The assassination of Benazir Bhutto on December 27 in Rawalpindi has thrown Pakistan into an even deeper crisis than those that have wracked it since 9 March 2007 when President Pervez Musharraf suspended Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Despite claims from the military regime that they have evidence proving the involvement of Islamist groups linked to Al Qa’eda in the assassination, widespread popular anger has been principally directed against Musharraf himself and at the army and police.
Revolutionaries completely condemn acts of individual terrorism such as the murder of Benazir Bhutto and sympathise with the outraged masses who, correctly, recognise it as an attack on their own democratic aspirations, an attempt to prolong or worsen the dictatorial military regime.
The assassination came just twelve days before general elections whose outcome was always likely to be rigged in favour of Musharraf and his stooge party the PML-Q. If they take place as planned, after the murder of the leader of the party (Pakistan People’s Party-PPP) that was expected to win the largest proportion of the popular vote, this would make them even more of a mockery. Yet, such a poll is still uncritically supported by the United States and Britain, the two imperialist powers that dominate the country. Pakistan, with its half- million strong army, has long been the main gendarme for first British and then US imperialism in Central and South Asia. Hence the enormous quantities of military aid it receives, especially since 9/11.
Benazir Bhutto – whose family and husband are millionaires and part of Pakistan’s corrupt landowning elite – are being hailed as martyrs of democracy by the western media, and even by left wing International Marxist Tendency (known as The Struggle within the PPP). But Bhutto has never been a consistent fighter for democracy. She has always put the interests of Pakistan’s tiny rich elite and a slavish loyalty to the imperialists in London and Washington, before the democratic struggle of the people of Pakistan. The Pakistan People’s Party has never been a party of the working class but from its very beginning was a bourgeois populist party.
The PPP has come to symbolise the democratic aspirations of large sections of the people because it was removed from office by military coups or constitutional manoeuvres on three occasions and several members of the Bhutto family have been murdered in the process. The PP emerged from a period of mass resistance against the then military regime. From 1971-77, its founder, Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, did at first carry out some social reforms but was ousted by the military and eventually hanged in 1979. This coup led by General Zia-ul-Haq (1977-88) was carried out with the direct collusion of US imperialism. Like all populist parties the PPP centres on a great leader, in this case chosen from the Bhutto dynasty.
Nonetheless, this radical populist heritage has been long abandoned by Zulfikar’s daughter. Leaving aside her own far-from-spotless record during her two premierships, in 1988-90 and 1993-96, when she disappointed the masses’ hopes of radical reform, supported US imperialism and colluded with the army and the Islamists, it is not true that either she herself, or her party, spearheaded the mass actions calling for the restoration of democracy in 2007. Of course, PPP cadres did play a role in those mobilisations but at crucial moments Bhutto and the PPP leadership actually acted as a brake on them, preventing them from developing into a decisive struggle to bring down Musharraf.
They did this by their negotiations with him, by their tacit toleration of his purge of the judiciary and by their acceptance of the very idea of sharing power with the dictator. Worst of all was Bhutto’s promotion of the idea that the USA and the UK were trustworthy guarantors of democracy in Pakistan and her expressed willingness to support their “war on terrorism” both in Pakistan and in Afghanistan.
Benazir Bhutto was indeed the politician that Bush, and his sinister proconsul John Negroponte, had chosen to be prime minister but under the strict control of Musharraf as a civilian president. Their objective was to ensure a safe hand at the controls of the Pakistan Army, so that it would continue to aid the US in its war in southern Afghanistan and, at the same time, to give the regime greater democratic legitimacy after the mass mobilisations of the summer. To achieve this, however, Musharraf had to prevent the judiciary, rendered unreliable by pressure of the mass movement, led by lawyers and students, declaring his position illegitimate. Under extreme pressure from Bush, he also had to agree to allow Bhutto to return and run for elections on January 8. In an attempt to maintain control, he declared a state of emergency, clamped down harshly on the real democratic opposition on the streets, arresting thousands, and, under cover of this, replaced all the independent-minded judges in the High Court, which then dutifully legitimised his actions.
