Pakistan Addressing the Future, Avenging the Past

By Jill Smolowe

"Stand up to the challenge. Fight against overwhelming odds. Overcome the enemy." The late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto regularly exhorted his eldest daughter with such maxims. Benazir proved to be a keen listener. "In the stories my father had told us over and over again," she writes in her new autobiography, Benazir Bhutto: Daughter of the East, "good always triumphed over evil."

To Benazir Bhutto, last week's national elections in Pakistan must have seemed the storybook fulfillment of her father's fantasies. In the first truly free elections since the late President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq began his eleven years of autocratic rule, voters catapulted her Pakistan People's Party to dominance in the nation's politics and put Bhutto within reach of the prime- ministership once held by her beloved father. Dreams do come true. Scores do get settled.

The captured 92 of the parliament's 237 seats, decisively beating the Islamic Democratic Alliance, its nearest competitor and the relic of Zia, who died in a plane crash three months before the vote. The Alliance won only 55 seats. A surge of ethnic support thrust the fledgling Mohajir Qaumi Movement into the third and pivotal position with 13 seats.

Under Pakistan's complex electoral system, more seats have yet to be decided, so a Bhutto government remains in doubt. By week's end, odds were perhaps 50-50. But the results are an unmistakable personal victory, whether she becomes Prime Minister or opposition leader. "The People's Party has emerged as the single largest party," she declared. "The acting President should now call on the People's Party to form a government."

Acting President Ghulam Ishaq Khan is not bound to invite Bhutto to form a government. But it is hard to imagine his sidestepping her without unleashing a furious reaction. Bhutto handily won all three National Assembly seats she contested (two of which will have to be filled in by-elections), and her party was carried to victory mainly on the strength of her blazing speeches and dazzling charisma. Standing in a convoy of speeding jeeps, her head held high and covered with a colorful dupatta, or scarf, this 35-year-old Western- educated wife and mother attracted frenzied adulation. To deny her the right to govern could just as easily turn those adoring crowds into mutinous mobs.

The President could still give the Alliance first crack at fashioning a governing coalition, but its two main leaders failed to win Assembly seats. Command of the Alliance was ceded to Mian Nawaz Sharif, chief minister of Punjab and a Zia protege, who won two seats.

Ishaq Khan hinted he would not automatically bypass Bhutto: "I think a woman Prime Minister might be a good change." In the male-dominated Muslim society of Pakistan, it would be an astonishing one. That did not daunt Bhutto. She immediately set out to solicit coalition partners. By Thursday night she claimed, "We already have a simple majority in the parliament." But Nawaz Sharif is also scrambling to assemble a majority, and likewise predicts he will succeed.

Whatever its makeup, Pakistan's new government will be the first run by civilians since Zia came to power. Four months earlier, the country's 102 million people would not have dared to hope for such an outcome. When Zia announced elections last July, he almost certainly planned to ban political parties. Only when Zia died in the still unexplained crash of his C-130 transport on Aug. 17 did the prospect for party participation emerge.

Even so, Pakistanis feared a repetition of the violence and ballot-box fraud that rapidly destroyed nearly all the country's previous attempts at democratic rule. The quiet this week at the 33,328 polling stations was hailed as a triumph of restraint. "Peace has not broken down," wrote Maleeha Lodhi, editor of the Muslim, an Islamabad-based daily. "Violence has remained well within the limits of subcontinental acceptability."

For Bhutto, the election was a battle among ghosts. She was driven by a fierce longing to avenge her father's death. Amid charges of corruption, election-rigging and autocracy, the elder Bhutto was toppled from power in 1977 by Zia, who two years later authorized Bhutto's execution. "I told him on my oath in his death cell, I would carry on his work," Benazir Bhutto once said. In achieving victory by playing up her father's name and his strong populist appeal, she in effect vindicated his chaotic 5 1/2-year rule. Moreover, by besting the eight-party Alliance, which included many supporters of Zia's policies, she wreaked posthumous vengeance on the man who had her father put to death. Says Mushahid Hussain, a Pakistani journalist: "I think that Zia has finally been buried with this election."

But the general's army is still alive and well. Its looming presence compelled Bhutto to moderate her father's nationalist-socialist program. She declared her devotion to free speech and free markets, and repeatedly assured the military they had nothing to fear from a P.P.P. regime. Praising the army's restraint as "critical to the restoration of democracy," she embraced the military's interests: close ties with the West, continued support for the mujahedin in Afghanistan and development of Pakistan's unacknowledged nuclear-weapons capability.

The military has signaled its intention to honor the election results. Just eight days after Zia's death, army Chief of Staff Mirza Aslam Baig instructed his officers, "Stick to your assigned job, leave politics to the politicians." However nervous at the prospect of another Bhutto government they may be, the generals have made no move to intervene.

A keener obstruction to Bhutto's authority may be the traditional attitudes of Pakistan's Islamic people. Not all are eager to live under the first Muslim government headed by a woman. In the days prior to the election, 40 mullahs issued a fatwa, or religious verdict, warning that a nation headed by a woman cannot prosper and risks falling "into the pit of Western cultural degeneration."

If Bhutto takes the helm, she will no doubt soften the literal reading of Islamic law espoused by Zia. But after enduring military rule for much of its 41 years, Pakistan is likely to find its experiment with democracy nothing less than tumultuous. The people have signaled their desire for a popularly elected government that is measured in years, not months. Now it is time for Benazir Bhutto to lay to rest the shades of her own and her country's past and see what kind of maxims she can write for Pakistan's democratic future.

With reporting by Edward W. Desmond/Lahore