PAKISTAN: Mary Fitzgerald, Foreign Affairs Correspondent, witnesses machinations and mourning in Naudero
At first glance Tajuddin Achakzai seems like an unlikely mourner for Benazir Bhutto. A Pashtun from Quetta, the restive city near Pakistan's southwesterly border with Afghanistan, he is more than six-feet tall with fierce-looking sunburnt features framed by masses of greying hair and a straggly beard.
He wears the khaki jacket and chequered scarf of a fighter over his salwar kameez and admits he is no liberal. Nevertheless, Tajuddin spent more than 10 hours on a bus so he could pay his condolences at Bhutto's graveside.
"I am a conservative person and very religious, but I was always on her side," he says. "She was the only leader worth supporting in this country."
Dozens of mourners stream past him into the Bhutto family mausoleum, a huge Mughal-style meringue that rises incongruously above the flat, dusty plains of poverty-ridden rural Sindh. Around Benazir Bhutto's tomb, bearded clerics rock back and forth as they recite the Koran and barefoot children toss rose petals over her final resting place.
"She was the only one to help poor people like us," whispers Subhan Khatoon, drawing her veil around her. "Who will look after us now?"
Asif Soomro, a student, nods in agreement. "We have lost everything."
A short drive away at Bhutto's family farmhouse in Naudero, armed guards skulk beside drooping banners and murals left over from her homecoming in October. A roar of engines heralds the arrival of Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, in a cavalcade of some 20 SUVs, all bristling with guns.
The newly-appointed co- chairman of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) is taking few chances with his security and has warned party members not to travel after dark in these crucial weeks before parliamentary elections take place on February 18th.
Two weeks after his wife's assassination at an election rally in Rawalpindi, Zardari is still receiving hundreds of mourners in the courtyard at Naudero, as he will do for the remainder of the 40-day mourning period prescribed by Islam.
"I'm still numb," he tells The Irish Times. "I'm functioning on less than a third of my normal self. I feel as if the rest of me is not living."
Zardari, a controversial figure who earned the nickname "Mr 10 Per Cent" due to his alleged propensity for demanding kickbacks while serving as a minister in his wife's government, will lead Bhutto's party until it can be run by their teenage son Bilawal, now a student at Oxford.
Aware that many PPP supporters - particularly rural Sindhis, many of whom regard the House of Bhutto with something approaching a quasi- religious fervour - would accept nothing less than a Bhutto as leader, Bilawal Zardari took his mother's surname following her death.
"This is a legacy he has to live up to," says Zardari. "Bhuttoism is the major driving force within the PPP and that is what we must keep alive."
Safdar Abbasi, one of Benazir Bhutto's chief political advisers, was sitting behind her when she was killed as she waved to supporters through the sun roof of the vehicle in which they were travelling. His wife Naheed was sitting next to Bhutto. The last words the former prime minister uttered before gunshots rang out, he says, were "Jiye Bhutto" (Long Live Bhutto).
"She dropped down into Naheed's lap and died in her arms," he recalls.
Bhutto built the PPP into the party it is today, Abbasi says, and she will be difficult to replace. "Her death has really created a vacuum - in the country, in its politics and in the party. But we faced the same problem in 1979 when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto [ Benazir's father] was hanged.
"This is a transition period, but at least the party stands united and in agreement that the tradition of Bhutto should continue."
There are others who dispute Benazir Bhutto's interpretation of that tradition, not least within the Bhutto family itself. Her death further exposed the fault lines in Pakistan's most famous political dynasty, one long riven by infighting and intrigue.
Even the Bhutto mausoleum - built by Benazir in honour of her father - bears testament to the feuding that has marked the family. Bhutto's grave lies next to that of her father in the centre of the marble shrine. At a distance are the tombs of her two brothers. One, Shahnawaz, was poisoned in still- unexplained circumstances in Cannes in 1985. The other, Murtaza, was shot dead on a Karachi street 11 years later. Benazir had fallen out with Murtaza and allegations that her husband was involved in his death have persisted since.
Murtaza's Lebanese widow Ghinwa now leads a splinter faction of the PPP.
She lives in Al Murtaza, the family home in nearby Larkana where Benazir was kept under house arrest in 1979. Another family home is occupied by Mumtaz Bhutto, Benazir's estranged uncle and patriarch of the entire Bhutto tribe.
He founded his own political organisation and recently questioned Bilawal's right to inherit the PPP mantle.
Ghinwa believes Benazir's PPP betrayed her father's vision.
"The problem with the PPP is they consider the Bhutto legacy as something that automatically belongs to them," she says.
"They forgot that the Bhutto legacy is about justice. The PPP used the name, but they did not fight for the rights of the people."
Murtaza's daughter, Fatima, a writer whose striking looks and forthright opinions have led to comparisons with her famous aunt, is much talked about as a future politician.
Many in Pakistan see her claim to the Bhutto political legacy as more credible than that of Bilawal.
But Ghinwa says Fatima is too young at 25 to enter the treacherous waters of Pakistani politics. A proposal by Benazir's younger sister Sanam that Bilawal marry Fatima in a bid to reconcile the clan has been dismissed as unrealistic.
Nevertheless, Ghinwa hopes the younger generation of Bhuttos can overcome the animosity that has dogged the family in the past.
"Maybe something good will come out of this tragedy after all," she says. "Things have to change. Bhuttos should not die young any more."