by Sue Corbett
During her last few years McLaren served as trustee of the Frozen Ark project which she had co-founded. This aims to preserve the DNA and viable cells of the world’s endangered animal species before they become extinct. She was convinced that the stored material would provide an invaluable source of genetic information for future generations, and a “back-up” for conservation breeding programmes.
Her research interests in stem cells led her to make a notable contribution to the ethical debate about their generation and use, in particular those made from early human embryos. She became a member of the Nuffield Foundation’s Bioethics Council and the European Group on Ethics that advises the European Commission on the social and ethical implications of new technologies. She was a long-term member and council member of the Pugwash Conferences. This group, which was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1995, is devoted to reducing the danger from all forms of armed conflict and seeks to raise awareness of the ethical issues that arise from scientific advance.
McLaren died in a car crash. Donald Michie, her former husband, scientific colleague, father of her children and lifelong friend, was travelling with her and also died in the accident. Her death is a tremendous loss to the world of science and to her colleagues, students, many friends and all those who were lucky enough to enter her orbit. Her particular blend of idealism, effectiveness and all the splendid personal qualities for which she was held in such high regard will make her greatly missed.
McLaren is survived by two daughters and her son.
Dame Anne McLaren, DBE, FRS, geneticist, was born on April 26, 1927. She died in a car accident on July 7, 2007, aged 80
BENAZIR BHUTTO
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COURAGEOUS PRIME MINISTER OF PAKISTAN WHOSE REFORMING ZEAL WAS NO MATCH FOR THE CONSERVATIVE FORCES RANGED AGAINST HER
DECEMBER 28, 2007
Benazir Bhutto was one of several women who were collectively South Asia’s greatest political paradox, each rising to heights of power on the backs of dead husbands and fathers for the sole reason that they possessed famous names. Bhutto’s ambition and guts were beyond question, but without her name and family political pedigree — and vast wealth — she could not have become the first female leader of a contemporary Muslim country.
It also happened in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, where two women who hated each other, Begum Khalida Zia and Sheikh Hasina Wajid, carved up the political landscape because one was the widow of the liberation war hero against Pakistan and the other the daughter of the founder of the nation. Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka became the world’s first female head of government in 1960 because her husband had held the job before her — paving the way for their daughter, Chandrika Kumaratunga, subsequently to become Prime Minister and President. Indira Gandhi led India because her father was Jawaharlal Nehru, and Sonia Gandhi became political kingmaker because she was Rajiv Gandhi’s widow.
Benazir Bhutto rose to power because she was the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a former populist Prime Minister who was hanged by the military dictatorship of General Zia-ul Haq in 1979. The dignity with which she handled herself after his judicial assassination — she called it murder — drew admiring comparisons with the Kennedy family, and touched the hearts of a nation sick of austere military rule. Her beauty and powerful oratory caught the imagination, and army rule weakened as her popularity soared.
It was a measure of Bhutto’s political ambition that in 1987 she submitted herself to an arranged marriage to somebody she did not love — the son of a Karachi cinema owner — aware that the highly conservative electorate would not tolerate being led by an unmarried woman. She constantly endured the sometimes salacious taunts of clerics who accused her of dating men while she was studying at Harvard and Oxford.
She was elected leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, founded by her father, and in national elections in November 1988 swept to power. She had returned from exile in London to be cheered by hundreds of thousands of people who were as confident as she was that a new and prosperous era was beginning and that the Army would at last allow democracy to take root.
Never had Pakistan been more optimistic or certain of itself. In less than two years, however, the military engineered Bhutto’s dismissal on the grounds of incompetence and corruption, and a new era of failed democracies and squandered hopes began.
Almost her entire time in her first term of office was spent fighting political battles with clerics and others determined to get her out. There was little opportunity for policymaking or economic planning, and the country reeled in financial crisis as the rich grew richer through corruption. Reports of rampant fraud by her husband, Asif Zardari, sullied the Bhutto name. Downtrodden women and the poor, groups which she had pledged to help, felt betrayed.
Three years after her dismissal, however, following even worse misrule and corruption under the government of Nawaz Sharif — also dismissed at the Army’s behest — she was re-elected Prime Minister. But circumstances did not improve, and nationwide loathing of the antics of Asif Zardari, openly branded “Mr Ten Per Cent” by the press, helped to wreck Bhutto’s credibility at home and abroad. There was widespread speculation about the obvious power Zardari exercised over his wife, and about her apparently inexplicable refusal to curtail his activities even though they were helping to destroy her credibility and undermine her leadership.
In 1996 the Army once again arranged her dismissal, clearing the way for another chaotic period of misgovernment by Nawaz Sharif. This endured until the military seized direct power once more in 1999, with Pervez Musharraf, the chief of staff of the Army, effecting a bloodless military coup.
Benazir faced imprisonment on a range of charges, including corruption, but she was allowed to go into exile, which she spent mostly in London, while an exiled Nawaz Sharif occupied a borrowed palace in Saudi Arabia. The two old enemies passed many years plotting to see who could be first to return to power when military rule ended. Even in exile Bhutto maintained a wary contact with Musharraf, in which power-sharing came under discussion.
