Benazir Bhutto was many things — zealous guardian of her dead father's legacy, aristocratic populist, accused rogue, even one of People magazine's 50 most beautiful people. And in the end, she was a victim of roiling passions in the nation she sought to lead for a third time.
To the West, she was the appealing and glamorous face of Pakistan — a trailblazing feminist, the first woman to lead a Muslim nation in modern times — though her aura was dimmed by accusations of corruption.
But to many Pakistanis, she was a leader who spoke for them, their needs and their hopes.
Even her worst critics would say that "she was a masterful politician," said Zaffar Abbas, an editor for the respected Dawn newspaper. She knew "what the people of this country wanted."
"If you asked an ordinary person what they achieved when Benazir Bhutto was in power, they would say at least she gave us a voice and she talked about us and our problems," Abbas said. "That was her real achievement."
Her life was a sprawling epic
Her father, Pakistan's president and then prime minister, was hanged; one brother died mysteriously, the other in a shootout. She spent five years imprisoned by her father's tormentors, mostly in solitary confinement, before rising twice to the office of prime minister.
She fled before her conviction on corruption charges, living abroad for eight years. She could have lived there comfortably, far from the cauldron of Pakistani politics, but chose not to do so. And when she returned in October to marshal opposition to President Pervez Musharraf, a suicide attacker targeted her homecoming parade in Karachi. More than 140 people died.
The 54-year-old Bhutto escaped injury. "We will not be deterred," she said then. And on the hustings, she celebrated her survival.
"Bhutto is alive! Bhutto is alive! Bhutto is alive!" she shouted at a rally in December.
Like the Nehru-Gandhi family, long a force in the politics of neighboring India, the Bhuttos have held a central role in Pakistan for nearly a half century.
Benazir's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was the son of a wealthy landowning family in southern Pakistan and founder of the Pakistan People's Party. With a populist, pro-democracy message, he rose to power in 1971.
But six years later, he was deposed by the military. In 1979 he was executed by the government of Gen. Mohammad Zia-ul Haq after his much-disputed conviction on charges of arranging the murder of the father of a political opponent.
A day before he was hanged, his daughter visited him in prison.
"I told him on my oath in his death cell, I would carry on his work," Bhutto would recall.
But at the time and for years after, Benazir Bhutto could not fight for her father's cause — she was in jail or under house arrest.
A Harvard-educated woman
The elder Bhutto had sent his daughter to study politics and government at Harvard and then at Oxford, where she was elected to lead the prestigious debating society, the Oxford Union. Beautiful, charismatic and articulate, she was a dangerous opponent for the military government.
Her youngest brother, Shahnawaz, organized opposition from France, but he died under mysterious circumstances in his apartment on the Riviera in 1980; the family insisted he was poisoned, but no charges were brought. Released in 1984 to seek medical treatment for a serious ear infection in London, Benazir established a People's Party office there, and waited for an opportunity to strike back.
Two years later, she returned to lead mass rallies calling for Zia to step down and allow a civilian government and elections. He refused. But in 1988, the strongman died in an explosion on his plane.
She rallied her father's party, only to find that she was being opposed by her brother, Murtaza — and that her mother was backing him. "In our family it was always a joke that my mother had a soft spot for my brother," she told The New York Times in 1994.
Still, Benazir Bhutto won on a platform of "food, clothing and shelter for all." And just months after giving birth to her first child, she took the office that was taken from her father.
Charges tarnish leader
Twenty months later, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan dissolved parliament and removed her from office, citing abuse of power. The new army-backed government filed charges of corruption against her, while Islamic clerics tried to get a court to bar her from running in elections. She was a bad Muslim, they said.
"Anyone who supports the Pakistan People's Party will not enter heaven," a Muslim cleric in Lahore, Abdul Qadir, told a Friday prayer congregation ahead of the October 1990 elections.
