Born: June 21, 1953, Karachi, Pakistan
Died : 27 Dec, 2007
Benazir Bhutto was a Pakistani political leader, who served as prime minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990 and from 1993 to 1996. Bhutto was educated at Radcliffe College in the United States and at the University of Oxford in England, where she was the first Asian woman to be elected president of the Oxford Union. The daughter of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1971-1977), she returned to Pakistan in 1977, planning on a career in the foreign service, only days before General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq staged a coup that unseated her father. Following her father’s imprisonment in 1977, Bhutto and her mother, Begum Nusrat Bhutto, assumed the leadership of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). The ruling military regime placed Bhutto under house arrest and then in prison. Released in 1984, she went into exile in Britain until 1986, when martial law in Pakistan ended and political parties were legalized. Supported by tumultuous crowds, Bhutto again called for fresh elections, resulting in another short prison term that same year. She also had to contend with internal dissension among the anti-Zia forces.
In 1988, Zia was killed in an aeroplane crash, less than three months after announcing that elections would take place. In the November elections the PPP gained a huge plurality in the National Assembly, and in December 1988 Bhutto became prime minister of Pakistan, the first woman to hold this office in any modern Islamic state. In August 1990, however, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan dismissed her, charging her with incompetence and corruption. Her party was soundly defeated in the elections that followed, and Bhutto became an opposition leader in the parliament. As opposition leader, attempts to oust the ruling party caused her deportation to the city of Karachi in 1992 and she was temporarily banned from entering Islamabad, the federal capital of Pakistan. In October 1993, following the resignations of Khan and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Bhutto was again elected prime minister. However, in 1996 her government was once again dismissed amid allegations of corruption by the president. New elections in 1997 brought only a small number of seats to the PPP, ruining Bhutto’s chances of regaining her former position. In 1999, the high court in Lahore found Bhutto guilty of taking payments from a Swiss company in exchange for a contract. In addition to a fine and a jail sentence, Bhutto faced disqualification for office and loss of her seat in the parliament, pending her appeal to the Supreme Court. Bhutto’s autobiography, Daughter of Destiny, was published in 1988.
On 27 Dec 2007, this brave lady was shot dead in a procession.
