A courageous woman – Amanda Fritz

Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan, was assassinated today. She could have elected to stay away from her home country, living a life of luxury lecturing in Europe and the Americas. She chose to return to Pakistan to challenge the military rule of President Pervez Musharraf.

CNN reports: “Benazir Bhutto was the first female prime minister of Pakistan and of any Islamic nation. She led Pakistan from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996. In a September 26 interview on CNN’s “The Situation Room,” Bhutto said she expected threats against her life as she prepared to lead a push for the restoration of democracy in Pakistan.

“After military dictatorship an anarchic situation developed, which the terrorists and Osama (bin Laden) have exploited,” she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “They don’t want democracy, they don’t want me back, and they don’t believe in women governing nations, so they will try to plot against me.

“But these are risks that must be taken. I’m prepared to take them,” she said. Bhutto narrowly escaped injury on October 18 when a suicide bombing near her convoy in Karachi killed 126 people.

“Soon thereafter, I was asked by authorities not to travel in cars with tinted windows — which protected me from identification by terrorists — or travel with privately armed guards,” she wrote for CNN.com in November.

“I began to feel the net was being tightened around me when police security outside my home in Karachi was reduced, even as I was told that other assassination plots were in the offing.”“

And yet she stayed.

I saw Benazir Bhutto speak at the Cambridge Union Society debating hall, in 1976 or 1977. She was finishing up her degree at Oxford, and even in her early 20s was considered a political world leader. I went to the Union Society debates for three years, and don’t remember another speaker as charismatic or compelling — although perhaps significantly, I can’t recall her topic. I’ve followed her rises and falls over the decades with interest, and now feel sad her life is over.

Maya Angelou said,

“I am convinced that courage is the most important of all the virtues.
Because without courage, you cannot practice any other virtues consistently.
You can be kind for a while; you can be generous for a while;
you can be just for a while, or merciful for a while, even loving for a while.
But it is only with courage that you can be
persistently and insistently kind and generous and fair.”

And Mark Twain wrote,

“Courage is not the absence of fear. It is acting in spite of it.”

She wasn’t perfect. But Benazir Bhutto was a courageous woman.