Benazir Bhutto (born June 21, 1953) became the first woman to lead a Muslim country in modern times when she was elected Prime Minister of Pakistan in 1988, only to be deposed in a coup 20 months later. She was re-elected in 1993 but was dismissed three years later amid various corruption scandals. Some of these scandals involve contracts awarded to Swiss companies during her regime and remain unresolved. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, has been implicated as well, and remained in jail until November 2004.

The daughter of former Pakistani premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir was educated in the west, notably at Harvard University and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She temporarily left Harvard for New York City in 1971, when India sent troops into East Pakistan -- soon to be called Bangladesh -- and her father, as Pakistan's foreign minister, traveled to the United Nations to resolve the issue. Benazir Bhutto joined her father in New York City and acted as a kind of assistant to him.

Benazir Bhutto

This seems to have been a formative experience for her, in that watching her father in action brought her out of academia and showed her the ways of power politics. Her remaining years in the United States included active participation in various social causes.

During her time at Oxford, she was the first Asian woman to be President of the Oxford Union, after the election had to be re-run because she accused her rival of illegal canvassing. Her entire undergraduate career was fuelled by controversy, coming in the middle of a period when her father's administration was being challenged both at home and abroad.

After graduating, she returned to Pakistan, but, in the course of her father's imprisonment and execution, she was placed under house arrest. Having been allowed, in 1984, to go back to the UK, she was leader in exile of the Pakistan Peoples Party, her father's party, but was unable to make her political presence felt in Pakistan until the death of General Zia ul-Haq.

Then, in the first open election in more than a decade, voters in Pakistan elected Benazir on November 16, 1988 to be Prime Minister. Bhutto was sworn in on December 2, becoming the first woman to head the government of a Muslim-majority state in modern times.
 

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