Even in the midst of tragedy, democracy must happen

Assassinations are rarely for the good and the one of Benazir Bhutto yesterday is no different. It is always startling to have a pervasive personality wrenched from the scene so suddenly, but one has a right to feel angry that a beacon of hope, however, controversial, was extinguished. Anger has to be initially directed at the dullheaded dope who wrought the carnage at Rawalpindi, but afterwards against those who ordered it and here's where it gets confusing. Was it the Islamic existentialists or the old guard security officers who sponsored the Taliban until 2001 or a collusion of the latter with the former? Whoever it was obviously saw modern democracy, personified in Bhutto, as a threat to their power.
But Bhutto also has herself to blame for not campaigning behind a bullet- and bomb-proof perspex screen, in the manner of John Paul II's 'Popemobile' post-assassination attempt. she narrowly escaped being killed on her return to Pakistan earlier this year. There is bravery, there is courage and then there is recklessness. Bobby Kennedy ignored the lesson of his brother's untimely death and in a touchy-feely campaign was himself gunned down. Nowadays, a student gets tasered for heckling Senator John Kerry. Bhutto, in a far more volatile country, went for the opposite tack. She committed a final, fatal, indulgence, leaning out of her vehicle's sunroof to wave to her supporters. It was the bullets fired that killed her, not the subsequent explosion.
Assassins were widely used in the glory days of Islam, when the caliphs oversaw things from Baghdad, but the perpetrators expected to get away to strike another day. Charlie Falconer gets a lot of things wrong, but calling the modern movement a death cult is spot on. It may be borne of the frustration of impotence against Western superiority and mendacity, but suicide bombing is pathetic, especially against civilians. Bhutto's killer may have preferred instant death to being torn to pieces by the crowd, but that confirms his irreligiosity. All of the Abrahamic religions glorify the giving up of one's life to save others and expressingly condemn suicide when it is used to kill. How this fool could believe that his actions would send him to heaven to be surrounded by virgins to deflower at will really illustrates his limited intellect.
When Bhutto was in exile, I used to recoil at her media appearances, tarred as she was with corruption charges. My view of her changed when, even if for basic personal motives, she returned to Pakistan, because she wanted to bring back democracy to her troubled country. Bhutto may not have been corrupt, nor even her convicted husband, known as Mr-Ten-Per-Cent, it may all have been a political smear, but her subordinates were and under her second term in office, Pakistan sank to the bottom of the international corruption register. Things were little better under Nawaz Sharif, though since Pervez Musharraf took over in a bloodless military coup, there has been a modest, if inconsistent, improvement in that rating.
Bhutto, also, by personalisng the power structure of her party, may have plunged it into more confusion by her death than might otherwise have been the case. Family isn't always a bad thing. When Indira Ghandi was killed by her own bodyguard, there was her technocrat son to take over. When Rajiv was blown up by a Tamil assassin, his wife Sonia took up the torch. And Rajiv and Sonia's children will be expected to continue the political dynasty. But who will take over from Benazir Bhutto? Her father and brothers are all dead and unnaturally at that. Her husband is disgraced. She may well have been nurturing an heir apparent but experienced observers can't readily identify a groomed successor. Other Indians have stepped into the breach of the Congress Party when there was a vacuum between the deaths of the Nehru-Ghandi family, but what Pakistanis of note are there waiting in the wings of the People's Party?
Bhutto, however, whatever else she might have been, stood for progressiveness and her murder bears parallel with two other historical assassinations. Tsar Alexander II, the 'Tsar-Liberator' (for trying to abolish serfdom in Russia), was the subject of many an attempt on his life by anti-monarchical fanatics and in 1881, as he was on his way to sign a document that could have kickstarted a liberal eventual exit from autocracy, he was attacked again. Russian nihilists, who could find common ground with today's suicide bombers, believed that the Russian monarchy was unreformable, despite all that Alexander II had sought to achieve and that only through conflict, leading to the regime's destruction, could any good occur in Russia. They lobbed bombs at the Tsar's carriage, but once again, missed, killing and hurting a swathe of civilians. Out of pity, the tsar, instaed of hastening from the carnage, got out to try and give comfort to the injured victims. Another explosive was hurled and the tsar took the full force of the blast. He died in agony shortly after, his son shelved all idea of liberal reform, believing it the weakness that led to his father's death and the nihilists got their wish of making the monarchy reactionary and unpopular, thus justifying their own insane cause.
In 1914, agents of the Black Hand, a terrorist organisation sponsored by the Serbian government, gathered in Sarajevo. Their aim was to murder Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was to visit the city. They wanted to eliminate him because he was heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was known to favour greater autonomy and parliaments, on a par with Hungary, for the Slavic peoples of the realm. This evolutionary federalism was a threat to Serbia's notion of itself as the self-proclaimed champion of the south Slavs. The Black Hand members attacked the Archduke's procession but miserably failed to harm him. Feeling the danger had passed, Ferdinand continued on his tour. Shortly after, as his retinue turned a corner, by chance ran into the path of another Serbian terrorist, Gavrilo Princip. He had been mulling over the botched job of his friends and could scarcely believe his luck. He killed Ferdinand and the world was plunged into war.
Whether a semi-democratic Russia would have waded into a world war in 1914 is a moot point, as is if the trigger for World War One could have been indefinietly postponed, the way the allaince system was set up. But both killings were a triumph for extremists over moderation and in a nuclear-armed Pakistan that cannot be allowed to derail progress. Bhutto believed this current strain of Muslim extremism would burn itself out over time, just as the plane hijackings by secular Muslims in the 1970s did. In that sense, democracy may not bring an immdeiate stop to it, but one person, one vote, is the best bulwark against it until that time.