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With Benazir Bhutto's murder, Pakistan has yet another martyr for democracy. During a storied political career, including two stints as prime minister, Bhutto was a charismatic, courageous champion of rule-by-the-people who risked everything challenging generals and mullahs who felt they knew best. She embodied Pakistan's recent hope of breaking with military rule and countering the religious fanaticism that threatens to tear apart her fragile country.

Bhutto made history in 1988 as the Muslim world's first woman prime minister. She followed her late father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan's first popularly elected prime minister before Gen. Zia ul-Haq deposed him in 1977, then hanged him. She again won office in 1993.

"It's a passion for me, to save my country," she told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. She also wrote, presciently, that her patrician life reflected Pakistan's "turbulence, its tragedies and its triumphs."

Her assassination yesterday clouds Pakistan's future, deprives her Pakistan People's Party of an imperious and polarizing but forward-looking and able leader, even as it demoralizes progressives and destabilizes the nuclear-armed nation of 165 million.

Yet the attack in Rawalpindi that killed Bhutto and many others cannot legitimize another long night of military rule. However President Pervez Musharraf may seek to exploit the situation, Canada, the Commonwealth and the world must send a blunt message that the democratic transition must survive this attack, and continue.

Musharraf is utterly discredited, after having imposed an unjustified state of emergency Nov. 3 to secure his own re-election, firing the Supreme Court and jailing civil libertarians. Now the promised Jan. 8 election has been subverted. Bhutto's party is in disarray. And former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who heads the Pakistan Muslim League, is threatening a boycott. Yet credible elections must be held once this trauma is past. Anything less would reward murderers.

Whatever the failings of Pakistan's corrupt, family-dominated, feudal political system, rule by junta has never been a good alternative. Pakistan's current turmoil proves it. For all his talk of "managed democracy," Musharraf has not reformed and strengthened politics, cleansed the army of extremists, suppressed terror or stabilized the country. The death of one woman has plunged the nation into crisis.

Some will reflexively turn to Musharraf and the army as guarantors of stability. But as news spread yesterday of Bhutto's death, protesters chanted "Dog, Musharraf, dog," and demanded he resign. For many, Sharif included, one-man rule is the problem, not the remedy.

Bhutto, in contrast, would have placed her faith in the people, civil institutions and the rule of law. After Pakistan's three days of national mourning are over, leaders of all the secular parties should press for the swift restoration of credible civilian rule through free and fair elections. That is the best way to honour a brave woman's memory, and serve the country she had a passion to save.