In New York’s Pakistani enclaves, they fear violence back home

From house to house, corner to corner, the news circulated through streets where Urdu signs hang in storefront windows and bakeries serve sweet Pakistani cakes. Some people called relatives in Peshawar or Islamabad to hear firsthand reports of clashes and stabbings that followed the assassination.

Others gathered in Pakistani restaurants and gazed somberly at Urdu satellite broadcasts that showed Bhutto smiling just moments before the rally and ambulances taking bodies away in what seemed to have been a close-range shooting followed by a suicide blast.

“I think there will be a lot of violence after this, and chances are pretty slim for democracy,” said a 27-year-old construction worker walking along Steinway Street in Astoria who gave his name as M Raja.

Whether they liked her or not, New York City’s Pakistani immigrants were mostly shaken by the assassination. They expressed fears that her assassination, days before the January 8 parliamentary elections that could have led to her winning a third term as prime minister, would set off a wave of turbulence just as President Pervez Musharraf ended a period when many civil rights were suspended and three months after another attempt on Bhutto’s life.

In an age when cellphones, e-mail and satellite TV have bridged the isolating distance for immigrants, seismic events, like Bhutto’s death across the planet in Rawalpindi, reverberate in the city’s Pakistani enclaves sometimes within minutes.

Most are paying more attention to the Pakistani election than to the American presidential primaries, said Madhulika Khandelwal, director of the Asian/American center at Queens College.

While Bhutto was not universally admired, Pakistanis were angry that she was taken from the political scene by an assassin’s bullet. “When a leader dies, you find the real value of that leader, and that is happening right now,” said Asif Alam, president of the New York-based Association of Pakistani Professionals. “A lot of people who didn’t support her are appreciating that she gave her life for a democratic and politically stable Pakistan.”

Bhutto, who was educated at Harvard and Oxford, was a favorite of Western leaders, so the news unsettled not just Pakistanis.

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