May 19, 2008	Monday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 13, 1429

LONDON, May 18: A very resolute Fatima Bhutto conceding that she was “anxious” for her safety now that Asif Ali Zaradri is in power has expressed her determination to continue to do all she can “to stand between Asif and a clean record.”

“We are currently waiting for Zardari’s acquittal judgment. But I am not going to give up this struggle. I am not going to stand down quietly. This is bigger than us – this is about justice. I will continue to do all I can to stand between Asif and a clean record,” she told William Dalrymple of Sunday Times in an interview (Fatima Bhutto: living on the edge).

Mr. Dalrymple had asked her if she was afraid for her own safety now that Zardari is in power.

“Well, I am certainly very afraid for this country. Even before Zardari, this was a country where anything can happen, a country that regularly makes its own people disappear. The state here is, in the worst way, expedient. You just don’t know what’s waiting for you, especially if you stand up and say what you think. And I have never been an especially diplomatic person. I certainly don’t belong to the silent majority.”

Mr. Dalrymple further quotes her as saying: “After all, this man knows no limits. He has a record. He has, as they say, form. And he is now clearly indulging in the politics of revenge and retribution. It’s nothing new – it’s how he has always been.”

“But what can you do? You just have to carry on as you can, and try to tell the truth as you see it. That’s all you can do. So perhaps I should be anxious,” she told the Sunday Times’ writer.

“If she (Benazir) didn’t sign the death warrant (of Murtaza), then who else had the power to cover it up?” asks Fatima. She said she wrote to Benazir, accusing her of, at best, failing to protect her father. It was the last direct contact between the two Bhutto women. “What does it all point to?” Fatima asks. “I would love to believe in the innocence of my aunt, but why else did she so obviously obstruct the investigation?”

Mr. Dalrymple says 12 years on (since her father’s murder) Fatima is now a strikingly beautiful 25-year-old, fresh from a university education in New York and London. She is sassy and clever, a respected poet and an outspoken columnist in the Pakistani press. She has a razor-sharp mind and a forceful, determined personality.

“In Pakistan we live with this historical amnesia,” Fatima told Mr. Dalrymple. “Such are the difficulties of the present that there is a strong urge to forget those of the past (for instance her father’s murder). But there are those of us who are not willing to forget. We are currently waiting for Zardari’s acquittal judgment. But I am not going to give up.”

“There are two Benazirs I remember,” says Fatima. “When she was in exile aged about 25, she was very brave and very sad. She had lost her father and brother and was in pain and fragile and vulnerable. But later, once she was in power, she changed. She became very far from fragile. In power she was unrecognisable from the figure I loved as a child.”

When asked if, in light of her aunt’s violent death, she had regrets, Fatima answered: “I’ve no regrets. I write about political issues in Pakistan. When Benazir did her deal with Musharraf, I couldn’t keep quiet. Surely the point of a democracy is to hold elected officials accountable, yet here in Pakistan we pass a law aimed at wiping out corruption cases so they can whitewash all the criminals, extortionists, drug dealers and murderers who enter our parliament. “I didn’t just write about Benazir as a niece. I wrote as a Pakistani. I’m clear I made the right decision.

“Of course, I was angry at what Benazir did to my father,” Fatima continued, “but mainly because I expected more. I do feel sad that the idealistic Benazir I knew as a child had turned into a person so tragically mired in corruption and compromise. The person who was killed was a completely different person to the one I loved. “I cried when I heard the news of her death. She was shot in the neck, just like my father.” Mr. Dalrymple asked her whether she would consider entering politics herself.

“I am political, but I don’t think becoming an MP and sitting in Islamabad is necessarily the best way to influence people here. A writer has other options.

“There is much to be done. Power in Pakistan never changes hands – it’s only the victims who change. The people of this country are so dispossessed – they have no access to justice or basic necessities. There is so much corruption. We have to teach the people to stand together and protect themselves.

“For now I want to be a writer. But if in the future there was a way I could serve my country that did not involve becoming yet another part of dynastic birthright politics, maybe I could envisage putting my name forward. If I stood I would want it to be on my own merits, not as a member of a dynasty.”