Source: Free Press

Before Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party continues its power struggle with President Pervez Musharraf, it likely will face an internal power struggle over who will succeed her.

That process is to begin today, when its executive committee is to meet to name an interim leader. Speculation in the Pakistani media has included Bhutto’s sister and widower.

The meeting comes as violence flares across Pakistan following Bhutto’s assassination. At least 27 people died in riots Friday as the popular opposition leader was laid to rest.

Hundreds of thousands paid their last respects as her body was placed beside her father’s in a marble mausoleum in the Bhutto family’s ancestral village in southern Sindh province.

But the violence is raising concerns that nuclear-armed Pakistan — plagued by chaos and the growing threat from Islamic militants — is in danger of spinning out of control.

Successor not easy to find

Bhutto’s party, known as the PPP, a leading voice for the restoration of democracy since Musharraf’s 1990 military coup, has no obvious successor because it has always been an autocratic institution. Since its founding 40 years ago, the PPP has been led by only Bhutto, her mother, or her father.

Months before her assassination Thursday, Bhutto, 54, assumed the party title of life chairwoman.

Pakistani parties, including the PPP, “are not internally democratic and do not transmit the democratic aspirations of Pakistanis,” said Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a political science professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

The autocracy of the main parties, including Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League, has cost them support, at times allowing others to fill the void by leading the fight against Musharraf.

Bhutto seems to have made little effort to groom a political heir. In an interview in August, she depicted herself as not only her party’s sole leader but as the country’s only hope.

“I would be content to see Pakistan have democracy,” she said in an Aug. 6 TV interview.

“But at the same time, my party feels that I’m the leader who can give hope to the people of the country.”

Among her possible successors are her husband, Asif Ali Zardari; Makhdoom Amin Fahim, her deputy in the PPP hierarchy; Aitzaz Ahsan, her longtime attorney, and her sister, Sanam.

But her sister has lived her adult life in London and has no political experience. Zardari has faced a battery of corruption charges, most eventually dismissed. Fahim is a longtime legislator and a former Bhutto cabinet minister but lacks a public persona.

Elections and a mystery

The Bush administration is counting on Musharraf going ahead with planned Jan. 8 elections despite Bhutto’s assassination in the hope the vote will cement steps toward restoring democracy. But the violence and a promise by Sharif — Pakistan’s other top opposition leader — to boycott the vote cast doubt on the prospects, despite the prime minister saying the government had no plans to postpone voting.

Adding to the uncertainty are government claims that an Al Qaeda operative is responsible for Bhutto’s death.

The government said Friday that Bhutto died from the force of a suicide bomb that slammed her head against a lever on her vehicle’s sunroof. That contradicted authorities’ statements Thursday that she died from bullet wounds fired by a man who then blew himself up. A surgeon who treated her said Friday that she died from the impact of shrapnel on her skull.

 E-mail this article to a friend

Tags: Assassination, Benazir Bhutto, PPP, Suicide bomb, Unrest