LARKANA, Jan 9: After years of discord within Pakistan’s top political dynasty, Benazir Bhutto’s sister-in-law has stoked up the family feud by saying she wants the opposition leader’s son to join her rival party.

Ghinwa Bhutto has been estranged from the former premier since Murtaza Bhutto, Benazir’s younger brother and Ghinwa’s husband, was gunned down amid shady circumstances in Karachi 12 years ago while Bhutto was still in power.

In the latest twist to the row that has torn the country’s “feudal family” apart, Lebanese-born Ghinwa said that after Benazir’s assassination she now hopes to woo her 19-year-old son Bilawal to her side.

“We’ll try to bring him to our party,” Ghinwa told AFP at her sprawling home in the southern town of Larkana -- a portrait of her husband on one side of her and a photograph of a young Benazir on the other.

Asked how she intended to get the Oxford undergraduate to defect, she said:

“I don’t know, with love and affection and education. Maybe when he comes back he might like our set-up better than the set-up of the other party.”

Any such move would be fiercely resisted by the Pakistan People’s Party, which kept the leadership in the family for a third generation by naming Bilawal and his father Asif Ali Zardari as co-chairmen after Benazir’s death.

While his role will be minimal until his studies are over, the teenager told reporters in London on Tuesday that he agreed to lead the PPP because “the party needed a close association with my mother through the bloodline”.

Ghinwa heads a breakaway faction called the Pakistan People’s Party-Shaheed Bhutto -- named in honour of her “martyr (shaheed)” husband -- for which she is standing as an MP in Pakistan’s Feb 18 elections.

And the rift goes deep.

Ghinwa said that she held Benazir responsible for Murtaza Bhutto’s death, while Benazir reportedly once scathingly referred to her rival as a “Lebanese bellydancer.” The infighting was set to reach fever pitch during the elections when the pair stood in the same constituency, vying for the votes of the Bhutto clan’s peasant followers in Larkana’s sugarcane fields.

But Benazir’s killing in a gun and suicide attack at a political rally on Dec 27 saw Ghinwa soften her stance and attend her funeral in the family mausoleum nearby.

Nevertheless she said that without Benazir at its helm the PPP could split, adding that her party would welcome Bilawal when he returns to Pakistan because it is the rightful heir to the legacy of his grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

“I don’t know what would be left of the other party. And if he sees I’m making a party here for everybody to work with... to deliver this legacy to the people, he might like it,” said Ghinwa.

“He seems to be a nice boy.” She described Bilawal as a “sweet child, always willing to get in touch, always willing to speak, always willing to hug and kiss his cousins and even me” despite the strains in the family.

Those cousins include a young woman widely seen in Pakistan as another potential heir to the Bhutto heritage -- and one who had continued the feud with Benazir’s side of the family: Murtaza’s 25-year-old daughter Fatima.

A writer who has so far refused to enter politics, Fatima bitterly criticised her aunt in October for exposing supporters to an attack on her homecoming parade for the sake of “personal theatre.”

A weeping Fatima however joined Ghinwa at Benazir’s graveside, and in a Pakistani newspaper column she said that although her relationship with Bhutto was “complicated,” she was now “compounded in a state of shock.”

Benazir’s death has though failed to heal the split with the 73-year-old patriarch of the Bhutto tribe, Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, who also lives in the Larkana area.

The luxuriantly moustachioed Mumtaz told Britain’s Guardian newspaper last week that the PPP’s new choice of leadership was “most unfortunate,” particularly reserving his scorn for Benazir’s widower Zardari.

“He will not be able to conduct himself as the same level as Benazir,” he told the newspaper.

For Ghinwa, however, the important thing is to unify a family whose history has been stained in blood and rancour since the execution of former premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979 by a military regime.

“Why should there be a conflict?” she said when asked if she thought the feud would seep down into Bilawal and Fatima’s generation.

“I do hope that these young kids will just tell the grown-ups to stay out of it. They’ll know how to get along.”—AFP