Last weekend it happened to Fatima Bhutto, 27-year old niece of the former Pakistani prime minister. She was in Delhi to promote her new book, Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir, which traces the country’s blood-letting and appalling governance as it tells the story of the assassination 14 years ago of her father, Murtaza Bhutto – in which her uncle Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan’s current president, was allegedly involved. A highly self-confident journalist, the vivacious and attractive Fatima Bhutto has wowed newspaper and magazine editors in the US, UK and elsewhere for several years with the same ease that Benazir Bhutto charmed them in ther past.
Benazir conned them, along with many politicians, into accepting her as a significant political figure when she was out of power, even though her reputation as a capable politician was near zero. Fatima’s success – and she is a capable writer – has been to persuade editors ranging from Tina Brown’s Daily Beast website in the US to the New Statesman in London to run her articles highly critical of Pakistan’s rulers as if she was an independent journalist, which she is not. What she is, understandably, is a committed campaigner out to avenge her father’s death and, therefore, to damn Zardari who, as Benazir Bhutto’s husband, is her uncle by marriage. This hefty 450-page book is part of that campaign. It tells of a traumatic family history. Her grandfather, prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in 1979 by a military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq. Both her father and his brother died violently, and Benazir Bhutto was assassinated.
Full report here Financial Times
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