ALBUQUERQUE BAR ASSOCIATION
NOVEMBER 4, 2008

You may think that as a sitting judge in an American courtroom, I have and always will uphold nothing but the highest ideals of democratic government.   My retention-election voters can rest assured of my dedication to the “always will” part. Not so seamlessly can I claim unblemished virtue for what went before -- the “I have” part, me in the past tense, back in Pakistan where I lived once upon a time.  When General Muhammad Ayub Khan, the first of many among Pakistan’s stone dictators, limousined past my house in Karachi, there I was, thrilled no end, waving and smiling from our second-floor balcony.  A parade!  Come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t a limo.  Maybe it was a tank.  Maybe it was a procession of tanks.  I can’t remember.  I was 6 years old then.

What I can remember is the bombs that fell on Karachi in those years and, most recent of all, the stark reminder I received of the violence in Pakistan that never seems to go away.  Not long ago, I lost a childhood friend to some of that same violence.  About those bombs -- I was now 9 years old.  Pakistan was at war with India -- again.  This time it went beyond a border skirmish.  Indian aircraft were staging night raids over Karachi, the country’s largest city and its former capital.  Behind the Indian bombs and the Pakistani defensive bullets was the driving will of larger, stronger nations.  The world order contained the force of China, the Soviet Union and the United States.  Pakistan would frequently play the Americans off the Soviets and then turn around and show favor to the Chinese or vice versa.  It was a messy, asymmetrical fluid situation, and the foreign policies of nations I had almost no knowledge of were playing out in thunderous explosions and neighborhoods left in rubble.  The bombings were aimed at military and seaport installations and not the commercial center of the city, where I lived.  But who knew? With hearts pounding, we were awakened in the middle of the night and herded to the closest stairwell where we crouched, hidden, while the explosions shook the ground beneath us.  Even at that young age, I learned the feeling of fear and hatred for an enemy, every bit as much as the thrill of the parade led by the dictator passing my house.

It would be years before these experiences gathered together, gaining force with passing time to become the belief system that stays with me to this day.  In fact, it was 1992 when I saw the totality of my experiences.  As I would write in my application for admittance to the University of New Mexico Law School: “I have lived in a country where, close by, buildings crumbled and people died.  I have lived in a country where freedom depends on how the dictator is feeling today -- maybe yes, maybe no to petitioners seeking justice who were gathered outside his fortress.  I have lived in a country where dictators exist to destroy political parties, to eliminate an independent judiciary, to marginalize NGOs, and to suspend the protection of human rights.”  “Now”, I wrote, “I can cherish and defend the freedoms here as perhaps others never dreamed would be necessary.”
 
I left Pakistan not long after my bit of personal witness to events by which Pakistan’s people suffered.  As I left, I wondered what was coming next for the country where I had been born.  Military dictatorships would follow, three in all, after the Ayub Khan years.  I guess I don’t need to tell you that the authority of these dictators to govern was self-imposed -- not a mandate from the people.  In between were failed attempts at Democratic rule, failure from the inability to stand up to military overthrow, failure from within due to corruption and incompetence, and not least and most recent, failure to escape the killing and big-power machinations dominating next door Afghanistan.  So while I left a troubled land, a part of the troubled land never left me.  Being, even just as a child and only for a brief time, at the receiving end of the huge power of stronger nations, and living among a people who were being used as pawns -- this time not by the colonialists -- but being used as pawns by those other nations, seeing if you will, the other end of the muzzle -- has allow me to instinctively be aware of “the other side of the story.”  It has allowed me to understand the law of unintended consequences. 