Bhutto herself was eventually forced by the pressure of her own party – itself under pressure from the masses – to denounce the state of emergency and begin talks to join a block of opposition parties and head mass demonstrations. Musharraf promptly clapped her under house arrest. The imperialist powers, seeing their carefully laid plans for joint Musharraf-Bhutto rule threatened, desperately applied pressure on Musharraf to lift the state of emergency and press on with the elections. This he grudgingly did, but in form only. The first major election rallies were subjected to terrorist attack. Nawaz Shariff’s was fired on with four people being killed and Bhutto’s saw her assassination.
For all these reasons, Socialists – while unreservedly condemning the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and respecting the democratic hopes which sectors of the masses projected onto her – do not in any way see her assassination as the “murder of democracy” (LPP) or see her as a “martyr for democracy.”
It was not only Jihadi Islamists and/or Al Qa’eda who had an interest in killing Bhutto – though she had recently fully backed the US “war on terror” being waged by the Pakistani army in Waziristan and Swat provinces, but also leading forces in Musharraf’s party, the PML-Q, and the secret service, the ISI. Reports suggest that military-police protection was very light indeed and Bhutto herself had identified forces within the military and the PML-Q who she believed were trying to kill her. Whatever the exact sequence of events and the direct responsibility – and such assassinations, which have marked the entire history of Pakistan, have rarely, if ever, been “solved” – there are powerful forces within the military regime and its stooge party that will benefit from a continuation of a de facto state of emergency.
The elections, if they are not postponed for a long period, would, in any case, be a total farce, designed to give legitimacy to Musharraff’s presidential rule. Any civilian party that agreed to take up the premiership would be unfailingly condemned by the overwhelming mass of the people.
What should the working class and progressive forces do, faced with the present crisis? Firstly, it is essential to reject any attempts to impose martial law or a new state of emergency. The masses of workers, students and peasants should themselves constitute community and workplace self-defence militias to restore order where it has genuinely broken down. At the same time, they should take steps to focus the masses’ anger into mass actions, demonstrations, general strikes, occupations of universities and colleges. To organise these struggles, and lead them independently of such corrupt bourgeois politicians as Nawaz Shariff, it is essential that the workers, the students, the lawyers and peasants organise themselves in committees of action. All these mobilisations should demand the immediate and unconditional resignation of the dictator and his military regime. The sham elections should give place to an election process for a sovereign Constituent Assembly.
These elections will need to be conducted under the supervision of the mass organisations of workers and working peasants, the urban poor, the lawyers’ movement, the students and youth. The journalists and media workers must ensure that fair and equal access is given to all candidates and that all attempts at bribery or coercion are exposed. Only by such a means can a democratic assembly of recallable delegates, able and willing to take revolutionary measures in the interests of the exploited and impoverished masses, come into being and fulfil its duties to them.
Above all, a new working class party needs to be formed around a programme, not only for winning full democratic rights, not only for an end to any collusion with Bush’s “war on terrorism”, but for a revolutionary expropriation of the big landlords, domestic and foreign capitalists and the dissolution of the armed forces into a universally armed people. No longer will rival dynasties of landlords and capitalists, or religious fanatics, be able to fool and divert the masses from fighting for their own social as well as political emancipation.
Last, but not least, the prolonged revolutionary situation in Pakistan is far from unique in the whole of South Asia. In Nepal, Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand, and in parts of India, major movements for democracy and against landlordism and privatisation have taken place over recent years. This is itself part of a worldwide pattern which involves the Middle East and Latin America. It is caused by the growing crisis of globalised capitalism and the major imperialist powers’ “war on terrorism.” The latter is, in reality, a war to grab oil reserves and other strategic resources, one increasingly carried on in scarcely concealed rivalry with one another. Only an international organisation with the strongest links to all these arenas of struggle can so coordinate them that they can inflict a historic defeat on capitalism and imperialism. For that we need a new, a Fifth, International.