Army wants to kill me, said Benazir in her last interview

LAHORE: Benazir Bhutto, the slain PPP chairperson, in her last interview to an American magazine that will be published on January 6, said her father’s parting advice to her from his Rawalpindi death cell was that she had the option of not entering politics and settle abroad. She says she refused and instead told her father that she would fight the war for democracy.

In the interview to be published as cover story of Parade, Benazir shared the parting advice her father had given her a day before he was hanged. “You can walk away. You’re young. You can go and live in London or Paris or Geneva,” Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had told his daughter. “No,” she told him. “I have to keep up this mission of yours, of democracy.”

She said the Army’s decision to overthrow her in 1996 came after she announced a crackdown on terrorism. “Now they are trying to kill me,” Benazir said. The interviewer, the magazine’s contributing editor, Gail Sheehy, also sought a comment from Musharraf’s confidant Humayun Gauhar about the October 18 attempt on her life, an incident Benazir had blamed on Musharraf’s close allies.

Gohar said, “We don’t want a dead Benazir on our hands! She’d be just another unlikely martyr.” But Gohar also predicted that if she returned to power, the US would finally get what Musharraf had refused it. “She will allow NATO boots on the ground in our tribal areas and a chance to neuter our nuclear weapons.”

Benazir said she heard the name of Osama bin Laden for the first time in 1989 when he sent $10 million to the ISI to help it overthrow her first government. When Benazir was asked what she would like to tell US President Bush, she said: “I would tell him that propping up Musharraf’s government, which is infested with radical Islamists, is only hastening disaster. Your (Bush) policy of supporting dictatorship is breaking up my country. I now think Al-Qaeda can be marching on Islamabad in two to four years.”