A Family Affair?
Exclusive: Benazir Bhutto's will names her 19-year-old son as her successor.
Benazir Bhutto, the slain former Pakistani prime minister, names her 19-year-old son Bilawal as her successor and the new leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party in her will, and her husband Asif Ali Zardari is expected to act as a kind of regent to him until he comes of age, a close family friend who has read the will told NEWSWEEK on Saturday.
Neither Bilawal nor Zardari, however, is expected to be named as the prime ministerial candidate of the PPP, the friend said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. That honor will go to a senior official, although it is not believed to be Amin Fahim, the vice chairman of the party who served as interim leader during Bhutto's eight-year exile.
Bilawal, who enrolled as a student at Oxford University only this year, is scheduled to read the will himself at a party gathering on Sunday. There is little doubt that he will be accepted by the party rank and file; the PPP has been an all-family affair in Pakistan's dynastic politics since Benazir Bhutto's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founded it 40 years ago. Bhutto had given herself the title of "chairperson for life" and her only previous public signal as to who she wanted her political heir to be occurred when she sent Bilawal to register to vote for the first time earlier this year.
Even so, given Bilawal's youth, the role of her husband will no doubt be controversial within the party and in the politics of the country. Zardari is a former playboy and polo star who was labeled "Mr. 10 Percent" in the Pakistani press because of the commissions and kickbacks he allegedly demanded from contractors doing business with the Pakistani government. He is widely blamed for the tangle of corruption that strangled and cut short Bhutto's two terms in office.
It is not known when Bhutto made the will, but the 54-year-old PPP leader had long made preparations for her possible assassination before returning to Pakistan last October. She even wrote the current president, Pervez Musharraf, a letter asking him to investigate certain individuals in his government if she were killed. Bhutto narrowly escaped one assassination attempt on the night of her Oct. 18 return, but she was killed Thursday in a second attempt.
The anointment of Bhutto's son will complicate the issue of whether scheduled Jan. 8 elections can go forward. Her chief secular rival, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, announced shortly after Bhutto was killed that he would boycott the vote, and it is not known whether the PPP's new prime ministerial candidate will be able to win anything like the votes that Bhutto was expected to garner.
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Michael Hirsh covers international affairs for NEWSWEEK reporting on a range of topics from Homeland Security to postwar Iraq. He co-authored the November 3, 2003 cover story, "Bush's $87 Billion Mess," about the Iraq reconstruction plan. The issue was one of three that won the 2004 National Magazine Award for General Excellence.
Hirsh writes a column on Newsweek.com entitled "The World from Washington" focusing on foreign policy issues and serves as Washington Web Editor for Newsweek. He also edited NEWSWEEK's "Issues 2007" special issue, which explores all facets and issues of globalization.
Hirsh was the magazine's Foreign Editor from January 2001 to January 2002, and helped guide Newsweek's award-winning coverage of the September 11 attacks and the war on terror. Before that he was a Senior Editor/Chief Diplomatic Correspondent in the Washington bureau, writing about foreign affairs and international economics. Hirsh was also managing editor for the Newsweek International special issue "ISSUES 2001," the second in a series of three annual reviews of the global economy in the new century.
From September 1998 to December 1999, as Diplomatic Correspondent, Hirsh covered foreign policy, the State Department and the Treasury. He moved to the Washington D.C. bureau in May 1997, previously serving as a senior editor of Newsweek International, covering the same beat.
Prior to joining NEWSWEEK in October 1994 as a New York-based senior writer, Hirsh served as the Tokyo-based Asia Bureau Chief for Institutional Investor from 1992 to 1994. Previously, he was a correspondent for the Associated Press in Tokyo and a National Editor in New York.
Hirsh was co-winner of the 2002 Ed Cunningham Award for best magazine reporting from abroad for Newsweek's terror coverage and contributed to the team of Newsweek reporters who earned the magazine the prestigious 2002 National Magazine Award for General Excellence, also for the magazine's coverage of the war on terror. Hirsh also won a Deadline Club Award in 1997 for investigative reporting on his expose of the IRS's abusive practices, and was one of five finalists for a 1994 Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism for his article, "China's Financial Revolutionaries." It profiled the new generation of mainland Chinese businessmen who are striving to build a capitalist financial system from scratch. Hirsh is the author of the nonfiction book "At War with Ourselves" (Oxford University Press, 2003) which explores America's foreign policy and its global role.
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