From the archives: an interview with Benazir Bhutto

From the May 31, 1988 edition.

Benazir Bhutto has set her sights on becoming prime minister of Pakistan. After Sunday's shake-up in Islamabad, she may be able to take a step in that direction sooner than she expected.

Ms. Bhutto is the leader of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), the main opposition party in Pakistan.

Pakistani President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq has suggested that, for the first time since he seized power in 1977, opposition parties will be allowed to participate in the parliamentary elections to be held within 90 days. Elections were not scheduled to be held until 1990.

(In Karachi, Pakistan, Bhutto said her party would participate in the elections if they appeared to be ''free and fair,'' the Washington Post reported Monday.)

For Bhutto, who was educated at Harvard and Oxford, the road to the top will be difficult. But foreign diplomats and specialists say she could eventually assume power, perhaps as the first female prime minister in a Muslim country.

Despite her current prominence, Bhutto was initially a reluctant politician.

In an interview with the Monitor in Washington before Sunday's events, she said, ''The last thing I wanted to do was to go into politics ... and given the choice I never would have.''

However, just after she received her master's degree from Oxford in 1977, Bhutto's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was overthrown as president in a military coup led by General Zia. After her father was executed in 1979, Bhutto was further than ever from the career in diplomacy or political journalism that she would have preferred.

''Gradually, gradually, I was sucked into a position where there was a sense of responsibility and a sense of duty. ... I remember the famous late-night conversations as an undergraduate (at Radcliffe) over endless cups of coffee and pretzels. It would be over how much an individual determines their own future and how much you are a product of your own special circumstances. I found out myself.''

Bhutto has become much more than the daughter of her father. Six years of prison, house arrest, and exile helped forge her into a formidable political leader. During her visit to Washington, she fielded delicate questions with aplomb. United States experts were impressed with her poise and approach to the issues.

When Bhutto returned to Pakistan from exile in 1986, she apparently hoped a wave of ''people power'' could help sweep her to victory as had happened to Corazon Aquino in the Philippines earlier that year. But the regime was not as feeble or unpopular as that of Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos. Bhutto survived and adapted.

''First you tend to move in a groove. ... Suddenly you say, 'Wait a minute, things have changed around us.' If you don't respond to those changes you can be out completely. ... When I returned in 1986 I thought, 'We need to respond to the changes within Pakistan.' That's when we got down to the business of defining the party.''

Bhutto has set about taking a new look at the key issues facing Pakistan and reshuffling her party leadership, all the while pushing for a full restoration of democracy. A key part of this process has been to begin to build bridges to the domestic forces that opposed her father and to reassure Pakistan's key foreign allies, such as the US, about her intentions should she come to power.

She now takes a moderate line toward the US, which irks many in her party who still say Washington encouraged the coup against her father. She credits US demands for a restoration of democracy, inserted into the 1981 US military aid package, with encouraging Zia to call parliamentary elections in 1985 - the first since the 1977 coup.

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