A LEADER TWICE REMOVED

By Howard Chua-Eoan

Benazir Bhutto had grown impatient with the rumors, and dismissed them angrily. "Rubbish," she told TIME. In interviews she insisted that her ties with Pakistani President Farooq Ahmad Khan Leghari were fine, that the talk of his sacking her government was just disinformation from the dark forces she claimed were out to strangle her country's hobbling democracy. Never mind that Leghari himself had publicly suggested the move. If the President had problems with her, the Prime Minister said repeatedly, she didn't see why he didn't bring them up. On Tuesday morning he did just that--and laid out his solution. He dismissed her government, appointed a caretaker Prime Minister, dissolved Parliament and promised to hold elections within 90 days.

It was the second time Bhutto has suffered such an ignominious removal--the military backed her expulsion in 1990. It is also the third time in six years a Pakistani Prime Minister has been kicked out in midterm. While the move is ominous for the fate of democracy, Leghari had other danger signals to consider. In the past few weeks, protests by the country's main Islamic party had torn into major cities, including Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. The cry in the streets was corruption. And in Pakistan the figure most often paired with that word is Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto's husband and the Minister of Investment. On Tuesday, Zardari had been detained, and at one point Bhutto was reportedly under military surveillance.

Bhutto and Zardari were charged with corruption after she was dismissed in 1990. But there was never any conclusive evidence, and Zardari was released on bail after more than a year in prison. So while Leghari mentioned corruption in his letter, he had another more troubling reason for his action. Pakistan is chafing under austerities imposed by the International Monetary Fund, which has refused to release a $600 million standby loan if Islamabad cannot remedy its budget deficit in order to service its $28.6 billion in foreign debt. To that end Bhutto had raised taxes--but her government did not collect enough revenue and at the same time raised the level of discontent. On Oct. 29, in an effort to appease the imf, Bhutto gave up the finance portfolio she had held since retaking the government in 1993. "The debt servicing is breaking our backs--debt that I didn't incur," she told TIME in September. "But as Prime Minister, I have to pay it back."

Bhutto has seen her fortunes fall and rise and rise and fall. Recently her image has been tarnished by allegations of her husband's corruption and an unseemly political feud with her mother and brother, who was killed in a police shootout in September. But she retains a haughty sense of her own fate and prerogatives, and if Leghari's complaints do not bar her from running, she will challenge her dismissal at the polls. "I am not one of those leaders who sell lies and buy time," she told TIME recently. "No leader, no dictator could do what I have done."

--By Howard Chua-Eoan. Reported by Meenakshi Ganguly/Islamabad

With reporting by MEENAKSHI GANGULY/ISLAMABAD