Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated after having addressed a political rally. She was shot, and then the assassin apparently blew himself up, killing a further group of people. Nobody has claimed responsibility for the assassination at the time of writing this - but as the ABC Radio cutely put it: "All sides are blaming terrorists".Just who are the terrorists in Pakistan?
The Government?
The military? (Remember the recent history of the President Musharraf?)
Supporters of former President, now Opposition Leader, Nawaz Sharif?
Islamic extremists?
And let us not forget "outside forces" which have propped up the illegal and corrupt regimes.
Benazir Bhutto might have been a corrupt politician, but she did not deserve to die like that.
There is a fine obituary in The Guardian
1 comment:
People are assassinated in great numbers every day of the year. This happens in every corner of the world, including the western 'democracies'.
We call it murder. Sometimes we call it "collateral damage".
Is there a difference that on this occasion its a Pakistani politician?
Perhaps there is. The reverberations will be of tsunami proportions.
Does that mean that non politicians' lives are less important? As a society we do not grieve much about the thousands of people who die every day due to the lack of food or denial of medication or assassinations by USA troops in their "war on terror".
Whilst we in "the western democracies" have not overtly assassinated any of our politicians in recent years, I wonder how many assassinations are our Anglo/USA/Australian allies are responsible for? Including Benazir.
She was not the most popular person with the Bush/Cheney administration.
Lets not be too complacent and praise ourselves that this does not happen in our Country. We are all citizens of the world. We have been overtly and covertly responsible for political assassinations for many years.
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