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October 18, 1999

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Musharraf offers a caretaker
government with a difference

E-Mail this report to a friend Raja Asghar in Islamabad

Caretaker cabinets are nothing strange to Pakistan, but the one promised by the new military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, has a difference -- a political and economic manifesto.

The country has had five caretaker cabinets in the past 11 years of political turmoil beginning from the last days of the longest-serving military ruler, General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq.

All of them were installed to oversee elections after the ouster of a prime minister in a stop-gap arrangement that many hold responsible for Pakistan's increasing instability.

Musharraf, in power since a bloodless coup last Tuesday, said in a broadcast to the nation yesterday that a cabinet of ministers to be named by him would work under the guidance of a national security council at the top of his administration. It will have a tough seven-point agenda including economic revival and accountability of politicians.

Under Pakistan's Constitution, which Musharraf suspended through an emergency proclamation on Friday, new elections must be held within 90 days after a government is dismissed and the national assembly is dissolved.

Musharraf has dismissed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's 31-month-old government, but has not dissolved the 217-seat national assembly, thus escaping the necessity to hold fresh elections even when the Constitution is revived.

He has promised a return to ''true'' democracy without giving a time-frame.

Pakistan's first caretaker cabinet was set up by Zia when he sacked his own hand-picked prime minister, Mohammad Khan Junejo, in 1988. It was retained by then acting president, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, after Zia died in a plane crash on August 17, 1988.

Headed by a senior minister, Mohammad Aslam Khattak, rather than an interim prime minister, the cabinet functioned until the November 1988 elections won by Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party.

Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, a former PPP loyalist turned opposition leader, was named first caretaker prime minister when Ishaq Khan sacked Bhutto's government in August 1990 on disputed charges of misrule.

He remained in office until elections in October, which were won by Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League amid charges of vote-rigging.

Balkh Sher Mazari, a PML dissident, headed the country's most short-lived caretaker cabinet named in April 1993 after Ishaq Khan dismissed Sharif's government.

That cabinet disappeared unceremoniously after about a month when the Supreme Court reinstated Sharif's government.

The most celebrated of all of Pakistan's caretaker prime ministers was Moeen Qureshi, a former World Bank vice-president, who was named for the office in July 1993 after Sharif and Ishaq Khan both resigned under an army-brokered deal to end the power struggle between them.

Qureshi also tried to introduce economic and administrative reforms in his three months while preparing for the elections and annoyed Sharif by criticising some of his high-cost projects.

But most decrees issued by his government for those reforms were allowed to lapse as Benazir Bhutto's second government formed after the elections had its own agenda.

Meraj Khalid, a former Bhutto loyalist-turned-critic, became the country's last caretaker prime minister. He appointed after the then president Farooq Leghari dismissed Bhutto's government.

Khalid headed a cabinet of Bhutto's opponents whom she blamed for what she called computer-rigging of February 1997 elections that gave Sharif a landslide victory.

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