Khalid named Pakistan's caretaker PM

By Raja Asghar

ISLAMABAD (Reuter): Veteran politician Meraj Khalid, named Pakistan's caretaker prime minister on Tuesday, pledged to ensure that free and fair elections would be held in February.

President Farooq Leghari named the soft-spoken 80-year-old from the populous Punjab province to replace Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, 43, whom he sacked overnight on charges of corruption and misrule. Leghari also dissolved parliament.

Khalid, once a left-wing crusader and social worker, is rector of Islamabad's International Islamic University.

He is a member of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP), although he dissociated himself from active politics in 1993 and has been critical of her government in recent months.

"Our first priority will be to hold free, fair and impartial elections," he told reporters at his Islamabad residence a few hours after Leghari offered him the new job.

"It is a very big test and responsibility," Khalid said. "And God willing, I will try to fulfill this responsibility to the best of my ability. It's a test of my honesty and sense of justice and I pray to God that I may succeed in this," he said.

Khalid said free and fair elections could not be held unless the election commission was "powerful and independent".

Born in 1916 to a peasant family in a village in Punjab's Lahore district, Khalid took his law degree in 1947 and began practicing the next year. He took an active part in social welfare work, championing the cause of peasants and workers.

Khalid pioneered the now-defunct left-wing Movement of Afro- Asian Solidarity in Pakistan and attended a tri-continental solidarity conference in Havana in 1966 as secretary of the Pakistani delegation.

He joined the PPP in 1968 a year after the party was founded by Benazir's father, the late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, under whom he served as a cabinet minister and chief minister of Punjab.

He was National Assembly speaker when then president Ghulam Ishaq Khan sacked Benazir Bhutto's first government in 1990.

Khalid was not given a PPP ticket to contest the October 1993 elections that brought Bhutto to power for the second time, but was afterwards named as Islamic University rector.

"He led sober elements within the PPP who wanted the rule of law and was often criticized by party hardliners," a senior journalist said. "He gradually drifted away from the party.