With the stock of Musharraf falling lower within Pakistan in the opening years of the new millennium, with his uneasy alliance with the US as its principal partner in the “war on terror” coming under constant attack, both verbal and physical, from Muslim clerical leaders and their followers, and with a groundswell of demand in the Western countries that supported him that he submit his presidency to ratification by a popular vote, the return of Bhutto to Pakistan, to play some sort of role in the political process, suddenly began to be spoken of again as a possibility.
On October 5 this year Musharraf signed a national reconciliation ordinance which gave amnesty to Bhutto and other opposition political leaders — though significantly not, at first, to Sharif. All corruption charges against her were dropped. The following day Musharraf won a parliamentary election which legitimised his tenure of the presidency. On October 18, Bhutto returned in triumph to Pakistan, assuming on-the-spot leadership of the opposition Pakistan People’s Party (PPP).
Two suicide bombs exploded shortly after she arrived at Jinnah International Airport, Karachi. She was unharmed, but among the 136 killed in the blasts were 50 security guards of the PPP who had formed a human chain around the truck that was carrying her away from the airport. It was a portent of things to come, and an indication that the old enmities that had twice forced her from power were never far from the surface in Pakistan.
Benazir Bhutto was born in Karachi in 1953, the eldest daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a Pakistani of Sindhi extraction, and his wife Begum Nusrat Bhutto, who was of Iranian-Kurdish extraction. The Bhutto family was not a happy one. Benazir’s mother openly supported one of her sons as the rightful heir of the political dynasty before he was killed in a shoot-out in Karachi, saying that as a man it was his right to take over the party.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto adored his daughter but never hid his contempt for both his sons. His ancestors had grown rich by helping the British to rule
Sind province (now Sindh), for which they were handsomely rewarded. Although presenting himself as a man of the people he never gave up the family’s huge feudal landholdings. Neither did his daughter. It was often said of her that her political life was driven by a need to vindicate her father, a foul-tempered man who made enemies easily. She was to fail, just as she failed to fulfil the dreams of the millions who had believed passionately in her and in her father.
She was educated in Karachi at Lady Jennings Nursery School and the Convent of Jesus and Mary. She then had two years at Rawalpindi Presentation Convent before going to the Jesus and Mary Convent in Murree, where she took her O-levels at the age of 15. She then went to Karachi Grammar School where she took her A-levels. She continued her studies in the US, from 1969 to 1973 at Radcliffe College. From there she went to Harvard, where she took a good BA in comparative government and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. From the US she came to Britain to read philosophy, politics and economics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, while also doing a course in international law and diplomacy. In 1976 she became the first Asian woman to be elected President of the Oxford Union.
After completing her education she returned to Pakistan. Her father, who had been deposed, was in jail, and she was placed under house arrest. She was to be intermittently with him during his last days. It was some years before Bhutto talked in detail of the day that her father was executed inside Rawalpindi Central Jail while she and her mother were held at a deserted police training camp at Sihala. She recalled waking suddenly at 2am and screaming “No!” Her father’s body was taken away immediately for burial, with no family members present, and his clothes were handed over to Benazir and her mother by a junior jailer who told them that the end had been peaceful.
“The scent of his cologne was still on his clothes, the scent of Shalimar,” Bhutto wrote in her 1988 autobiography, Daughter of the East. For two years she had done nothing but fight in the courts and on the international stage to save her father, and now she felt shattered and empty. On her last visit to his cell she asked: “What will I do without you to help me?” He shrugged helplessly, unaware that he was to be hanged the next day. After 30 minutes Bhutto and her mother were ordered to leave.
Bhutto used her speaking skills — she was more comfortable in her first language of English than Urdu — to campaign relentlessly against the Zia regime after her father’s death, and was frequently placed under house arrest. That only heightened her popularity. She spent the summer of 1981 in an insect-infested jail cell in Sindh, fighting heat and insect bites, and in 1984 was allowed to travel to England to be treated for a serious ear infection. She remained in exile until Zia lifted martial law in December 1985. She returned to a massive welcome on the streets and instantly began to organise mass protests and civil disobedience campaigns to force Zia out. His death in a still-unexplained air crash in 1988 — there was apparently an on-board explosion — cleared the way for elections.
No one ever doubted Bhutto’s resilience and determination, but few could praise her for effective governance. She fought formidable objects — she was young, attractive, inexperienced and, above all, female in a political system controlled jealously by men. In her early days of power she tried to calm tensions with India, but a strong and entrenched rightist parliamentary opposition scuttled any attempts at progress at home or abroad. She was perhaps doomed from the outset. As a head of government she relied heavily on Washington — a vital paymaster — to keep her in power, and she presented Pakistan as a frontline state in the fight against Islamic extremism, making her the darling of the US before corruption and incompetence soured her name.
Her husband went to jail for corruption but was later allowed to leave the country. When Bhutto, threatened with jail on corruption charges, also went into exile in 1999 a sickly Zardari did not join her. The marriage appeared to be dead.
