BENAZIR Bhutto probably would have been alive today and addressing a public rally at this very moment had she not been overwhelmed by her feelings for party workers who were standing at the Liaquat Bagh gate. She emerged from the sunroof of her Land Cruiser and was shot dead (as was initially reported) by an unknown assassin who then allegedly blew himself up.

Her vehicle was bulletproof and the suicide blast would not have affected her, like the other passengers in the vehicle, had she remained inside.

We will probably never be able to find out who masterminded her killing and who was actually her assassin. Let alone this assassination we have yet to unravel the mysteries surrounding the deaths of past leaders. Benazir was hit on College Road at around 5.20 pm.

By 9 pm, the municipality in Rawalpindi had washed the road in record time. Benazir was buried by 5 pm the next day in her ancestral village, and thus another chapter of our history has been washed and buried in the midst of clumsiness and nonsensicality.

I have been living in Rawalpindi and Islamabad for almost four decades now and have hardly missed a public meeting at Liaquat Bagh. The Dec 27 rally in the Bagh was the smallest that Benazir ever held there. I was astonished to see that almost two-thirds of the ground was empty which could be attributed to the public’s disapproval of Benazir’s deal with President Musharraf or the fear of a suicide attack.

Despite this, I was astonished to hear some of the media folks repeatedly stating in their broadcasts that the rally was big. I was sitting on top of the same trailer on which all the electronic mediamen were placed in the press enclosure.

It was officially announced that the meeting would commence at 11.30 am but Benazir reached the venue at around 3 pm. This was late even by her own standards but she was probably waiting for the ground to be filled.

Her speech was preceded by the major candidates from this region making speeches and she then took the mike.

I have heard many of her speeches and this was perhaps one of her finest, not in terms of the content but for her exemplary delivery. She mostly talked about her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and his achievements and ostensibly avoided dwelling on the current political situation in the country. She particularly avoided criticising President Musharraf.

She did not name any of her opponents by name but instead called them “political orphans”. She sounded and genuinely appeared very happy.

She finished her speech, quickly got off the stage and sat in her Land Cruiser. The security was good within the premises and nobody was allowed to enter without being frisked and passing through a scanning machine. The assassin, however, approached Benazir’s vehicle when it left the Liaquat Bagh precincts and came on to College Road across Gordon College.

It was then that the suicide bomber approached her and struck the fatal blow. The car carrying Benazir left, without anyone knowing as to what had happened to her.

Many of those associated with Benazir’s security and the relevant government functionaries may say that suicide bombing cannot be completely avoided. It is an altogether different question as to where these bombers receive their ammunition and training and why have we so far been unable to catch a single mastermind of these attacks.

However, Benazir did not die from the bombing but probably of gunshot wounds. And the strategy adopted by her security staff to surround her with Benazir Janesars was obviously not effective and kind of cruel.

It at least appeared to me that the police, most of which had come from other cities for some unknown reason, was alert at the start of the meeting but soon relaxed once the speeches started. Soon lethargy caught up with them and almost all of them could be seen chatting in groups of three or four enjoying peanuts on a beautiful sunny afternoon.

A policeman sitting on a chair in the press enclosure with a stick in his hand constantly irritated me, looking like he had come to watch a stage drama. Four young guys, three of them incidentally bearded, stood alertly on the ground next to the stage, with automatic weapons. There were one or two policemen on top of some of the buildings, particularly on the side of College Road where the blast took place.

The problem started with the exit points. Apparently there were not enough policemen deployed around Ms Bhutto’s vehicle, as can be seen from the last photographs of that momentous event.

I had approached the press enclosure gate on College Road when the blast took place; I was thus less than 30 feet from the site. The gate was locked. I rushed towards the wall to see what had happened. I still remember the bewildered faces of policemen looking at me rather than towards the blast site; some female police officers had huddled into a corner and a few were crying.

