In a divided Pakistan, not all are mourning Bhutto

[Harold F. Schiffman]

In divided Pakistan, not all are mourning Bhutto

Tristan Mabry

The death of Benazir Bhutto triggered outbursts of pain and protest in
Pakistan, but although President Pervez Musharraf declared three days of
mourning, it is entirely misguided to believe that her assassination is
being mourned by most Pakistanis. While Islamabad and Washington are quick
to blame the Islamists, who almost certainly orchestrated the actual
attack, some of the country's secular elites are celebrating her demise.
The dividing line between the mourners and the merry is an ethnic one.
As the world's first Islamic republic threatens to implode (again), the
most important political divisions to consider are not ideological -
democracy vs. despotism, liberalism vs. Islamism - but cultural and
linguistic.

Punjabis account for almost half of the country's population and control
its most important institution: the military. Yet Bhutto was a Sindhi, a
member of an ethnic minority that accounts for just 12 percent of
Pakistan's 165 million people. She was also a hero to a Sindhi separatist
movement, a decades-old struggle for independence pursued by a people who
see Pakistan as a prison. Under British colonial rule, the Sindhis were
regional ministers of their own affairs. After partition in 1947, the
Sindhis were marginalized by politically powerful migrants, the Mohajirs,
who led the drive to split India as two "nations" divided by religion. The
Mohajirs, who settled primarily in the capital of the province, Karachi,
are now represented in Islamabad by one of their own: Musharraf.

Immediately after Bhutto died, it should come as no surprise that the most
violent protests erupted in the streets of Sindh. Because the Mohajir
elite are both educated and secular, the return of Bhutto and her call for
democracy should have been cause for cosmopolitan celebration. Yet she was
generally loathed by Mohajirs. In Karachi, a popular comedian often played
Bhutto in drag and made fun of her uncomfortable accent in Urdu. Rather
than a symbol of civility, she was viewed as a chief of the hostile
natives, the Sindhis.

In fact, this is not far from the truth. Bhutto's cousin Mumtaz Bhutto
is the chairman of the separatist Sindhi National Front (SNF). In a
meeting over tea and cookies at his well-guarded home in Karachi, Mumtaz
Bhutto once told me the Sindhi separatists are inspired by the secession
of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971. Just as Islamabad "did not read
the signs" warning of what was about to happen in Dhaka, he believes the
Musharraf regime is "totally oblivious to what is going on in Sindh."
The separatist sentiment in Sindh is not unique in Pakistan.

In the neighboring province of Balochistan, a resource-rich but
desperately forbidding region, many of the five million ethnic Balochis
support the Baloch Liberation Army, a separatist militia that sometimes
bombs natural-gas pipelines and government offices. The BLA's longtime
leader, Nawab Akbar Bugti, was killed last year when the Pakistan Air
Force bombed his remote mountain hideaway. And last month, his successor,
Balash Khan Marri, was shot and killed by an unknown assailant. And in the
wild, wild northwest, ethnic Pashtuns - cousins of the same people who
formed the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan - battle their country's own
army.

In short, aside from an observance of Islam, the Muslims of Pakistan have
little else in common. The country's name offers the best illustration of
its synthetic construction: Pakistan is an acronym composed of the titular
provinces Punjab, Afghan (for the people of the wild northwest), Kashmir,
Sindh, and Balochistan. Each of these provinces is dominated by separate
peoples with distinct languages. The official language of Pakistan, Urdu,
is the mother tongue of only 8 percent of its people, the Mohajirs. All of
this matters if free, fair and open elections are successfully conducted
in Pakistan. The democratic process will strengthen political parties
representing ethnic interests.

And while Islamist violence is clearly a present danger, the power of
terrorism is political rather than military. The outrage and civil unrest
triggered by Bhutto's assassination will probably break the back of the
Musharraf regime and force the military to openly select his successor. In
the short term - and despite public calls by President Bush and other
world leaders to hold elections in Pakistan - this is privately the most
welcome outcome for the international community. When dealing with any
country equipped with nuclear weapons, a nasty stability is usually better
than an unstable democracy. But in the long view, Benazir Butto's bloody
end is symptomatic of Pakistan's enduring birth defect: a state without a
nation, a country cobbled together by decree.


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E-mail Tristan Mabry at tjm76 at georgetown.edu.

Find this article at:
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/12879172.html

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