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    ブット暗殺
    Tokyo has had the same reaction to the Bhutto assassination as the rest of the developed world:

    On the night of 27 December, Minister of Foreign Affairs Masahiko Takamura spoke to the press corps about the assassination of former Prime Minister of Pakistan [Benazir] Bhutto: "We had hoped that free and fair elections would be conducted; there aren't words to describe the heinousness of using violence to decide such matters." At the same time, "We fervently hope that Pakistan will ride out this tragedy and [do us all the favor of] treading a path toward democratization. Japan, too, wishes to support the democratization of Pakistan." *


    Rondi Adamson cites Christopher Hitchens's reaction in Slate, in which he even-temperedly examines her strengths and weaknesses:

    The sternest critic of Benazir Bhutto would not have been able to deny that she possessed an extraordinary degree of physical courage. When her father was lying in prison under sentence of death from Pakistan's military dictatorship in 1979, and other members of her family were trying to escape the country, she boldly flew back in.

    ...

    The fact of the matter is that Benazir's undoubted courage had a certain fanaticism to it. She had the largest Electra complex of any female politician in modern history, entirely consecrated to the memory of her executed father, the charming and unscrupulous Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had once boasted that the people of Pakistan would eat grass before they would give up the struggle to acquire a nuclear weapon. (He was rather prescient there—the country now does have nukes, and millions of its inhabitants can barely feed themselves.) A nominal socialist, Zulfikar Bhutto was an autocratic opportunist, and this family tradition was carried on by the PPP, a supposedly populist party that never had a genuine internal election and was in fact—like quite a lot else in Pakistan—Bhutto family property.

    ...

    This is what makes her murder such a disaster. There is at least some reason to think that she had truly changed her mind, at least on the Taliban and al-Qaida, and was willing to help lead a battle against them. She had, according to some reports, severed the connection with her rather questionable husband. She was attempting to make the connection between lack of democracy in Pakistan and the rise of mullah-manipulated fanaticism.


    That's just his view, of course, but it squares with what I remember from reports about her second tenure as prime minister: Bhutto was politically progressive by study and reasoning but also had the reflexive sense of entitlement and privilege of the daughter of a super-elite family. Her assassination is a tragedy in any case, but it's doubly unfortunate if she really was beginning to come around to harsh reality.

    * Japanese readers who click through to the article will notice that I've translated もらう as if it were くれる. That wasn't a slip--"we will humbly receive the favor of..." didn't quite seem to catch the mood here of dealing with an unstable nuclear power with Muslim radicals in the population.
    Posted by Sean on 2007-12-28 18:52:52

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