I rushed towards the blast site and sadly not a single policeman had arrived on the scene. More than 20 badly burnt bodies were lying on College Road. Most spectators were simply hysterically, shouting or beating their heads in shock and daze.

Few had dared to reach the spot as perhaps everybody was scared of a follow-up blast. I was quickly looking for survivors; I saw a guy breathing but his lower portion was destroyed. Two fellow lawyers were lying dead, with one guy’s face on the ground.

He appeared to me to be a close jiyala friend and I thus apprehensively tried to swerve him to one side to see his face. Sticky stuff stuck to my hands which I can still feel. It was not my friend but was another lawyer in his uniform.

The tragic part is that the police was not there to help the people lift the injured and the dead bodies. This was either being done by civilians or later by the ambulance crew who immediately started reaching the place but it took them about an hour and a half to clear the whole area. The police should be asked to lend a helping hand in such endeavours, or is their task simply limited to cordoning off areas?

One police officer had drawn a circle with his stick around the head of the alleged bomber and was hysterically and repeatedly abusing the bomber’s sister. Sometimes it appears to me that an evil force has drawn a circle around our beloved country as well.

Benazir, however, left the Land of the Pure happily as she was euphoric in her last moments and was happy with her last public rally and her speech. She died happily but left her nation in a shock that will take decades to shake off.

HE burst forth through the open door of the white stretch-limo attired in a black suit, green shirt, tie-less, an outsize green plastic cut-out of Africa’s map pinned to the lapel, heart-side, cape fluttering behind him in the wind, the extravagant sash, left shoulder to right thigh, catching oblique rays of a low, mid-December sun, fragmenting them into all the colours of the rainbow.

His crinkly hair, long and dyed jet-black, wildly shooting out from under a dark brown velvet cap, reputedly of his own design, he waved his arms and hurled kisses at the African immigrants dancing and clapping, wearing T-shirts with his portrait printed on the front and the back.

Confused, a TV reporter blurted out: “By God! I feel like I’m covering Michael Jackson!” The woman from Le Monde apparently did not agree. “I thought it was Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones,” she wrote in her paper the next day.

To the dismay of the self-righteous lobby in France, Col Muammar Qadhafi had arrived in Paris on the international human rights day. The immigrants, especially the sub-Saharan variety, are considered to be the exclusive precinct of France’s pharisaical Left. How to criticise them if they take the visitor to be their hero? How to criticise him if he is welcomed by them? The Libyan Brother-Guide himself had a lesson or two for the French. “You make ‘us’ work in factories and on public works projects under hail and snow, then you throw [us] far away from the cities into decrepit suburbs. Is this your idea of human rights?” He also described the condition of women in Europe as ‘tragic’.

If the socialist lawmakers boycotted the Libyan leader’s visit to the National Assembly, there was a split within the government ranks also. Foreign minister Bernard Kouchner was unapologetic for dropping out of the welcome dinner at Elysée Palace the night Qadhafi arrived. “By a happy coincidence,” he explained, “I have to be in Brussels at the same time for a European Union dinner.”

To this the Libyan Foreign Minister Abdelrahman Shalgham retorted: “If Kouchner doesn’t have time for us, we’re not too keen to see him either.”

To tell the truth, President Nicolas Sarkozy didn’t really care if his foreign minister, the secretary of state for human rights and the minister for ecology and development had all decided not to attend the dinner. The people who really mattered, as far as he was concerned, were all there around the table. In other words, the captains of the nuclear, aeronautics, gas, railroad, oil, electricity and advertising industries.

Responding to the growing cacophony from the Left, the Elysée spokesman insisted the colonel had a right to redemption. Sarkozy despaired if only Parisian intellectuals could put some of their energy into actually promoting human rights rather than squandering all of it in leaving one Latin Quarter café to enter another!

