Benazir Bhutto has found she can still rely on a loyal group to rally around her when the occasion demands.

The former Pakistan prime minister was delighted when friends and Pakistan Peoples Party supporters took the trouble to fly out to Dubai last week to help her celebrate her 50th birthday.

While Pakistan's military dictator General Pervez Musharraf was in Washington preparing for his offiicial visit starting June 24, Bhutto's friends were in Dubai listening to a poem lamenting her years in exile and the continuing imprisonment of her husband, Asif Zardari.

Known to her friends as 'Pinkie', Bhutto's most enduring contacts were forged during her years at Harvard and, later, Oxford, where she became president of the Oxford Union.

Among her student contemporaries and friends is Peter Galbraith, son of the famous economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and a former US ambassador to the Balkans.

Although her two terms as the democratically elected prime minister of Pakistan were mired in controversy, not least because of the alleged corruption of her husband, many from her university days remember her with affection.

They praise her for her poise and charm and the dignity with which she endured her father's imprisonment and execution at the hands of Pakistan's then military dictator, General Zia ul Haq.

After Zia was killed in a mysterious aeroplane crash in 1988, Bhutto came to power in one of Pakistan's rare democratic elections.

Her adversaries say she demonstrated then and later that she was unfit to exercise power. Friends say every initiative she took was blocked by a vindictive military establishment.

Bhutto's problems were compounded by family tragedies. One brother, Shahnawaz, died in exile in Cannes, allegedly the victim of poisoning.

Another brother, Murtaza, was killed in a shoot out at a police roadblock in Karachi during Bhutto's second term in power.

The 338 line poem reveals both her homesickness and the military's offer to free Zardari if Bhutto agrees to quit politics.

"They thought it generous to offer freedom for abandonment", reads one verse, "the abandonment of a people, of a land, of a struggle, of a dream. I thought it wrong."

Another verse reads, "Oh where is my husband gone? Judges are frightened, courage has fled."

India and Pakistan never went to war during the Benazir Bhutto years in power, but analysts in New Delhi have never been able to agree on the depth of her hostility to India.

As far as the Indian media is concerned, she has never given them any cause for complaint. When India Today journalist Prabhu Chawla lost the tape of a television interview with Bhutto in a London taxi, the former prime minister agreed to go through the entire exercise again for Chawla's benefit.

He was, however, not on the list of invitees to Bhutto's birthday bash in Dubai.