Address of Ms Benazir Bhutto

Speech at

Lady Margaret Hall  

By Ms Benazir Bhutto

At London

27-May-2004

It is a pleasure and an honor for me to return to Lady Margaret Hall. I thank the Principal, Mrs. Frances Lannon, for the invitation and the opportunity to meet with you this evening.

I was at Lady Margaret Hall in the seventies at the height of the Miners strike. I return to

Lady Margaret Hall in different times. Now London prepares emergency evacuation plans in the event of a terrorist strike in this the twenty first century.

The changes in threat perception and preparation are enormous.

I visit Oxford at a time when Coalition forces are seemingly bogged down in a political and military quagmire that threatens the achievement of its goals in Iraq.

With respect to the war on terrorism-I see three primary victims of the Al Qaeda rampage of September 11th. Above all the victims are the people who were killed that day.

The era of peace for which we prayed, became a time of war.

Violence continues in Iraq and Afghanistan. Terrorist acts take place from Indonesia to Morocco. Even Madrid is not spared.

This violence takes place at a time when tension in the Middle East make the peace processes a distant dream. Despite some overtures, India and Pakistan still have a distance to travel to reduce the risk of nuclear confrontation.

Ladies and gentlemen, the attack on the Twin Towers was an attack on a country that symbolizes freedom.

As a former student from Oxford and Harvard, I first learned of freedom in these bastions of democracy.

It was at Oxford, with its flourishing political groups and debates at the Oxford Union that I learned of dissent, tolerance, and equal opportunity for all citizens.

My commitment to freedom was nurtured here. Britain is the world's oldest democracy. Its elected, representative and empowered House of Commons as well as its Habeous Corpus Charter is a light of hope for all those denied human dignity across the world.

Wedded to the past, the terrorists attacked the symbols of a modern age.

Ladies and gentlemen,

It grieves me that included in the list of innocent victims of September 11th is the image of Islam across the world.  For me, Islam is not what these people preach.

I see Islam as committed to tolerance and equality and committed, by Koranic definition, to the principles of democracy. 

The Muslim people want freedom. I know the people of Pakistan want freedom.

They can not understand the support for a military dictator.

Islam is committed to universal education and literacy.  The very first word of the Holy Book Koran is "Read."

Yet, while militaries are armed, students are often not educated. Professors and teachers are paid very little salaries.

Islam is committed to the equality of women in society.  The wife of the Holy Prophet of Islam was a working woman.

Yet, in many Muslim countries, women are discriminated against in every aspect of life. Most of these crimes go unpunished.

The investment in justice, law and order and prosecution is small.

Businessmen and women are not allowed to freely compete. Nepotism and cronyism prevail parliamentarians pressured or forced to defect.

Human rights activists are jailed.

Political parties are decimated.

Political leaders are political prisoners or forced into exile. Dissent is not tolerated. Television interviews are regulated by the military.

This is the street of decent Muslim people, terrorized by the authoritarian powers of the state.

It is the street of Pakistan's future in the chains of tyranny where law and constitution are treated with contempt.

And it is a street that threatens to explode.

We must fight a war on terrorism, and on political manipulation of religion and against military dictatorship.

Terrorists and dictators are the cause of war, bloodshed, inhumanity, chaos and disintegration.

In the end, they will be defeated.

Ladies and gentlemen,

In the Muslim Holy Book, Abraham is our father, just as Moses and Jesus are our prophets.

There are similarities between Islam and the Judeo-Christian traditions.

Muslims believe that Jews, Christians and Muslims are one people who are Ahle e Kitaab that is who have religious books containing the message sent by God through his Prophets.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

If Islam and the Muslim world are viewed as threats, we will enter a relentless cycle of action and reaction spiralling out of control. To prevent this, it is important to distinguish between those committing crimes in the name of the Islamic religion and those Muslims who believe in peaceful religious co-existence.

It would be a tragedy if suspicion towards Muslims led to a backlash that provoked a clash of civilizations.

All Nineteen of the hijackers that hit the world trade center were Arabs. That Arab countries could have produced men who launched such an attack makes them the center of scrutiny in the twenty-first century. There is renewed focus on the Arabs as a whole. Nonetheless, the war against terror has put the Middle East issue on the backburner. This should not be so. A Middle East settlement is one of the significant keys to the future Arab mind and the Arab youth just as it is key to the mind of the Israelis who today live under the shadow of the suicide bomber.

The Coalition forces in Baghdad, greeted with hope after the fall of the Saddam dictatorship, are now facing the anger of the Iraqi people. The lack of preparedness for the post Saddam era caused the backlash. There is a need to widen the base of international and internal participation in Iraq.

Iraq and the Middle East are brimming with violence. They are the flash points that Osama and his cohorts exploit to hide their aim of a religious war through feigned sympathy for nationalism. They exploit a growing siege mentality within the Muslim world.

