Pakistan's interim govt makes shaky start

Pakistan's interim govt makes shaky start

By Alistair Lyon

ISLAMABAD (Reuter): Pakistan's caretaker government has made a
wobbly start since President Farooq Leghari sacked Benazir Bhutto
for alleged corruption and misrule, analysts say.

Meraj Khalid, the 80-year-old politician Leghari named as
interim prime minister, has reiterated a vow to hold a general
election on Feb. 3, as prescribed in the constitution.

Yet political analysts say the 90-day interim period may prove
too short to put in place serious mechanisms to combat
corruption, turn an ailing economy around or undertake badly
needed political reforms, including the first census since 1981.

"It is self-deceiving to believe that the elections are going
to heave the country out of the political morass," wrote Syed
Talat Hussain in the English-language daily The News.

Many Pakistanis reacted with relief and delight at the fall of
the Bhutto government, which in its three years in power lurched
from one economic crisis to another, crushed ethnic militants in
Karachi at the cost of many lives and won an unenviable, but
unsubstantiated, name for corruption.

But few look back with great nostalgia on the performance of
Bhutto's main rival Nawaz Sharif, whose 30-month stewardship
until July 1993 was also marred by allegations of graft.

Questions about Leghari's "constitutional coup" remain
unanswered. Why was it done in the middle of the night? What
prompted its apparent haste? How big a role did the army play?

Sources at the presidential palace say that army chief of
staff Gen. Jehangir Karamat and Supreme Court Justice Sajjad Ali
Shah both met Leghari in the hours before Bhutto's removal.

Leghari himself, suffering from unexplained ailments, has kept
silent since addressing the nation late on Nov. 5 to justify the
dismissal of his longtime political patron.

The impression of confusion and lack of direction is dimming
hopes of many Pakistanis that Khalid's caretakers will cleanse
their country of deep-rooted abuses practiced by members of its
privileged ruling elite on both sides of the political divide.

A vengeful Bhutto has lambasted Leghari for hypocrisy in
allowing his brother-in-law and classmates to be appointed in an
interim cabinet supposedly fighting nepotism.

Freely insulting his leadership qualities, she has also asked
how he can complain of extrajudicial killings in Karachi after
previously lauding her crackdown on militants there.

Apart from keeping herself in the headlines, Bhutto, 43, has
petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn her dismissal by
Leghari, who used controversial powers dating from the era of
military rule to oust her and dissolve parliament on Nov. 5.

The case has yet to be heard, but even Bhutto's own lawyers
privately admit that her public quarrels with the judiciary
during her last six months in power may damage her chances of
being reinstated, as Sharif's dismissed government was in 1993.

Khalid has promised to bring "all kinds of charges" against
Bhutto and her husband Asif Ali Zardari, who has been detained
along with several senior bureaucrats and intelligence agents.

The government has transferred scores of other bureaucrats and
police officers, and barred many from leaving the country.
However no charges have been filed against the suspects, held
under a catch-all maintenance of public order law.

Some new appointments have raised eyebrows. Two journalists
have joined the government without quitting their old jobs --
columnist Irshad Haqqani as information minister and editor Najam
Sethi as adviser on political affairs and accountability.

Mumtaz Bhutto, estranged uncle of the ousted premier, was
named chief minister in Sindh province in an apparent ploy to
weaken Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party in its powerbase.

The cabinet has approved an anti-corruption bill likely to be
promulgated soon as a presidential ordinance in the first of a
series of reforms planned by Law Minister Fakhruddin Ebrahim.

"My agenda is to bring an accountability bill which is fair
and transparent," he told Reuters. "Then I want to bring
amendments in election laws, a freedom of information act and the
right to appeal against discretion of government officials."

Yet the anti-corruption, or accountability, bill has already
been watered down to spare military officers from scrutiny.

Khalid's finance adviser Shahid Javed Burki, on loan from the
World Bank, has unveiled sweeping plans for fiscal rectitude and
structural reform. The International Monetary Fund has said it
plans to resume a stalled lending program to Pakistan.

But Burki's assertion that Leghari has taken "personal
responsibility" for ensuring that commitments to the IMF are
implemented by an elected government rings hollow. Sharif's party
has said it would follow its own economic policies.