Mommie Dearest

By MARGUERITE MICHAELS

As Benazir Bhutto tenderly sprinkled red and yellow flowers on her father's marble tomb last week, the scene amounted to only a brief respite from a family feud of royal proportions. Just minutes earlier, Pakistani national police had prevented her mother from making the same gesture -- by firing tear gas and bullets at the 63-year-old widow and her supporters who had gathered at the family mansion nearby. Raising a white handkerchief in a sign of peace, Nusrat Bhutto asked police to allow her supporters to tend to the wounded. Angrily, she compared her daughter to General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, the dictator who had sent her husband to the very grave she was now barred from visiting.

Such is the sorry state of Pakistan's ruling dynasty on the 66th anniversary of the birth of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Nusrat's husband, Benazir's father and Pakistan's Prime Minister before General Zia had him hanged in 1979. The rift is not just mother against daughter, but also brother against sister. Accused of terrorism by the Zia regime, Murtaza Bhutto, 39, Nusrat's eldest son, has been in jail since November. After 16 years of exile abroad, he came home to claim a provincial seat he had won in absentia in the same elections that brought his older sister to power for the second time in less than five years.

It was Murtaza's return that sparked an ugly feud over who should inherit the Bhutto legacy. Nusrat drew cheering campaign crowds for Murtaza last fall by holding aloft his two-year-old son and proclaiming the male line as her husband's true heirs.

Benazir has spurned her mother's entreaties to get the charges against Murtaza dismissed. She has not even visited her sibling in prison. Last month she talked the central executive committee of the Pakistan People's Party, founded by her father, into dropping her mother from her post as party chairperson.

For many Pakistanis, the family spat is more entertaining than most of the soaps broadcast on state-run television. But the violent end of last week's demonstration, which left one person dead and 20 wounded, has sullied an otherwise promising start to Bhutto's second term. With the government and party machinery firmly in her control, no one expects any serious challenges to her rule. That is, until Murtaza gets out of jail. Even on bail, he will, by local Muslim tradition, automatically assume the leadership of the vast Bhutto clan. With his mother's help and the support of Pakistan's male- dominated Muslim society, brother Murtaza will be stalking his sister throughout her days in power.

With reporting by Gerald Bourke/Islamabad and Jefferson Penberthy/New Delhi