Pakistani politician and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto (right) sits with Campbell Bowen at a wedding.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
1984
The Pakistani Politician Benazir Bhutto.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
1988
Larkana, Sindh, Pakistan
Benazir became the youngest and first woman Prime Minister of Pakistan.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
1988
Larkana, Pakistan
Pakistani politician, stateswoman, and 11th Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
1988
Punjab, Pakistan
Leader of Pakistan People's Party Benazir Bhutto on the election campaign.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
1988
Punjab, Pakistan
Benazir Bhutto on the election campaign.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
1989
London, United States
Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
1989
55 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, 75008 Paris, France
Benazir Bhutto at Elysee Palace.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
1989
128 Rue de l'Université, 75007 Paris, France
Garden Party At Lassay Hotel.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
1989
Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
1989
Washington, D.C., United States
Benazir Bhutto on a visit to Washington, D.C. As a politician, she took to wearing the white dupatta on her head, a political move to attract support from Islamic clerics.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
1989
United States
Benazir Bhutto
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
1990
Supporters of former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, gather in Lyari, a neighborhood of Karachi, Pakistan, to hear her speak.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
1990
Pakistan
Former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto campaigning for the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in the week before the Pakistani General Election.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
1990
Benazir at an award ceremony.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
1990
Iran
Bhutto pilgrimages Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, the eighth Imam of Twelver Shiites during her state visit to Iran.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
1993
Cyprus
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip sitting either side of the President of Cyprus, Glafcos Clerides, as they pose with various Commonwealth heads of government ahead of a banquet on board the Royal Yacht Britannia moored in Cyprus.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
1993
Cyprus
At the meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
1994
Spain
Bhutto on a visit to Spain
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
2004
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Former Pakistani Prime Minister and Opposition Leader Benazir Bhutto at her home.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
2007
Islamabad, Pakistan
Former Pakistani Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto speaks to media after breaking through police lines outside her home.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
2007
Rawalpindi, Pakistan
Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto (C) waves to supporters at a campaign rally.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
2007
Karachi, Pakistan
Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto talks to friends and family of bomb victims during a prayer service in their memory at her house.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
2007
Lahore, Pakistan
Former Pakistani Prime Minister and head of Pakistan People's Party (PPP), Benazir Bhutto.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
2007
Karachi, Pakistan
Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto poses for a photograph whilst on the Pakistani Peoples Party bus on her welcome home parade.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
2007
Benazir Bhutto interview during Socialist International meeting.
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Benazir Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari wedding
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto, daughter of the former prime minister Zulkikar Ali Bhutto, shortly after leaving Oxford University where she was educated. She later became prime minister of Pakistan.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500, United States
Bill Clinton (L) pointing out sights to visiting Pakistan PM Benazir Bhutto, out on a stroll in White House Rose Garden.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Former Pakistani Prime Minister and Opposition Leader Benazir Bhutto with her daughters Bakhtawar left, and Asifa, and her son Bilawal at her home.
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President of the Pakistan People's Party Benazir Bhutto in the field.
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Bhutto and her husband Ali Zardari (pictured) were convicted of corruption by a Swiss court.
Gallery of Benazir Bhutto
Benazir Bhutto, carrying her son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, leaving an airliner upon her arrival for a state visit with husband Asif Ali Zardari (in the background).
Allen stated that had Bhutto died that year, "she would be remembered as a shining example of what youth, fortitude, and idealism can accomplish even in the most brutal and repressive political culture.
Benazir Bhutto on a visit to Washington, D.C. As a politician, she took to wearing the white dupatta on her head, a political move to attract support from Islamic clerics.
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip sitting either side of the President of Cyprus, Glafcos Clerides, as they pose with various Commonwealth heads of government ahead of a banquet on board the Royal Yacht Britannia moored in Cyprus.
Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto, daughter of the former prime minister Zulkikar Ali Bhutto, shortly after leaving Oxford University where she was educated. She later became prime minister of Pakistan.
