Remembering Benazir Bhutto
Speech to the meeting and social reception hosted by Third World Solidarity to celebrate the birth anniversary of Benazir Bhutto.
21 June 2026
Ladies and Gentlemen
Friends
We meet today on what would have been Benazir’s 73rd birthday. As you all know, she was cruelly taken from her family, her party, the Pakistan People’s Party, her country and from all of us as a young woman of 54.
When people leave us unexpectedly and too soon, it is hard to envisage them as they might be today. In a sense they remain frozen in time. They remain as we knew them. It is perhaps the comfort we draw from the cruelty of loss.
As the English poet Robert Laurence Binyon, writing in 1914, and addressing the violent departure of those who should have had many more years to enjoy and in which to contribute, put it:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
The words may have been written within, or been too often placed within, a context of imperialist jingoism and great power rivalry. They nevertheless retain the ability to speak powerfully to the human condition.
That we gather here this evening on her birthday is itself testimony to the fact that we, like countless others, do remember Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto.
For my part, I want to briefly remember Benazir this evening on two levels.
First as a good friend of the People’s Republic of China and of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). And of course, in both cases she carried forward the cause and work of the father that she so greatly revered.
As Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto visited China several times, including her first foreign trip in office, in February 1989, and also to attend the Fourth UN World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in September 1995.
She also made a very significant visit to the DPRK, following another visit to China, in December 1993. At a banquet he gave in her honour, President Kim Il Sung said:
“The present situation calls on the Asian people, as the masters of Asia, to carve out Asia’s future independently. If the people of the Asian countries unite on the basis of independence and expand and develop cooperation on the principle of collective self-reliance, they will be able to build a new, independent and prosperous Asia free from domination and subjugation.”
I clearly remember from that visit the evocative pictures of Benazir receiving a warm send off at Pyongyang’s Sunan Airport in the midst of a bitterly cold, raging snowstorm. We reminisced about that on one of the occasions that I was privileged to meet her during her exile, in her South Kensington apartment on Queen’s Gate, together with our mutual friend Mushtaq, who had introduced us.
As it says on the banner here – and it’s really Mushtaq’s life’s work:
“Bringing people together”
More significantly, in terms of that visit, it has subsequently been widely reported, for example in a 2008 book by veteran Pakistani journalist Shyam Bhatia, that Benazir, “carried critical nuclear data on CDs in her overcoat to Pyongyang in 1993 and brought back North Korea’s missile information.”
An article from the UPI news agency asserted: “Although it has been mentioned previously in other books, this episode is notable, if only for the fact that Bhutto was, essentially, acting as a female James Bond… During a state banquet of chestnuts and steamed fish, the book maintains that Bhutto… requested a favour from North Korea’s founding father, Kim Il Sung. She left with a bag of computer disks to pass on to her military.”
I would also add that it was some six years after Benazir’s visit to Pyongyang, that I was helping to arrange the first visit there of my good friend and comrade George Galloway. Knowing of his friendship with Benazir, in one of our conversations, I suggested that he might ask her if she had any advice for him. George replied that she’d already been in touch and had offered him any help she might be able to give.
And that really brings me to the second point I want to touch on. And that is Benazir the person.
A number of you will have known her so much better than me. But for what they’re worth, here are some of my observations.
Yes, she was the daughter of a Prime Minister. She grew up in an intensely political family. Her father was martyred. She went on to twice serve as Prime Minister, the first democratically elected woman leader of a Muslim majority country. She, too, gave her life for her country. An extraordinary life by any standard.
But to me, she was in many respects a very simple person.
By this, I don’t intend to in any way diminish her. She was intellectually inquisitive and sharp and always interested to hear others’ opinions and news. She had started her studies at Harvard University when she was just 16 years old and where she campaigned and demonstrated against the Vietnam war. She continued her studies at Oxford – first at Lady Margaret Hall and then at St. Catherine’s College – where she became the first Asian woman to be elected as President of the Oxford Union and reputedly introduced our future prime minister Theresa May to her husband.
She was courageous. Along with her mother, she declined her father’s advice to leave the country shortly before he was hanged. For years she endured prison, solitary confinement, denial of medical care and house arrest. And then the pain of years of exile. She knew the dangers of returning to Pakistan, of openly campaigning and of her fateful action of opening the escape hatch of her bullet proof vehicle and standing up to wave to the surrounding crowds. Ironically, those responsible for her murder must have known that this was her character. And it was surely part of why they feared her.
But Benazir was also more than this. She was a dutiful daughter. She was the oldest of four siblings. And she was a mother of three. She was a friend to countless people and she took an interest in them all without regard to their social status. Itself a noteworthy quality in a country still fighting its way out of its feudal heritage.
Sometimes when Mushtaq and I would visit her in Queen’s Gate, she’d suddenly say, “let’s go for lunch.” But on some things she didn’t permit any argument. She insisted that I order the steak because she considered that to be the best thing on the menu.
Yes, she was in many respects controversial and, perhaps unlike many of her devoted admirers, I don’t think she was a saint. That, too, is part of being human.
Years later, I was in Beijing attending a conference of Asian political parties on China’s belt and road initiative. Of course, I’m not Asian. Nor was I representing a political party. Nevertheless, I was grateful to the Communist Party of China for inviting me.
I spent much of one day in small group meetings including with, among others, Senator Sherry Rehman. Later, at a plenary session, she came over to me and said, “let me introduce to Bilawal”. She took me over and introduced me with the words, “Bilawal, this is a friend of Mum’s.”
No more. No less. And to me those few simple words, spoken by one of Benazir’s closest and most loyal friends, said volumes.
Thank you for listening to me.
