On a beaucoup glosé sur les vrais coupables de cet assassinat. On s’est jeté sur Al Qaïda, coupable idéal de tous les crimes de la terre, qui est d’ailleurs le premier à revendiquer, car même si ce n’est pas l’une des nombreuses cellules de cette nébuleuse qui a commis l’acte, c’est dans leur intérêt de porter le chapeau. On parle aussi du général Musharaf et de ses services secrets, que cette disparition arrange bien. Mais on parle assez peu des erreurs de Bénazir Buttho. Quand on sait qu’on est menacé par des gens ayant les moyens d’organiser un carnage le jour de votre retour au Pakistan, on ne passe pas le buste par le toit ouvrant de sa voiture blindée. C’est une règle élémentaire de sécurité, surtout au milieu de la foule. Bénazir Buttho est la première responsable de ce qui lui est arrivé !

On a aussi vu à l’oeuvre le reflexe habituel de sympathie envers qui nous ressemble, et encore plus, envers qui est conforme à nos canons de beauté. C’est vrai que Bénazir Buttho était belle femme (même si elle s’est un peu empâtée ces dernières années) et elle peut bien être une aristocrate corrompue et incompétente, et l’ayant prouvé par deux fois lors de ses passages au pouvoir, on s’en fout. Ce qu’on veut, c’est une belle icone sur laquelle greffer nos valeurs.

[Authueil : “Comment occuper les médias entre Noël et nouvel an”.]

Courage, témérité, imprudence ou inconscience ?

En parlant de corruption… Wikipedia anglophone (le “fr”est indigent) : “Benazir Bhutto, Charges of corruption”.

Potentially the most lucrative deal alleged in the documents involved the effort by Dassault Aviation, a French military contractor. French authorities indicated in 1998 that Bhutto’s husband, Zardari, offered exclusive rights to Dassault to replace the air force’s fighter jets in exchange for a five percent commission to be paid to a corporation in Switzerland controlled by Zardari.

At the time, French corruption laws forbade bribery of French officials but permitted payoffs to foreign officials, and even made the payoffs tax-deductible in France. However, France changed this law in 2000.

À lire également au Diner’s, “Le voile de Benazir Bhutto”.

Balayés, en passant, les soupçons de corruption sur la famille Bhutto, et sa considérable richesse, dans un pays où le feu de la radicalité religieuse prospère souvent sur des revendications égalitaires.

Mais jamais oubliée, étrange rémanence, cette mention de la “culture occidentale” de Benazir Bhutto ou de son père. Pour nous la rendre plus proche ou pour nous rendre plus lointain le Pakistan ?

BHL, lui, sait tout. D’un lyrisme indécent, il sait que Benazir Bhutto a été assassinée parcequ’elle était belle, parce qu’elle était femme. Une analyse d’une pauvreté intellectuelle et factuelle consternante.

P.S. The New-Yorker, “Mary Anne Weaver, Bhutto’s Fateful Moments”.

[…] Disillusionment followed, and Benazir’s inexperience showed. In its nearly two years of existence, her government passed virtually no legislation.

She presided over a sliding economy, a deteriorating security situation, a growing communal threat, a confrontation between democracy and the Army, and dangerous diplomatic drift. She was harassed by an energetic opposition, led from Punjab by Nawaz Sharif, she was destabilized by violence in her home province of Sindh; and she was faced with the growing hostility of both the Army and the Muslim clerics. Above and beyond this, she laid her administration open to the charge of corruption. Among the worst offenders, according to the President and the generals, were her flamboyant, controversial husband and her father-in-law.

There was a familiar ring to the President’s charges against her to justify the dismissal of her government: corruption, nepotism, mismanagement, and loss of the people’s confidence. Three times in the last five years, Pakistani Prime Ministers have been dismissed on those grounds—real or imagined—by the President, or the Army, or both. But Benazir had to live up to higher expectations than the others.

“People were expecting a liberal, Western-educated woman with forward-looking programs,” I was told by Dr. Hamida Khuhro, who is a formidable woman herself—an Oxford-educated friend of the Bhutto family but a political opponent in the feudal Larkana constituency. “When Benazir came to power, she could have set the trend, but the first thing she did was to shroud herself in a chador, the most obstructionist, outward manifestation of Islam, and begin praying incessantly at saints’ tombs, the most superstitious part of Islam. She’s vastly superstitious, and it shows. She could have been a reformer, but she wasn’t; she did nothing for women, which she could have done. And, with her education and her background, she simply has no excuse.” (Benazir later told me, “There are some who would have liked me to solely champion women’s causes. As a political leader, I can’t.”)

A Western Ambassador says, “Benazir’s a dreamer, a great conceptualist. She says all the right things, but she has no follow-through. She wasn’t able to focus, to move things forward, or to control situations. Maybe she’ll pick better people next time. It’s her streak of loyalty that kills her; she always goes back to what people have done in the past—how they served her father, how much time they spent in jail—rather than considering what they could do in the future. She therefore failed to tap an enormous pool of brilliant young intellectuals and technocrats who could have turned this country around. Instead, she relied on the feudal landlords, who catered to her illusion that it was her birthright to rule. She’s one of the most bewildering women I’ve ever met: one moment, she is utter charm; the next moment, she’s so antagonistic that she comes perilously close to impertinence. But she’s not a sulker, she’s a battler and a survivor, and that’s not all bad. Basically, she’s driven: She’s a P.P.P. politician with the name Bhutto, and she never stops. She’ll do anything to get elected, and she simply cannot accept that anyone can do this country any good except her. She’s a wonderful campaigner; she gives wonderful speeches. But the basic question we always come back to is: Can she rule?”