Benazir Bhutto, carrying her son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, leaving an airliner upon her arrival for a state visit with husband Asif Ali Zardari (in the background).
(Daughter of Destiny, the autobiography of Benazir Bhutto,...)
Daughter of Destiny, the autobiography of Benazir Bhutto, is a historical document of uncommon passion and courage, the dramatic story of a brilliant, beautiful woman whose life was, up to her tragic assassination in 2007, inexorably tied to her nation's tumultuous history. Bhutto writes of growing up in a family of legendary wealth and near-mythic status, a family whose rich heritage survives in tales still passed from generation to generation. She describes her journey from this protected world onto the volatile stage of international politics through her education at Radcliffe and Oxford, the sudden coup that plunged her family into a prolonged nightmare of threats and torture, her father's assassination by General Zia ul-Haq in 1979, and her grueling experience as a political prisoner in solitary confinement. With candor and courage, Benazir Bhutto recounts her triumphant political rise from her return to Pakistan from exile in 1986 through the extraordinary events of 1988: the mysterious death of Zia; her party's long struggle to ensure free elections; and finally, the stunning mandate that propelled her overnight into the ranks of the world's most powerful, influential leaders.
(Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October 2007, afte...)
Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October 2007, after eight years of exile, hopeful that she could be a catalyst for change. Upon a tumultuous reception, she survived a suicide-bomb attack that killed nearly two hundred of her compatriots.
Benazir Bhutto was a Pakistani politician who became the first woman leader of a Muslim nation in modern history. She served two terms as prime minister of Pakistan, in 1988-90 and in 1993-96.
Background
Bhutto was born on June 21, 1953, in the Pakistani city of Karachi. Her father was the politician Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and her mother was Begum Nusrat Ispahani. Zulfikar was the son of Shah Nawaz Bhutto, a prominent politician who had served as Prime Minister of the Junagadh State. The Bhuttos were aristocratic, wealthy landlords from Sindh. They were Sunni Muslims, although Nusrat had been born into a Shia Muslim family before converting to Sunnism on her marriage. The couple had married in September 1951, and Benazir was their first child. Their three younger children were: Murtaza (born 1954), Sanam (1957), and Shahnawaz (1958). When Shah Nawaz died in 1957, Zulfikar inherited the family's land holdings, making him extremely wealthy.
Throughout her youth, Bhutto idolised her father, and he in turn encouraged her educational development in contravention of traditional approaches to women then pervasive in Pakistan. Relations between her parents were however strained during her childhood; Zulfikar embarked on extra-marital affairs with other women, and when Nusrat objected he had her thrown out of their house. She moved to Iran, but after Zulfikar prevented her children from joining her there, she returned to Pakistan six months later, settling in Karachi. Throughout her life, Bhutto never publicly acknowledged this internal family discord.
When Bhutto was five, her father became the cabinet minister for energy, and when she was nine he became the country's foreign minister. From an early age, she was exposed to foreign diplomats and figures who were visiting her father, among them Zhou Enlai, Henry Kissinger, and Hubert Humphrey. When she was thirteen, he resigned from the government and a year later established his own political party, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP). The PPP used the motto "Islam is our faith, democracy is our policy, socialism is our economy. All power to the people." It employed a populist strategy to attract votes, promising "roti, kapra aur makan" (bread, clothes, and housing) for every Pakistani and insisting that the disputed territory of Kashmir would be transferred from Indian to Pakistani control. Benazir immediately joined. Amid riots against the government of President Ayub Khan, in 1968 Zulfikar was arrested and imprisoned for three months, during which he wrote to Benazir to encourage her studies.
Education
Benazir's first language was English; as a child she spoke Urdu less frequently, and barely spoke the local Sindhi language. Benazir initially attended the Lady Jennings Nursery School in Karachi. She was then sent to the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Karachi and from there to the Jesus and Mary Convent, a boarding school in Murree. Murree is near the border with India, and during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 Bhutto and the other pupils underwent air-raid practices. Taking her exams in December 1968, Bhutto passed her O-levels with high grades.