In spite of her failures in the past, her return to Pakistan in October 2007 at the head of the PPP as opposition leader was greeted with wild enthusiasm by large numbers of the party’s followers who still saw in her a liberal middle way in Pakistani politics. Her launch of the PPP’s electoral manifesto stressed that if elected the party would concentrate on the “Five Es” — employment, education, energy, environment, equality.
Her optimism was high for a convincing performance for the PPP in elections scheduled for January 8. But continuing physical attacks on the party’s personnel and premises were a constant reminder of the dangers lying in her path. Already this month three PPP workers had been killed in an attack by gunmen on the party’s headquarters in Quetta, Baluchistan province. Bhutto herself was fatally injured in a suspected suicide attack as she left a rally in Rawalpindi after addressing an audience of thousands.
Benazir Bhutto, Prime Minister of Pakistan, 1988-90 and 1993-96, was born on June 21, 1953. She died of injuries sustained in an attack by a suicide bomber on December 27, 2007, aged 54
HELEN SUZMAN
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IRREPRESSIBLE ANTI-APARTHEID CAMPAIGNER AND POLITICIAN WHO WAS A CONSTANT THORN IN THE SIDE OF SOUTH AFRICAN GOVERNMENTS
JANUARY 2, 2009
The most celebrated white champion of the anti-apartheid movement, Helen Suzman was the South African MP who, over a period of 36 years, consistently denounced the iniquities of racial segregation. Often, she was the sole politician in South Africa’s parliament to campaign vociferously against apartheid legislation and highlight the frequent instances she discovered of institutional racial abuse. For six years, she was also the only woman among 165 MPs, enduring the contempt of male parliamentarians who viewed white supremacy as a birthright, and to whom “liberal” was a dirty word.
Undeterred, Suzman used her privileges as an MP to gain access to areas forbidden to the general public: prisons, black townships and “resettlement areas” in the tribal homelands. At every step she highlighted the evils of the system. She disseminated her findings and presented alternative policies to the outside world through the parliamentary press gallery.
Suzman began her parliamentary career as a United Party MP in 1953, but left in 1959 to co-found the Progressive Party after the UP split on the question of allocation of land to blacks. Thereafter hers was often the lone voice of dissent on the parliamentary benches. For 13 years she was the only representative in Parliament of the Progressive Party. But she persevered, using the paradoxical circumstance of the authoritarian Government’s respect for the parliamentary system to challenge it and its policies at every turn. Her most relentless campaign was against the notorious pass laws, which restricted the movement of blacks and prevented them from selling their labour in the open market. The repeal of these odious laws towards the end of the life of apartheid government in South Africa owed much to her obduracy.
Slight of build though she was, Suzman had great reserves of courage and stamina. She readily held the attention of the House, particularly in her clashes with successive prime ministers and ministers of justice. She used question time to good effect, drawing attention to abuses in the police force and other departments of state and ensuring that these gained the widest publicity.
Helen Suzman was born in Germiston, a small mining town outside Johannesburg, in 1917. She was the daughter of Samuel Gavronsky, a Jewish immigrant who had come to the Transvaal from Lithuania with, as she used to say, “a bundle on his back”.
She was educated at Parktown Convent in Johannesburg and at the University of the Witwatersrand where she read commerce and economics. She married in 1937 before graduating, and dropped out of university to give birth to her first child. She returned to her studies and completed her degree with first-class honours.
After the Second World War Suzman taught economic history at Witwatersrand for eight years before going into politics. She entered Parliament with the United Party representing the Houghton constituency of Johannesburg in 1953. At that time Dr D. F. Malan’s Nationalists had completed five years in office and were enforcing the first apartheid legi
slation. Elected as a member of the old United Party of General Smuts, Suzman was one of a group of liberal-minded MPs who broke away from the UP to form the Progressive Party in 1959. In the general election of 1961 this new party was all but wiped out at the polls: Suzman was the only survivor. It was a situation to be repeated at the elections of 1966 and 1970.
In the 1960s, with the Vorster Government introducing the first legislation providing for detention without trial, hers was frequently the only dissenting voice on the opposition benches. It was this legislation, later supplemented by the Terrorism Act and consolidated in the Internal Security Act, which gave the State powers to hold detainees incommunicado and in solitary confinement. It also gave rise to abuses such as torture during interrogation — and a spate of deaths in detention.
Suzman was witty and irrepressible in debate, a master of the pungent aside and cutting rejoinder. She often faced roars of disapproval from the government benches as she argued the case against the Nationalist Government’s ideological legislation. In the 1960s, she frequently had to stand her ground in debate amid intense anger and abuse. The three successive prime ministers whom she confronted over a period of 25 years, Hendrik Verwoerd, John Vorster and P. W. Botha, she was subsequently to describe as “as nasty a trio as you could encounter in your worst nightmares”.
She later admitted that Verwoerd was “the only man who has ever scared me stiff”. Yet she stood up to him across the floor of the House, notably on one occasion in 1961 when he was at his most aggressive and sarcastic, telling her that “the country has written you off”. Suzman replied: “The world has written you off.”
