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ASIA
APRIL 26, 1999 VOL. 153 NO. 16
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Bhutto Brought to Book
Convicted of graft and sentenced to jail, Pakistan's former Prime Minister may face the end of her rocky political career
By NISID HAJARI
By her own account, Benazir Bhutto took the news well. A cadre from her Pakistan People's Party called her in London from outside a courthouse in Rawalpindi, to let her know that she and her husband had been convicted on corruption charges and sentenced to jail. "I knew it was coming," she says she told the official. "This is nothing."
Unfortunately for the former Prime Minister, last Thursday's verdict most definitely was something: the first time in Pakistan's 51-year history that anyone has been disqualified from politics for graft. The court--one of the Ehtesab, or "Accountability," benches formed by Prime Minister Mian Mohammad Nawaz Sharif in 1997 to investigate official corruption--found both Bhutto and husband Asif Ali Zardari guilty of accepting kickbacks worth $9 million from the Société Générale de Surveillance (SGS), a Swiss company hired by Bhutto during her second stint as Prime Minister to improve Islamabad's collection of customs revenue. Both were sentenced to five years in prison, fined $8.6 million and banned from holding parliamentary seats (and therefore the prime ministership) for seven years. No matter how the resilient Bhutto looks at it, the news is not good.
For one thing, her troubles may be just beginning. Bhutto struck a defiant pose in London. "This is nothing but the murder of justice by a kangaroo court," she railed to TIME the night of the verdict. But as soon as she returns to Pakistan--which she has pledged to do within a week--she faces immediate arrest. (Her lawyers hope to keep her out of jail while they appeal.) The verdict is only the first in a series of cases pending against the couple, which involve further allegations of kickbacks, undeclared foreign bank accounts and the doling out of 1,600 jobs at Pakistan International Airlines. PPP spokesman Farhaullah Babr says that Zardari, already in jail on drug-smuggling charges, took a long-term view when he heard the verdict. "For me it does not change anything," said the former businessman. "I get out of jail in the morning [to attend court proceedings] and go back in the evening."
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