So, while my life rolled on, into and out of Singapore, Hong Kong, Texas, New York and New Mexico, I gathered life experiences and made the most of the opportunities that came my way.  But across the globe in Pakistan the troubles never let up, and in fact were, and still are, piling on by the year, month and week -- toxic connections inside the country to 9/11 and its aftermath, al Qaeda, Osama, Taliban.  
For a time I thought that I was no more enmeshed in that faraway turmoil than any other American.  But then came Thursday, December 27th, 2007.  On that date, a bomb went off, gunshots sounded, and the candidacy of a promising campaigner for Pakistani leadership came to a deadly -- though not unexpected -- end.  Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated as she campaigned in Rawalpindi, an old British military cantonment located just outside Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. 

Why did Benazir’s death touch me personally?  Very simply, I knew her back in those childhood days in Karachi.  She and her sister attended the same Catholic school as I did - together we studied under Irish nuns at Karachi’s Convent of Jesus and Mary.  Her sister and I were best of friends and we played together often at the Bhutto home in southern Karachi near the Arabian Sea.  I remember happy times playing and laughing at our little kids’ games. Benazir was three years older than her sister Sunny and me and I can still hear her voice -- yelling at us to stop making so much noise as she was studying.  We just laughed at her and carried on.

It being Pakistan, of course, the laughter in the household had to stop.  By 1979, the girls’ father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto -- a former prime minister who had displeased the next in line of military dictators, General Zia ul-Haq, was hanged for murder upon conviction by a military-friendly court.  Ali Bhutto, an Oxford graduate and brilliant lawyer had been a charismatic and populist reformer, the first democratically elected Prime Minister in the country’s history who espoused the causes of freedom and human dignity.  But, Bhutto made one fatal blunder.  In a move he later described as “the biggest mistake of my life,” he hand-picked Zia to be his Chief of the Army Staff.  Benazir herself was in prison at the time her father was hanged - held at a deserted police-training camp.  Although she begged her jailers to let her say a proper goodbye to her father, they refused.

In adulthood, Benazir rose up to avenge her father’s death by confronting military rule and winning for herself the prime-minister-ship of Pakistan.  After all, she was her father’s political heir and the political game was in her blood.  It was December 1988 and at the age of 35 she became the first woman prime minister of a Muslim country.  

Now, as you can imagine from the little I’ve told you, Pakistan is not an easy country for anyone, let alone a woman to rule.  But she did so twice, all the while under clouds of suspicion that corruption, nepotism, and mismanagement was rampant within her government.  There are no simple stories in this country, the heroes are complex, often difficult and almost always imperfect.  But, Benazir’s election was a vindication against a military establishment that had overthrown and then executed the father she adored.

So what’s the lesson I take away from my early exposure to people of destiny, or at any rate one person, one woman, a daughter of destiny?  Like all the informed conclusions one reads about bearing on Pakistan, I conclude also that Benazir’s death sent Pakistan off into yet another unchartered direction.  And, its ever-turbulent politics are in even greater confusion than usual.  While terrorist explosions rock the country almost daily, the civilian government -- having succeeded the latest of military dictatorships -- tries to cope as best it can.  Or so it says.  But it’s beset on all sides now with forces aimed at shaping a Pakistan not of the government’s making.  There is the influx of thousands of mujahideen.  Americans want to conduct military operations inside Pakistani territory.  Extreme Islamists want religious rigor imposed in the manner of the Taliban who, when they ruled Afghanistan, specialized in public beheadings of women caught reading books.

Would my childhood friend Benazir have made a difference for the good in Pakistan?  I like to think so, but I could never prove it.  I believe, though, that Benazir and the constant chaos gripping her country did open my eyes perhaps wider than they would have been opened otherwise to the ways of a complicated and stormy world where power can -- and does -- move quickly.

Once, when asked what it was like to be the first Pakistani woman to run for Prime Minister, Benazir said “I’ve never thought of myself as a woman.  I am, of course, but I’m more a person who was caught up in a dictatorship.”  I feel I owe Benazir a share of that received perspective.  She believed that fate put her where she was, that she had a duty to defend all peoples right to freedom and democracy.  I feel that, in some small way, she taught me that you must never wave at a dictator.