From 1969 to 1973, Bhutto studied for an undergraduate degree at Radcliffe College, Harvard University. She started when she was sixteen, which was younger than normal, but Zulfikar had pulled strings to allow her premature admittance. Zulfikar asked his friend John Kenneth Galbraith, an economics professor at Harvard who had formerly been a United States ambassador to India, to be her local guardian. Through him, Bhutto met his son Peter Galbraith, who became a lifelong friend. Murtaza joined Bhutto at Harvard a year later. Bhutto found it difficult adjusting to life in the United States. A fellow student said she "cried most of her first semester", although Bhutto later called her time at Harvard "four of the happiest years of my life". She became a campus tour guide and the social secretary of her dormitory, Eliot House. She involved herself in campaigns against American involvement in the Vietnam War, joining a Moratorium Day protest on Boston Common. Bhutto encountered activists involved in second wave feminism although was sceptical of some of the views expressed within the movement. At Harvard, Bhutto majored in comparative government and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in 1973.
In autumn 1973, Bhutto relocated to the United Kingdom and began studying for a second undergraduate degree, in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. After three years, she received a second-class degree. At her father's insistence, she remained in Oxford to study for a one-year postgraduate degree, attending St Catherine's College, Oxford. One of her fellow students at Oxford stated that there, she "epitomized the classic spoilt rich girl from a third world country". She nevertheless made friends, who later described her as a humorous and intellectually curious individual. She was elected President of the Oxford Union debating society, the first Asian woman to hold that post. Despite the ongoing tensions between Pakistan and India, she interacted socially with Indian students, and while at Oxford also made proposals of marriage to two fellow Pakistani students, but was rebuffed on both occasions. Bhutto biographer Brooke Allen thought that her time at Oxford was "almost certainly the happiest, most carefree time of her life".
After her Oxford education, she returned to Pakistan in June 1977, where she was scheduled to work at the Prime Minister's office and the "Inter-Provincial Council of Common Interests" during the rest of the summer. Intent on a career in the Pakistani Foreign Service, she was scheduled to take the service's entrance exams later in the year.
After her father’s execution in 1979 during the rule of the military dictator Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, Bhutto became the titular head of her father’s party, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), and endured frequent house arrest from 1979 to 1984. In exile from 1984 to 1986, she returned to Pakistan after the lifting of martial law and soon became the foremost figure in the political opposition to Zia. President Zia died in August 1988 in a mysterious plane crash, leaving a power vacuum at the centre of Pakistani politics. In the ensuing elections, Bhutto’s PPP won the single largest bloc of seats in the National Assembly. She became prime minister on December 1, 1988, heading a coalition government.
Bhutto was unable to do much to combat Pakistan’s widespread poverty, governmental corruption, and increasing crime. In August 1990 the president of Pakistan, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, dismissed her government on charges of corruption and other malfeasance and called for new elections. Bhutto’s PPP suffered a defeat in the national elections of October 1990; thereafter she led the parliamentary opposition against her successor, Nawaz Sharif.
In elections held in October 1993 the PPP won a plurality of votes, and Bhutto again became head of a coalition government. Under renewed allegations of corruption, economic mismanagement, and a decline of law and order, her government was dismissed in November 1996 by President Farooq Leghari.
Voter turnout was low in the 1997 elections, in which Bhutto’s PPP suffered a decisive loss to Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League party. With British and Swiss cooperation, Sharif’s administration continued to pursue the corruption charges against Bhutto. In 1999 Bhutto and her husband, the controversial businessman and senator Asif Ali Zardari—jailed since 1996 on a variety of additional charges—were both convicted of corruption by a Lahore court, a decision overturned by the Supreme Court in 2001 because of evidence of governmental interference. Bhutto did not achieve political accommodation with Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s seizure of power in a 1999 coup d’état; her demands that the charges against her and her husband be dropped were denied, undercutting negotiations with the Musharraf government regarding a return to the country from her self-imposed exile. Facing standing arrest warrants should she return to Pakistan, Bhutto remained in exile in London and Dubai from the late 1990s.
