Another voice of hope is silenced

I find myself shaken again by news of the death of Benazir Bhutto, one of the most predictable events of an ugly year in world politics, yet one that remains strangely difficult to absorb. Of course, Benazir – born in Karachi in 1953, the privileged eldest child of a future Pakistani prime minister – is likely to remain as controversial a figure in death as she was in life, tainted both by her undoubted political failures as prime minister of her country in the 1980s and 1990s, and by a series of corruption scandals. 

Yet in the broad spectrum of Pakistani politics, there can be no doubt that Benazir spoke, in general, for the best of liberal and humanist political ideals: for a programme of human rights, democracy, education and welfare that places human development above any fundamentalist dogma, whether religious or economic. In that sense, she was a classic secular humanist of her and my generation; not a militant anti-religious atheist like the old humanists of the 1930s, but one determined to honour both the faith in which she had been raised, and the underlying universal values of compassion and human equality which she believed it reflected. More...