Seyman's 'Benazir'

During the times when Pakistan and Bangladesh were still one and this journalist was still a young beginner of the profession, there was a Pakistani journalist, Hossain Shahadat, who spared time and energy to explain the deliquescence of souls in the Indus River...

Hossain was the foreign news editor of what was then the Turkish Daily News. He had taken over from another Pakistani journalist, Aktar Cemal... A while later I took over from Hossain when, like Aktar, he decided to return to his homeland. Aktar in the meantime had become not only an important contact for Turkish journalists travelling to Pakistan but also a senior journalist in Pakistan. Following the sad execution of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979 by the military regime - a very unfortunate development that Turkey strived to prevent a lot at the time - at the age of 29, in 1982, Benazir Bhutto was pulled into active party politics as the first Pakistani woman undertaking such a role in the history of her nation. From the first day, Aktar was with her.

Reading through an excellent work, "Benazir" by Ya?ar Seyman, I revisited not only the traumatic journey of the author herself, but more so what Turkey and Pakistan went through over the past almost six decades.

The 1980 coup and the then National Security Council ruling the country with an iron grip might be a nuance to the current political Islam clan the Turkish nation reelected with almost fifty percent of the vote to a fourth consecutive term in governance. When Gen. Kenan Evren and his gang of generals were in power, back in Pakistan there was a pal of Evren, Gen. Zia ul Haq, busy converting the brotherly country into an Islamist country. In that atmosphere and with the memory of a father slain by a military...