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As a student, Benazir Bhutto showed great promise
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John Schlegel's first impression of the young woman with horn-rimmed glasses
came as Oxford University graduate students gathered for the first day of a
British politics class three decades ago. |
She is beautiful, he
thought.
His second impression of Benazir Bhutto, one of the students,
was formed when she began to speak: She talked forcefully and said things about
the future of the British Commonwealth that seemed insightful and deeply
true.
Schlegel found himself nodding in agreement.
"From the very
beginning, it wasn't hard to see the characteristics that would make her
popular," Schlegel, a Jesuit priest and president of Omaha's Creighton
University, recalled Saturday.
Bhutto's life as a popular and
oft-controversial Pakistani politician ended Thursday when she was assassinated
following a rally in her turbulent home country.
The Harvard- and
Oxford-educated Bhutto - the first woman to govern a Muslim country - had been
expected to win a third term as Pakistan's prime minister.
Supporters in
both Pakistan and the United States had hoped she would combat the jihadists
living in the country's lawless border regions and shake off the corruption
charges that sullied her first two terms as prime minister.
Instead she
left behind countless admirers, including Schlegel, who met her while studying
politics at Oxford.
The young woman he encountered 30 years ago had
already learned to straddle cultures and cross religious and racial divides with
apparent ease.
She wore traditional Muslim dress to some events and could
act in a formal manner, seemingly befitting the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto,
then the president of Pakistan.
She sometimes showed up to class wearing
a Rolling Stones T-shirt and had protested the Vietnam War while a student at
Harvard University.
She bucked tradition to become the first female
president of the Oxford Union, a prestigious debating society long dominated by
white men who would go on to become European politicians or members of the
British Parliament.
Schlegel, then a member of the Oxford Union, said
Bhutto got his vote for president.
But she stayed largely silent when
Oxford professors and students publicly protested the university's decision to
give her father an honorary degree.
She had to walk past teachers and
classmates holding up signs denouncing her father, a controversial Pakistani
leader sometimes applauded for democratic reforms but also denounced for
corruption and dictatorial tendencies.
"In some way, that must have
driven her to do what she did," Schlegel said of Bhutto's eventual political
career after a military coup led to her father's imprisonment and execution in
Pakistan.
"In some quiet way, she had to be trying to vindicate the
family honor, and it may well have begun with (the protests)."
Schlegel
said he last corresponded with Bhutto when he sent her a congratulatory note
after she won election as prime minister in 1988.
He had watched from
afar as she battled through two terms in office. Both ended when the military
leadership removed her, citing widespread corruption that was never proven in a
courtroom.
Schlegel watched Bhutto's triumphant return to Pakistan this
fall after a decade in exile.
And he's saddened by the loss of a former
classmate who had the potential to be the moderate leader both Pakistan and the
United States needed.
"I saw somewhere that al-Qaida said they eliminated
the No. 1 friend (to the U.S. and Europe), and in some ways I think they have,"
Schlegel said. "The world is a very different place than it was two days ago,
unfortunately."
BY MATTHEW HANSEN - WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER
Omaha World-Herald
Your Comments
"She was good educated and intellent women in Pakistan. She is favourt in our home."
Name: Muhammad Waseem-ur-Raza
Email: Waseemvhr@yahoo.com
City, Country: Vehari, Pakistan
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| Education News | | Updated: 23 May, 2012 |
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