Because of Musharraf’s 2002 decree banning prime ministers from serving a third term, Bhutto was not permitted to stand for elections that same year. In addition, legislation in 2000 that prohibited a court-convicted individual from holding party office hindered her party, as Bhutto’s unanimously elected leadership would have excluded the PPP from participating in elections. In response to these obstacles, the PPP split, registering a new, legally distinct branch called the Pakistan People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPPP). Legally separate and free from the restrictions brought upon the PPP by Bhutto’s leadership, the PPPP participated in the 2002 elections, in which it proceeded to earn a strong vote. However, Bhutto’s terms for cooperation with the military government—that all charges against her and against her husband be withdrawn—continued to be denied. In 2004 Bhutto’s husband was released from prison on bail and joined Bhutto in exile. Just before the 2007 elections, talk began to circulate of Bhutto’s return to Pakistan.
Shortly before Musharraf’s reelection to the presidency, amid unresolved discussions of a power-sharing deal between Bhutto and Musharraf’s military regime, he finally granted Bhutto a long-sought amnesty for the corruption charges brought against her by the Sharif administration. The Supreme Court challenged Musharraf’s right to grant the amnesty, however, criticizing it as unconstitutional; nevertheless, in October 2007 Bhutto returned to Karachi from Dubai after eight years of self-imposed exile. Celebrations marking her return were marred by a suicide attack on her motorcade, in which numerous supporters were killed. Bhutto was assassinated in December in a similar attack while campaigning for upcoming parliamentary elections.
Bhutto’s autobiography, Daughter of the East, was published in 1988 (also published as Daughter of Destiny, 1989); she also wrote Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West, which was published posthumously in 2008.
(Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October 2007, afte...)
2008
Religion
Bhargava stated that Bhutto was "dedicated and devout in her religious principles but modern and emancipated in her behaviour and outlook". In a 2002 interview with The Guardian, Bhutto described her allegiance to the Sufi branch of Sunni Islam. Allen thought her to have "some genuine, if unorthodox, religious belief, mixed up with superstition". In conversation, she often used the phrase "inshallah", and insisted that the Quran supported the equality of the sexes. Bhutto was pro-life and spoke forcefully against abortion, most notably at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, where she accused the West of "seeking to impose adultery, abortion, intercourse education and other such matters on individuals, societies and religions which have their own social ethos".
Politics
Allen thought that Bhutto's "core political values ... were hard to pin down". Bhatia described Bhutto as having "liberal convictions" and a "self-evidently progressive outlook", while biographer G. S. Bhargava thought that in the context of Pakistani politics, she could "pass" for a social democrat. Her friend Catherine Drucker, who knew her while the two women were at Oxford University, said Bhutto's political views were then akin to those "commonplace" within the "mild leftism of the day". Bhargava added that, through her education in governance and politics at Harvard and then Oxford, Bhutto had "a thorough exposure to political theory and practice, in historical perspective as well as in the contemporary setting".
Bhutto admired the Thatcherite economic policies pursued by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom; she was, according to biographer Mushtaq Ahmed, a "zealous convert" to privatisation and market economics. She advocated for the creation of an expanded economically and politically stable middle-class in Pakistan, believing that this was needed in order to sustain a stable democratic state. Allen commented that although the PPP had once been officially socialist in ideology, Bhutto "was not a natural socialist, or even as adept at talking the talk as Zulfikar had been". She disagreed with her father's socialist economic policies, and when in power sought to privatise various industries that had been nationalised in the 1970s. Ahmed thus suggested that while under Bhutto the PPP continued to profess ideals of egalitarianism and claimed it would enhance the welfare of peasants and workers, such "progressive phraseology" couched an absence of economic policies to benefit the poor. Instead, Ahmed thought, its policies primarily benefited "the privileged classes" and was thus a right-wing rather than left-wing party.