Following September 11, many Muslims found themselves treated with suspicion. This created a siege mentality. That siege mentality was reinforced by the Iraq war, a war that started without cover of the United Nations.

Despite Saddam's history of dictatorship and repression, many in the Islamic world interpret the invasion of Iraq presaging a wider attack against an array of Muslim countries including Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and eventually Pakistan. The recent sanctions against Syria reinforce this view.

While most Muslim intellectuals strongly condemn the attacks on the World Trade Center, they believe that unaddressed political problems and neglected social injustice provided a dish allowing the germs of terrorism and hatred to multiply.

The world is threatened but a military response is only part of the solution to the problem of terrorism and the growing divide between the Muslim and non-Muslim world.

The instability of the Iraqi occupation, the continuing instability in Afghanistan, the deteriorating situation in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians, and the unresolved tragedy of Kashmir impact upon the people in the Street. No one knows when the masses can become a mob and that mob strike out against anything Western.

Some scholars argue that with its overwhelming military might and allies, America must shed its imperial inhibitions and take on the responsibility of reshaping the world. For them, the post Yalta world is now redundant with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The world is to be reshaped to mirror the new realities. Driven by a sense of righteousness, the proponents of this theory find a moral purpose in unilateral action.

Such scholars overlook the lessons of twentieth century history. This history teaches us that the go it alone policy fails to build the political support that must follow a military victory.

It was for this reason that one of America's great Presidents, Woodrow Wilson, promoted the concept of collective security and the principle of self-determination.

To prevent the acceleration of the clash of cultures, civilizations and religions, collective security is important to ensure world stability in the coming decades.

As Prime Minister of Pakistan, I stood up to the forces of dictatorship that breed extremism by weakening democratic forces.

During the Afghan-Soviet war in the seventies and eighties, Pakistan became the breeding ground for the political and religious manipulation of the religious extremists. Pakistan's then military dictator insisted on handling the fighters in Afghanistan, known as the Jihadis, directly through his own intelligence services.

He recruited and supported the most extreme elements in his bid to undermine the moderate and democratic political forces of the country. He justified his dictatorship under the guise of implementing an Islamic system. He belonged to the Muslim brotherhood and he brought in their supporters from all over the world to Pakistan.

Exploiting the name of religion, he established thousands of doctrinaire schools. These schools produced brainwashed young men that could be sent off to fight the superpowers. First the Soviets-and then the West.

But one must never give in; To the fanatics and the extremists democracy and rule by elected representatives.

To Islam at the crossroads, a modern, democratic Pakistan was one fork in the road, fanaticism and ignorance the other.

With the failure of their attempted military coup in 1995, the extremists worked with their supporters in the security establishment to destabilize the democratic government I led.  My brother was murdered. The PPP President was blackmailed into dismissing the PPP government. The election, according to the SAARC observers, was rigged and a pliant political protégé of the military dictator Zia ul Haq was brought in.

A psychological war was launched against the PPP to demonize its leadership. Our government had been the obstacle to the triumph of Taliban over all Afghanistan, to the invitation to Al Qaeda in pursuit of the agenda of religious war and to the export of extremism through Afghanistan, into Central Asia then to Chechnya and onto the shores of Europe.

I am proud of my record as Prime Minister in containing international terrorism and reducing tensions with India.

During my first tenure in office, we facilitated the formation of an interim government of national consensus in Afghanistan where the moderates and hard liners agreed to co-exist. During my second tenure, my government confined the Taliban to Southern Afghanistan prevailing upon them to enter negotiations with the United Nations Special Envoy Mr. Brahmi.

With the eclipse of my government in late September 1996, the Taliban seized Kabul imposing their will across Afghanistan. After my overthrow on November 4, 1996, they openly invited in Osama Bin Laden. In 1997, they allowed Bin Laden to establish Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda set up camps without secrecy to recruit and train young men from the Muslim world. As Leader of the Opposition in the Pakistani Parliament, I called upon Islamabad to sever ties with the Taliban in 1998. That call went unheeded.

On the India front, we had extraordinary progress with the first nuclear confidence building treaty, the agreement not to attack each other's respective nuclear facilities.  We established a hot line between the Pakistani and Indian leadership modeled after the hot line between Washington and Moscow during the Cold War.  We opened up our borders to travel and tourism, and adopted a South Asian preferential tariff agreement that established a free-trade zone between Pakistan, India and the other nations of the region.

The PPP government was making dramatic progress in relations with India and with containing terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  But moderation and progress is not what the Army hard-liners and religious extremists could tolerate.  I was their threat, and I was eliminated. I am afraid, ladies and gentlemen, that the consequences continue to ripple across Asia.

In the closing days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, I cautioned that the policy to

defeat the Soviets had empowered and emboldened the most fanatical, extremist elements of the Afghan Mujahadeen at the expense of the moderates, creating a  "Frankenstein " that could come back to haunt us in the future.