Bhutto perhaps did not realise that Zia was more cunning than clever. He bent easily to political pressure, and learned quickly the subcontinental art of ruling by playing one group against the other. Division is perhaps his legacy.By any standard he was extraordinarily lucky. By all political reasoning he should have disappeared in 1980 His country was isolated because of his being in power. He had no popular support and he had many opponents in the army. His action in allowing Bhutto's trial and execution caused the Carter administration to propose an arms and aid embargo on Pakistan He was reviled by just about every government in Europe He was distrusted.

He promised and cancelled elections almost monthly so that the acronym of his title as Chief Martial Law Administrator (CMLA) became known as "Cancel My Last Announcement". Then, like an angel of mercy, the Russians invaded Afghanistan.Overnight all changed. Far from being an international pariah, General Zia became, in the words of one American news agency, "the doughty defender of Western interests and the last bulwark against Communistic expansion to the warm waters of the Gulf".As long as the Russian army was in Kabul, Zia was secure. It gave him enormous confidence and he set about trying to establish a political system based on Islamic values that would replace the secular politics which he claimed had made Pakistan unstable.His opponents accused him of using religion for his own ends This was probably true. He was a zealot, a "born-again Muslim" who pursued his faith with a vigour that shocked his more easy-going countrymen. They accused him of trying merely to undermine the power of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party by sponsoring and encouraging the minority Islamic extremist party.

This was no doubt his intention, but he carried it off in a manner that foreigners especially saw him as a devout and well-meaning man who believed in some form of democracy Like Bhutto he was a great showman He was very good at image-making. Foreigners, not Pakistanis, became his greatest admirers.General Zia gave Pakistan a phoney stability Politically he lived from hand to mouth He failed to find a genuine constituency outside the army. He leaves behind an army that is disliked, politicians that are divided and a country that is uncertain where it is going.From the Obituaries page of `The Independent', Thursday 18 August 1988. THE EMINENT Hungarian-born violinist Andre Gertler was part of a link stretching back through only one intermediary teacher to another celebrated Hungarian, the violinist Joseph Joachim, and through him directly to Felix Mendelssohn. Remarkably the lives of Joachim and Gertler actually overlapped for two and a half weeks in July and August 1907, and their joint lives spanned 167 years. Until Joachim's time leading virtuosi had toured the concert world playing music they had written for themselves, exemplifying their particular technical strengths and to suit their individual styles of playing. One thinks of the Italians Tartini, Viotti and Paganini, and the latter's German-born and German-trained contemporary Ludwig Spohr (better known by the French forename "Louis"), whose 15 violin concertos had far greater currency than Beethoven's solitary masterwork of that genre.