During her years in office she also did nothing to seriously challenge the feudal nature of rural Pakistan. Under Bhutto, Ahmed wrote, people from the wealthy feudal class dominated the PPP "both at the federal and provincial levels". Bhargava suggested that, because of the period in which she was operating, Bhutto did not need to engage in the "verbal radicalism" employed by her father, not needing to "clamour for a socialist identity" in order to win votes and allowing her to be "a pragmatist in both word and deed". In a 2007 article for the Los Angeles Times, Bhutto's niece, Fatima Bhutto, called her "a puppet 'democrat'" linked to the U.S. government's neoconservative agenda.
Views
Bhutto regarded herself as an ardent supporter of women's rights, and took a hard stance against militant Islamism. Although she had to compromise with Pakistan's powerful Islamist lobby, she favoured a secular government for the country. Allen wrote that "at no time in her years in power did Bhutto, Westernized though she was, feel comfortable in seriously challenging Pakistan's Islamists". Under Bhutto's leadership, the PPP was officially secular, as were the governments which she led. Bhutto described her main role model as Fatimah, the daughter of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, stating that she admired her piety, wisdom, and courage. She also described the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi as a political inspiration. Lamb described Bhutto at being skilled in using populist strategies in election campaigns.
Quotations:
"Democracy needs support and the best support for democracy comes from other democracies. Democratic nations should... come together in an association designed to help each other and promote what is a universal value - democracy."
"You are creating a Frankenstein. - Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, concerned about the growing strength of the Islamist movement, told President George H. W. Bush."
"I put my life in danger and came here because I feel this country is in danger. People are worried. We will bring the country out of this crisis."
"No, I am not pregnant. I am fat. And, as the Prime Minister, its my right to be fat if I want to."
"Democracy is the best revenge."
Membership
Bhutto was the President of the Oxford Union debating society, the first Asian woman to hold that post.
Oxford Union debating society
Personality
According to Bhutto biographer Shyam Bhatia, Bhutto possessed a desire to be liked and to be popular, and for this reason "was prepared to be all things to all people", having a "chameleon-like" quality to blend into her environment. While in Pakistan she presented herself as a conservative Muslim who always wore her head covered, he observed, but as a student in Oxford she had adopted a more liberal lifestyle, tending to wear a T-shirt and jeans and occasionally drinking wine. Muñoz concurred, describing Bhutto as "a woman of contradictions". As a politician, she was conscious of how her image was presented in Pakistan; she dressed modestly, was never photographed with a glass lest it be interpreted as containing alcohol, and would refuse to shake men's hands. In the country, she also wore a white dupatta on her head to placate Islamist opposition; her mother and other female family members had not covered their hair in this manner.
The journalist Christina Lamb believed that in being raised in a wealthy and aristocratic family, Bhutto was unable to appreciate the struggles of Pakistan's poorest. The Islamic studies scholar Akbar S. Ahmed, who went to school with Bhutto, wrote that she was a "pampered and precocious" child. Bhatia claimed that at Oxford, where he first met her, Bhutto was spoilt, self-obsessed, and prone to throwing temper tantrums, although at the same time was humorous and generous, willing to pay for her friends' meals whenever at a restaurant. Allen suggested that Bhutto retained her "characteristic de haut en bas arrogance, a relic of her feudal upbringing", arguing that her key character flaw had been "a belief in the special, almost sacred destiny of herself and the Bhutto family" and that accordingly, while she "spoke like a democrat ... she thought and felt as a dynast". In later life, Bhutto was accused of being addicted to power, although Allen thought it more accurate to state that she was "addicted to adulation", suggesting that this stemmed from a narcissistic element to Bhutto's personality.
Bhutto was an accomplished orator, having honed her skill at public speaking while president of the Oxford Debating Society. Having encountered her later in life, Muñoz regarded Bhutto as a "charming and intelligent" woman. Allen asserted that Bhutto was "a woman of action rather than an intellectual". Her choice of reading material was usually either utilitarian or pleasurable rather than intellectual; she enjoyed reading Mills & Boon romance novels and the celebrity-focused Hello! magazine. She read a number of self-help books, telling a friend that "for all the lows in my life, those self-help books helped me survive, I can tell you".