The Libyan leader who had previously visited Paris 34 years ago a lean and upright man in a crisp military uniform, literally a pale shadow of his today’s colourful self, was housed in Hôtel Marigny, a two-centuries-old mansion close to the Elysée. He merrily pitched a Bedouin tent in the gardens; but the temperature that night dropped below zero and he finally decided to sleep indoors where it was warmer.

President Sarkozy says the West just cannot go on treating Qadhafi as persona non grata for the rest of his life; especially since Libya gave up its nuclear ambitions four years ago and turned in valuable information to the International Atomic Energy Agency besides formally accepting responsibility for the bombings of two civilian airliners, over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988 and over Niger in 1989, and agreed to pay compensation to the families of the victims. More recently in July this year, Tripoli released the five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor after more than eight years of captivity on the charge of deliberately infecting Libyan children with the virus that causes AIDS.The visit was actually a reward to Qadhafi for allowing the medics to be relieved of their suffering and the deal was negotiated last July by Sarkozy himself who had dashed to Tripoli soon after his then wife Cécilia came back with the prisoners. The two are since divorced and the president was recently seen visiting Euro-Disney near Paris in the company of former fashion model and singer Carla Bruni. But that’s another story.

Patrick Ollier who heads the France-Libya friendship group defended the Brother-Guide in these words: “Qadhafi is no longer the same man he was 20 years ago. Today he is eager to be respected by the international community and reads Montesquieu every evening before going to bed.”

Qadhafi stayed five days in Paris, visiting, apart from the Elysée, the National Assembly, the Louvre and the Versailles, this time in a fur-collared leather jacket and an Eskimo hat (with ear-flaps down) that he refused to take off even as he toured the heated rooms of the royal palace. Like a good tourist, he also enjoyed a boat trip on the Seine.

Sarkozy saw his guest only once — the day he welcomed him at the Elysée in the company of France’s real movers and shakers. Contracts were signed the same evening to supply Libya with Airbuses, Dassault fighting aircraft, nuclear water desalinisation plants, transport and advertising billboards networks, etc. at the cost of more than 10 billion dollars, at the same time guaranteeing 30,000 jobs for French workers and technicians over a period of the next five years.The Trotskyite daily Libération said all this was nonsense and the figure was highly exaggerated. It promised to reveal the truth soon but hasn’t done so till our going to the press.

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

THE assassination of Ms Benazir Bhutto may have changed Pakistan’s future in many different and significant ways. This horrendous act deserves the widest outrage and condemnation for the brutal murder that it was, and the public response has been spontaneous and not unexpected, and is unlikely to subside for some time to come.

The loss of Ms Bhutto as one of the most important, vocal and courageous political figures on the Pakistani, and indeed global, scene will be irreplaceable. Whatever one thought of Ms Bhutto’s politics, and there were many who did not agree with it, there were few who denied her the recognition which she deservedly received. She will be missed sorely for her public presence and for her pivotal role in Pakistani politics over the last three decades.

This is not yet the time or place to analyse Ms Bhutto’s contribution to Pakistani politics, for which perhaps a more dispassionate distance from the events of Dec 27 is essential. The eulogies have only just begun to pour in and will continue to do so for many months to come. More detailed biographical and political analysis will also soon follow, and a spate of articles and books, many with reminiscences others with analyses, are probably already being written. Because she was such a major figure on the political and democratic map of Pakistan, her assassination will continue to influence the politics of the country for some time to come. Yet, her departure also brings about the possibilities for many new beginnings as well.

Although Ms Bhutto is gone, the country, at least for the moment, stumbles along, hurt, bleeding, yet coming to terms with this new reality. Similarly, the political processes — and not just the elections — as always, continue, with all other political parties and actors responding to this great loss, yet continuing to be in the realm of the political. Whether elections are to be held now or later, political parties will continue to do what they are expected to. However, Ms Bhutto’s assassination and her absence will probably be the largest single influence on the electoral and political process in Pakistan in the immediate future. And it is this influence which allows both continuity and departure, and possibilities as well.

