Death of a leader

I wanted to write a separate entry for this. Even though my day was spent having fun in London with my sister, I was never really able to keep the thoughts of the day's events in Pakistan from my mind.

Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated that morning (London time). With an unpopular war abroad and racial and civil unrest at home, Bhutto had represented a challenge to the heavy-handed Musharraf that had caught the attention of policymakers around the world. Until today, she had led the only truly "pan-Pakistan" political party, one that had managed to reach across the ethnic and sectarian boundaries that are so prominent in South Asia, and had successfully withstood the Pakisani army's efforts at emasculating it (practically from the time of its founding by Benazir's father). With her death, the experiment with democracy that Pakistan has pretended to flirt with for the past 60 years can be returned to the cryogenic freezing facility from whence it originated.

The riots that have followed Bhutto's death have been no surprise, especially to the people in Pakistan. I spoke to my parents immediately after I found out what had happened, and they told me how markets and workplaces had emptied in the blink of an eye that day. One of our relatives was shopping in the busiest areas of Karachi, when suddenly people had started running in every direction. Someone somewhere had started yelling that Bhutto had been killed, and it didn't take long for people to understand what was coming next. Karachi was going to burn, and it was only a matter of time until the first flames arose. Customers ran so fast that some tripped out of their shoes and didn't bother to return for them.

It was the same at workplaces too. Businesses and corporations shut down immediately, and employees tried their best to get home before the rioting started. Not all of them were successful, though. My parents were surprised at home by my cousin and his friend, who showed up unannounced. Both of them lived on the other side of town but worked closer to where my parents live. They had tried to make it home, but the rioting had already started - after trying to weave past mobs on a rampage, burning vehicles, and advancing police, they had wisely decided to come over to our place for shelter for the night. My dad told me he had never seen two grown men as scared as those two. And that scared me.

The question is, can Pakistan recover? Will Bhutto's death shine light in areas that need it badly, and force Musharraf and the other political parties to come together in an attempt to keep the country from burning? Or will there be a doomsday scenario - extreme violence leading to civil war, with the army losing control of the country and perhaps its nuclear weapons, forcing the US and its allies to pre-emptively invade and seize control?

Scary times, my friends. Scary times.