Commentators and biographers has said that Bhutto shared her father's charisma, but also his arrogance, and that like him she was impatient of criticism. The connection between Bhutto and her father was endorsed by Allen, who stated that they "had much in common: strength, charisma, political instinct, and the courage, part and parcel of their arrogance, that was so characteristic of both". Allen also believed that Bhutto was so dedicated to her father that "psychologically", she was "unable to admit to any imperfection" in him. Bhutto imitated many of her father's mannerisms and his style of speech.
Close friends called her "BB", or "Pinkie", the latter being the childhood nickname given her by her parents. Bhutto was devoted to her father and husband. In later life, she increasingly came to see success through the prism of her family. She had a love of French and Italian cuisine, and was a great fan of the music of American singer Neil Diamond.
Physical Characteristics:
Height - 165 cm (1.65 m)
Weight - 62 kg (137 lbs)
Eyes color - black
Hair color - black
Quotes from others about the person
"Benazir Bhutto was a woman of immense personal courage and bravery. Knowing, as she did, the threats to her life, the previous attempt at assassination, she risked everything in her attempt to win democracy in Pakistan, and she has been assassinated by cowards afraid of democracy. Benazir Bhutto may have been killed by terrorists, but the terrorists must not be allowed to kill democracy in Pakistan. And this atrocity strengthens our resolve that terrorists will not win there, here or anywhere in the world." - Gordon Brown
"Bhutto represents everything the fundamentalists hate - a powerful, highly-educated woman operating in a man’s world, seemingly unafraid to voice her independent views and, indeed, seemingly unafraid of anything, including the very real possibility that one day someone might succeed in killing her because of who she is." - Ginny Dougary
"Bhutto is a survivor and has an infinite belief in herself and her abilities. Rarely does she reveal even glimpses of her true character or her real thoughts. She may have genuinely not yet decided whether to return. Or she may have accepted that she can never return, but intends to leave the military on tenterhooks for as long as possible. Despite Musharraf's hostility, Bhutto's party is still the strongest political force in Pakistan and she is the only Pakistani politician with any natural charisma." - Rory McCarthy
Interests
French and Italian cuisine
Politicians
Margaret Thatcher
Sport & Clubs
Tennis
Music & Bands
Neil Diamond
Connections
On returning to Pakistan in the 1987, Bhutto's mother arranged for her marriage to the businessman Asif Ali Zardari. Many of her friends were surprised that Bhutto acquiesced to Islamic tradition given her liberal attitudes, however she later related that she "felt obligations to my family and my religion" to go through with it and that her high public profile made it difficult for her to find a husband through other means. She consistently presented an image of loyalty to her husband, throughout the many accusations and periods of imprisonment he faced. Allen expected that it would probably never be known how happy the couple's marriage was, for Bhutto "always projected support and loyalty for her unpopular mate".
In the final years of Bhutto's life, she and her husband lived apart. According to Allen, she would have been aware that a divorce or a public separation would have resulted in the end of her political career in Pakistan due to social stigma around the subject. In a 2007 interview, she said that she and her husband were living apart because of his medical requirements, adding that she visited him every month in New York. Regarding the rumours of separation, in 2008 Bhutto's friend Victoria Schofield said that the marriage should not be judged by ordinary standards. According to Schofield, after Zardari's return from prison, the Bhuttos' marriage was going through a process of "readjustment". In 2018, Bhutto's friend Ron Suskind described the marriage as "probably not all bad", although added that Bhutto did not consider her husband to be an equal partner in the marriage.
The couple had three children: a son, Bilawal, was born in September 1988, while she was campaigning for that year's election. She also had two daughters, Bakhtawar and Aseefa. When she gave birth to Bakhtawar in 1990, she became the first elected head of government to give birth while in office.