Former Leader Talks of Return to Pakistan, and Maybe Power
By CARLOTTA GALL
Published: June 4, 2007
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, June 3 — Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is stirring up Pakistani politics by quietly talking through intermediaries about a power-sharing deal with the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and suggesting in an interview that she could return to Pakistan before the end of the year.
Threatened with arrest and dogged by corruption charges, Ms. Bhutto has sat out the last eight years in self-imposed exile in London and Dubai, while still leading what is arguably the country’s largest opposition party. In that time, she has seen General Musharraf, her former chief of military operations, seize power in a coup. She has watched the political turmoil build as Pakistanis grow restless under military rule, galvanized most recently by General Musharraf’s ouster of the chief Supreme Court justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.
Her party, the Pakistan People’s Party, was heavily represented in a peaceful rally for Mr. Chaudhry in Abbottabad on Saturday, just weeks after more than 40 people died in Karachi in clashes related to his ouster.
As Pakistan veers toward elections this year, General Musharraf has run into mounting opposition over his plans to seek a second term. Ms. Bhutto, 53, is raising her profile once again and positioning herself as savior of the nation, someone who can lead Pakistan back to democracy and provide a more reliable ally than General Musharraf, whose performance she criticized in fighting terrorism and extremism.
Under General Musharraf, she noted, Al Qaeda and the Taliban have used lawless areas of northern Pakistan to regroup and cause havoc in neighboring Afghanistan and within Pakistan itself. Yet Washington continues to support General Musharraf, she said, giving him billions of dollars in assistance since 2001.
Despite his repeated insistence that Ms. Bhutto will not be allowed to participate in the elections, General Musharraf, according to aides and diplomats, has been conducting discreet negotiations for some kind of deal that would allow her to return and him to stay on as president. The corruption charges, which Ms. Bhutto says are politically motivated, might then be dropped. “General Musharraf says that he wouldn’t allow me back and I interpret that to mean that he would then arrest me and prevent me from having freedom of movement and freedom of speech and freedom of association,” Ms. Bhutto said in the interview, which took place recently at one of her homes outside Pakistan. “In any event I’d like to go back, and I’m looking at the window between September and December to do that.”
To some, the prospect of Ms. Bhutto’s return confronts Pakistan with an unsavory choice, one it has faced before. Since its independence in 1947, this nation of 149 million that now has nuclear weapons has alternated between rule by generals who have fronted for a domineering military and civilian politicians who have won an enduring reputation for corruption. They have by turns worn out their welcomes. The country has had no fewer than four Constitutions, four military takeovers of government, and never experienced a constitutional transfer of power.
General Musharraf seized power in a coup in October 1999, overthrowing Ms. Bhutto’s successor, Nawaz Sharif, who also lives abroad to avoid prosecution on corruption charges. General Musharraf was at that time embraced by much of the population, wearied by turbulent years of short-lived, self-serving civilian governments. Yet today, Ms. Bhutto, part of a storied family dynasty, is probably the most popular politician with national appeal. If allowed to return, she may well be in a position to form the next government and serve again as prime minister, even if General Musharraf remains as president, if both agreed.
The daughter of a politician executed by the military, educated at Harvard and Oxford and the first woman to serve as prime minister in the Islamic world, at age 35, Ms. Bhutto captivated supporters in the West as well as many Pakistanis in her early days. She was twice prime minister, from 1988 to 1990 and then from 1993 to 1996, when her personal and political fortunes unraveled.
She left Pakistan eight years ago under a cloud. She was embroiled in a family feud when her brother, Murtaza, tried to claim leadership of the party their father founded, the Pakistan’s People’s Party.
Her brother was shot dead in 1996. Ms. Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, was jailed on suspicion of the murder, though the case was never proved. Ms. Bhutto says the killing was a plot by Pakistani intelligence to divide and weaken her family.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/04/wo.../04bhutto.html 
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