All is not well in the House of Bhutto.
Five weeks after the slaying of the family's only adult male heir, Murtaza Bhutto, his widow Ghinwa and sister Benazir - Pakistan's prime minister - are engaged in a bitter feud.Ghinwa says Benazir's polo-playing husband, Asif Ali Zardari, set up her husband's death. She has sent her two children to Syria, where they're under the protection of President Hafez Assad. And she says she may enter politics to exact revenge on her in-laws, who are known as the "First Couple."
The conflict increased Sunday at the "chelum," the 40th and final day of mourning for Murtaza, which was held in the Bhutto ancestral home of Larkana, where the family owns vast tracts of farmland.
While Benazir remained in the capital, Islamabad, crowds in Larkana gave the Lebanese-born Ghinwa a rapturous welcome, storming security barricades around the local airport and chanting for her to assume her husband's Larkana seat in the provincial assembly.
There may be little for her to inherit. Back in Karachi's leafy neighborhood of Clifton, where Ghinwa stays, the Bhutto family home that once was a beacon of democracy resembles a political tomb. Three truckloads of paramilitary troops, bearing automatic weapons, park on an avenue lined with banyan trees to guard the front gate of 70 Clifton, which has become a synonym for Bhutto.
Inside the two-building compound, there's little to summon the memory of the family patriarch, Zulfikar, who as prime minister held court here until he was arrested in a military coup in 1977 and hanged two years later. A decaying family tree seems ready to fall from the wall.
The new head of the household, Ghinwa, is too young to be a political widow in a country in which she has lived for only two years. But in South Asia, destiny is a powerful force.
A former school teacher who is Murtaza's second wife, Ghinwa is preparing to assume his political mantle and challenge her sister-in-law.
"It is not a family dispute anymore," she said in an interview. "It's her against the country."
All around Ghinwa there seems to be an emptiness in 70 Clifton, where no Bhuttos by birth remain. Zulfikar's youngest son, Shahnawaz, died of an apparent drug overdose in France in 1987. Another daughter, Sanam, eschews politics for a very private life in Karachi. Benazir, the eldest child who reclaimed her father's office in 1988, spends most of her time in Islamabad and abroad.
When Murtaza returned from exile in 1993 and demanded his sister's resignation, he announced that he was the rightful heir to Zulfikar's legacy. He was immediately arrested for involvement in an airline hijacking in the early 1980s, when he and his brother ran a terrorist group from Kabul, and he never reconciled his differences with Benazir.
On Sept. 20, Murtaza and six of his guards were killed by police near the front gate of 70 Clifton. Police said they had stopped Murtaza's convoy to disarm his private bodyguards, who had developed a reputation for thuggery.
But the story soon grew murky. There were claims that Murtaza's group fired no shots. Then a senior police officer involved in the episode died in a reported suicide, raising suspicions that he, too, was murdered.
Finally, after a judicial inquiry last week, 11 officers were arrested Thursday.
"It was not a shootout," Ghinwa said in the interview. "My husband was targeted."
By whom? She chuckled her way into a tirade against her brother-in-law, Zardari. It was widely known in Pakistan that Murtaza and Zardari held each other in contempt.
Zardari, who was jailed by the previous government, resented Murtaza's return from exile only after Benazir had taken office for a second time. Murtaza considered Zardari, who grew up in a middle-class family, to be beneath the feudal Bhuttos and once called him "a former dishwasher."
"My husband was against corruption," Ghinwa said. "Who else could refer to Asif (Zardari) as a thief?"
Even before Murtaza's death, Zardari had become a political liability to Benazir.
All major public-sector financial institutions are headed by his friends. And his appointment in August to the federal cabinet, in the new position of investments minister, is mocked by the opposition and many businessmen, who call Zardari "20 percent" - double his earlier nickname, which referred to the cut he was said to take from government contracts.
Murtaza's death has only strained relations in a family that has suffered much grief.
Many Pakistanis wonder whether the feud will continue for another generation. Benazir has two young daughters and a son. Murtaza left a 15-year-old daughter from his first marriage and a seven-year-old son from Ghinwa. The boy is named, perhaps ominously, Zulfikar Bhutto.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)