Bilawal keeps mum at Oxford debate to honour Benazir

OXFORD: Friends of slain former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto held a memorial debate in her honour at the Oxford Union debating society with her son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari in attendance.

Bilawal, who at the age of 19 has been made the chairman of his mother's Pakistan's Peoples Party (PPP), was the star attraction at the event but - in a politically savvy move - did not participate in the debate.

Bhutto became the first Asian woman president of the Oxford Union in 1977. "She was amazingly fiery and fun, standing at this dispatch box she would enliven this chamber," said Alan Duncan, a member of parliament.

The topic of the debate on Thursday was 'This House believes that the ideal state is a secular state' and a spokesperson in Oxford said it was well suited for the occasion.

"Mrs. Bhutto believed so much in secular democracy and politics," he added.

Author Victoria Schofield, a longtime friend of Bhutto's, remembered meeting her as a freshman in the Oxford Union bar; Bhutto immediately invited her to tea. "She was larger than life for all of us dull, ordinary undergraduates," Schofield said.

"That yellow MG perfectly encapsulated her personality, whether it was parked (illegally) on those double yellow lines outside the union, or driving, as I remember with terror, the wrong way around a London roundabout," said Simon Walker, another former union president.

From the beginning, Schofield said, Bhutto was committed to the ideal of "a secular, modern, democratic" Pakistan.

The proposition was carried 272-171.