pakistani public that the case \u00a0against her was malicious and unable to stand the rigours of due process in ordinary \u00a0courts.<\/h6>\n
Now Bhutto’s opponents hope that a “foreign finding” will alienate Bhutto \u00a0supporters in Pakistan and abroad. Unfortunately for them, the Western media \u00a0focus on the alleged fixing of a British government dossier to build a case for \u00a0war against Iraq, and the missing weapons of mass destruction, tarnishes the \u00a0image of Western infallibility for the Pakistani people.<\/h6>\n
That the Swiss finding comes hot on the heels of General Musharraf’s \u00a0emergence as a key ally of the West raises eyebrows in Islamabad. Islamabad’s \u00a0“foreign finding” against Bhutto reinforces the public view that a military dictator \u00a0seeks to eliminate a political foe symbolising democracy for her people. The unjust treatment of the Islamic world’s first woman prime minister is \u00a0demonstrated in holding her husband hostage for seven years. The suffering of \u00a0Bhutto and Zardari reflect the sufferings of ordinary Pakistanis as poverty \u00a0increases and the gap between the rich and the poor widen. Few believe that the \u00a0courage and strength Bhutto and Zardari showed in prison and exile, facing \u00a0hardships, could be withstood by those interested in enriching themselves.<\/h6>\n
That Bhutto was emerging as a voice of Muslim moderation on the international \u00a0stage was unacceptable to the handful of military hard-liners controlling \u00a0Pakistan’s security apparatus. If Bhutto was punished in the past by them for \u00a0upholding democracy in Pakistan, today she is punished by them for upholding \u00a0democracy in the Muslim world.<\/h6>\n
The attempts to pressurise a lady forced out of her country, banned from parliament, husband snatched through imprisonment, a mother sick with \u00a0Alzheimer’s, is interesting. The Bhutto story is woven with the story of Pakistan and its \u00a0attempt to end military rule and extremism from the body politic of the \u00a0country.<\/h6>\n
One Musharraf supporter wrote gleefully of Bhutto’s lectures abroad being \u00a0cancelled as a consequence of the Swiss finding. Such glee is an insight into how \u00a0Bhutto torments her enemies by being what she is: a woman leader committed to \u00a0the emancipation of her people. Bhutto’s enemies belong to the past. Her struggle for freedom, pluralism and \u00a0tolerance as a system of government for the Pakistan and the Muslim \u00a0world is \u00a0bound to triumph. And if a free election is held in Pakistan, as last October’s \u00a0elections showed, Bhutto will triumph once again to become Prime Minister for \u00a0the third time.<\/h6>\n

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[vc_row type=”container” css=”.vc_custom_1680284512306{padding-top: 20px !important;}”][vc_column][vc_column_text] The other side of the Bhutto story by Bashir Riaz – August 30, 2003 Islamabad’s military dictatorship discovered a new life for its campaign against the democratic leadership of Benazir Bhutto in a Swiss Magistrate’s finding. The Swiss Magistrate’s finding follows an investigation triggered by politically motivated allegations by Bhutto’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-full-width.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-76489","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe other side of the Bhutto story - Pakistan Peoples Party Parliamentarians<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/pppp.org.pk\/website\/the-other-side-of-the-bhutto-story\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The other side of the Bhutto story - Pakistan Peoples Party Parliamentarians\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"[vc_row type=”container” css=”.vc_custom_1680284512306{padding-top: 20px !important;}”][vc_column][vc_column_text] The other side of the Bhutto story by Bashir Riaz – August 30, 2003 Islamabad’s military dictatorship discovered a new life for its campaign against the democratic leadership of Benazir Bhutto in a Swiss Magistrate’s finding. 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