The first political response to Ms Bhutto’s assassination has been the immediate decision by Mr Nawaz Sharif to boycott the elections, a position which he failed to convince Ms Bhutto of some weeks ago. Mr Sharif has got what he wanted and now stands apart from the electoral process. The second equally significant decision immediately following Ms Bhutto’s death has been the unexplainable announcement by the caretaker government that elections will be held ‘on schedule’, in eleven days — until ‘a final decision’ is taken after consulting the major parties. With Ms Bhutto expected to have won perhaps a quarter or third of the seats or votes, this decision is not just strange but insensitive.

Politics in Pakistan, and that of political parties in particular, has always revolved around the personality of the leader of that party. Despite the presence of a central working committee and other inner forums within parties where advice may be sought, political decisions are taken by a handful of the leadership, and it is always the individual leader who symbolises the political stand of the party. Often leaders take decisions which they believe to be correct, regardless of the advice they receive. Given this pivotal role of the leader of the party, the decision by the government to not seriously consider a postponement is particularly significant, knowing that whoever replaces her will never be able to fill her shoes in such a short time, if ever at all.

With these two important political decisions already taken, the third one, and perhaps the most important one, will be decided after the soyem of Ms Bhutto on Sunday. Who replaces Ms Bhutto as the leader of her party is of great significance, both in the immediate term and particularly in the somewhat longer term. Although it is not possible to speculate about what happens to the Pakistan People’s Party in the longer term just at the moment, just as it is increasingly difficult to speculate about Pakistan and about its politics, the selection of a new leader and his role over the next few weeks and months will have a significant bearing on which way the political process, and the country, go.

Whoever the new leader is he will not have either the political presence or persona, nor perhaps the political understanding, which Ms Bhutto represented. The new leader will perhaps be more responsive to advice from trusted and more experienced party members from the inner sanctum, and in fact, for some time at least, we may see some form of collective leadership. Whoever this leadership is, it will not be able to replace what Ms Bhutto brought to the party or to politics in Pakistan. Yet, as political actors who have an interest and stake in the politics of the country, they will have to take political decisions. The most important and immediate decision the new leader and the collective leadership will have to take is whether to contest or boycott the elections.

For reasons that have been debated at length in the press, Ms Bhutto, perhaps for both personal and political reasons, had decided not to boycott the sham elections of President Musharraf, a decision which would have legitimised and endorsed his hollow political structure and arrangement. Once again, this critical decision is open for debate and allows for the possibility for a reversal of the earlier mistake.

With Mr Nawaz Sharif having taken a unilateral and independent stand in response to the complete collapse of President Musharraf’s political settlement, the new leaders of the Pakistan People’s Party must show greater political acumen and follow suit. Following the assassination and removal of Ms Benazir Bhutto, the civilian and military facade and arrangement since 1999 has now completely collapsed.

There is no way possible for political parties to agree to play the old game any longer. Although the private and personal grief, and the political sentiment, is still charged and will continue to be so for some time, this possibility of a different future, a substantial and marked transformation and departure from the past, is very real. Ms Bhutto’s assassination is not, as some have begun to state, ‘the end of democracy’.

Joint collective action by the two largest political parties and other actors, at this political juncture, might be that one push which was lacking to rid Pakistan of a military-dominated political arrangement imposed on the people of Pakistan since 1999. In many instances, in a settled, well-structured political system, assassinations of prominent political leaders result in a continuity with new individuals filling in. In a collapsing system and structure such as Pakistan’s, and especially due to the influences of the democratic and political processes under way since early 2007, a continuity is no longer possible.

Whatever reasons Ms Bhutto may have had for playing the electoral game according to a set of given rules, those rules are no longer valid. While the private and personal responses to the assassination of Ms Bhutto will be many, on the political front there is only one, and there is no longer any alternative. The time for collaboration and compromise is over.