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I would like to begin by thanking the Oxford Union for inviting me to speak in this hallowed hall across from this beautiful portrait of my mother, Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto. During my Undergraduate years I used to attend quite a few of the socials here and it’s an honor to have finally made it up to this side of the podium. My mother spent some of her happiest times here at Oxford and it is very gracious of you to keep her memory alive at this renowned institution through events such as this one.
I would like to thank my fellow speakers, George Galloway and Aunty Victoria, for making time in their busy schedules. And I would like to thank my friends and family for joining me here today. I also would like to thank Saria Benazir for her lovely tribute to my mother.
I come today to speak not as a worker of a political party but as a daughter. My mother did not have the easiest of lives. Her time here was perhaps the last phase of her life where she wasn’t burdened by an intense and painful struggle for democracy. My siblings and I grew up predominantly in exile. Away from Pakistan, a country that though I had spent few years in, is where I consider, and have always considered my home.
My relationship with Pakistan is a bittersweet one. It is a land that has taken my grandfather, my uncles, my mother and my grandmother. It has also taken the lives of countless of my fellow party workers. But while Pakistan has taken so much from my family it has also given us so much. My grandfather, Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, in his death cell wrote frequently to my mother.
I would like to read an extract from one of his many letters that I believe sums up our experience of Pakistan perfectly. He wrote:
‘What gift can I give you from this cell out of which my hand cannot pass? I give you the hand of the people. What celebration can I hold for you. I give you the celebration of a celebrated memory and a celebrated name. You are the heir to and inheritor of the most ancient civilization. Please make your full contribution to making this ancient civilization the most progressive and the most powerful. By progressive and powerful I do not mean the most dreaded. A dreaded society is not a civilized society. The most progressive and powerful society in the civilized sense, is a society which has recognized its ethos, and come to terms with the past and the present, with religion and science, with modernism and mysticism, with materialism and spirituality; a society free of tension, a society rich in culture.’
The Benazir Bhutto I knew, quite obviously, was a different Benazir Bhutto to the one the people of Pakistan and the people of the world knew. She was always mama, never Madam Prime Minister or the leader of the largest political party in Pakistan or the 1st female PM in the Muslim world. The pressures of her struggle for democracy was always alive in her conscience and she devoted her life to this political struggle. But yet she never once made my siblings and I feel neglected. She was always there for us.Loving, kind, doting and strict.
My mother was keen, no matter what was going on, that we try to live as normal a family life as possible. One would think that living in exile and with my father in prison on politically motivated charges that this would be impossible but nothing would get in my mother’s way when she put her mind to it. While we were living in exile no matter what was going on in world affairs, at 7pm on weekdays, we always sat down together for family dinnertime. My mother would sit and ask us about our days, whether our homework was finished, something I rarely could answer in the affirmative, what we had learned at school, who our friends were – all the questions any caring and attentive parent asks.
However, regularly punctuating our moments of normalcy were the –“real world problems” that came with running the largest political party of a country that was trying to topple a dictatorship. I was always in awe of my mother. She was brave, strong, independent and remarkably intelligent. She was adored by millions and we as children always understood that we couldn’t keep her to ourselves, although I tried, I had to share our mother with the millions of Pakistanis who desired to see a peaceful, progressive and prosperous Pakistan.
Education was the most important thing to her. She always said that people could strip you of your wealth, your freedom, your dignity, but no one could ever strip you of your education. My mother always ensured that we got the best education. She strived for the same for each and every daughter and son of Pakistan. She believed that the children of Pakistan deserved better and she made investments in their education, nutrition and healthcare a priority for both her governments. During her governments, primary schools were built across Pakistan in an attempt to ensure that every child, regardless of caste, creed, ethnicity or social status had access to education, the most basic of human rights.
One of the most successful programmes she began was the health programme, which employed thousands of lady health workers to help reach out to rural women. The lady health worker program trained women in basic health care, travelling from village to village assisting with prenatal and postnatal care, and helping administer vaccinations to children. It was the last of these which peaked my interest because I was the first child given the Polio vaccination under the government’s programme in Pakistan. It always stayed with me. When I was a bit older I was asked by the UN to become their Ambassador for Polio in Pakistan. This was an opportunity for me to continue my mothers’ mission to eradicate this preventable disease.
As the Ambassador for Polio I took it upon myself to work with every level of government and bureaucracy to ensure unwavering commitment to eradicate polio. After years of meeting and speaking to countless workers and victims of this disease there is one story in particular that I would like to share with all of you today.
One of our elderly Lady Health Workers had joined the program because she had been brain washed into refusing polio drops for her only child, who as a result, unfortunately contracted this disease. Since then she has been part of LHW program because she wanted to spare other mothers and children from going through the same untold suffering that her family had to go through. She now goes door to door campaigning, regardless of the religious stigma, and countless terrorist attacks on her fellow workers.
In an ideal world no mother should have to go through what she has gone through, but this is not an ideal world. In Pakistan polio is on the rise, terrorists have deemed polio drops ‘a western/un-islamic drug’ that is a mass conspiracy to cause in fertility. In the last government and with the support of the international community, we began to make serious headway in tackling this disease and we were getting closer and closer to eradicating it once and for all from Pakistan.
Countless obstacles still stand in our path but I am clear on my mothers mission and so are the countless polio workers currently risking their lives everyday in Pakistan. They are committed to a polio free Pakistan. I am committed to a polio free Pakistan. My mother’s passion lives on through me and I will not give up on them – just as she didn’t. The people who resent me/my cause do so because I am a woman, I’m young and I’m a Bhutto. Well, the simple answer is, it doesn’t matter that I’m a woman, it doesn’t matter that I’m young and it’s a matter of pride that I’m a Bhutto.
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