Catching Benazir's Killers: Can Islamabad Confront Army?

On April 15, 2010, a United Nations commission of inquiry into the assassination of Pakistan's former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, made its report public. This first step towards solving the terrible crime and settling the case - consisting of preliminary findings and pointers - has taken nearly 28 months. How much longer will it take for the process to be taken to its logical conclusion?

Indications are that it will take indefinitely long. Far from ruled out is the possibility that the assassination remains an unsolved mystery and the process of justice incomplete forever in this case. The process is up against what continues to be the most powerful of forces in Pakistan: the army-backed "establishment" (as everyone calls it in the country). This remains no less an entrenched force for the elections of 2009 and the installation of a civilian government.

This is not the first of political murders in South Asia to have defied attempts at solving them, with democratic processes failing to bring the culprits to book. Two striking examples can be cited.

It was only on January 28, 2010, that five convicted persons were hanged for the assassination of the founder-president of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, on August 15, 1975. This may not close the chapter, as originally 15 ex-army officers faced the same charge.

The process of justice is incomplete now, and cannot possibly be taken forward, in the case of the assassination of India's former prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, on May 21, 1991. While the suicide bomber was shot to bits along with the victim, the alleged masterminds of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) could and can never be produced in an Indian court: they are all dead. Only a woman convicted as an accomplice, with a peripheral role in the crime even by official accounts, still languishes in an Indian prison.

The Benazir assassination falls in a different category. The Rajiv case could not be solved, above all, because the main accused, slain LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran, could not be extradited from Sri Lanka and brought to India. A section of the Bangladesh army carried out the Mujib assassination and the coup of 1975, but it is civilian, electoral politics that has eventually carried the day.

If the investigation of the Benazir killing is taking so long, and if its advance seems so uncertain, it is because the army-centered "establishment" enjoys a political power and pre-eminence, to which the return of Pakistan's repeatedly derailed democracy has so far made precious little difference. The course of the case following the UN report, consequently, will also determine the future of Pakistan's democracy.

The independent, three-member UN commission, headed by Chilean diplomat Heraldo Muñoz, was set up in July 2009 at the request of the Pakistan government. The commission was mandated to investigate the "facts and circumstances" of Benazir's death, and not to assign criminal responsibility. Its findings, however, clearly point in the direction of the "establishment."