Letter:

In her Commencement address delivered at Harvard on June 8th, Ms. Bhutto, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, set a high moral tone by pleading the case for freedom, liberty and human rights worldwide. These are universal values which every nation must uphold, argued Ms. Bhutto, and she paid glowing tribute to the peoples of Argentina, Brazil, Panama, the Phillipines and her native Pakistan who stood up in defense of these values.

What I found shocking was her failure to make any mention of the courage and sacrifice of the young Chinese students who champion the very values Ms. Bhutto so passionately pleaded for. While such a glaring omission could be viewed as political expedience designed not to offend current Chinese leadership, such discretionary judgement seriously diminishes the moral imperative of her call to fight for the preservation and spread of democracy and liberty.

Likewise, Ms. Bhutto praised her father, former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan. as a defender of democracy. Not only that, she boasted her father was the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Pakistan. Both these claims should be taken with a grain of salt. First, Mr. Bhutto refused to recognize the outcome of the Pakistan General Elections held in 1970. He persuaded the then General of Pakistan not to transfer power to the Awami League Party of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) which had clearly won the elections. This led to a genocide in which three million innocent East Pakistanis were massacred and the nation of Bangladesh was born. (In fact, some of Ms. Bhutto's close friends, for example, the Galbraiths, recall that she was, during her Radcliffe days, a vigorous proponent of the policies of the military government of Pakistan.) Secondly, while in power as Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mr. Bhutto himself engaged in massive electoral fraud and political repression in the mid-70s, the accounts of which are widely known. In claiming to uphold Harvard's motto "Veritas", the Latin for truth, Ms. Bhutto has an obligation not to distort history. Shah M. Ashquzzaman