The New Nation - Internet Edition

Reuters , Islamabad

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf swore in 24 members of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani's cabinet on Monday, six weeks after opposition parties won a general election.

Eleven of the new ministers were from assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto's party, which won the most seats in the election and nine were from its main coalition ally, the party of another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif.

Of the other four, one was an independent member of parliament and three were from two smaller parties joining the coalition.

Some members of Sharif's party being sworn in wore black armbands, in a show of protest against Musharraf, who they consider an unconstitutional president.

As expected, Ishaq Dar, a member of Sharif's party, is finance minister and Shah Mehmood Qureshi, a member of Bhutto's party, is foreign minister, according to a government statement.

Minister of defence is Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar, a member of Bhutto's party.

More ministers will be appointed later, party officials have said.

A top student from Punjab University, Dar was an accountant before he was appointed commerce minister in a pro-business Sharif government in 1997. He identified export-led growth as a cornerstone of economic strategy.

He became finance minister in November 1998 and concluded negotiating an IMF rescue package to tackle an economic crisis triggered by sanctions over nuclear tests in May that year.

While generally well regarded, Dar, 60, was criticised for what some saw as a naive approach to markets, blaming speculators for every rapid movement of the currency and stocks.

Dar was detained for nearly two years after Musharraf overthrew Sharif in a 1999 coup.

Qureshi is president of the PPP in Punjab, Pakistan's richest province and home to half its 160 million people and the seat of power of the political and military establishment.

Qureshi, 52, comes from a land-owning family from the eastern city of Multan and is a graduate of Britain's Cambridge University.

He served as finance minister in Punjab's provincial government, headed by Sharif's party, in the early 1990s, before joining the PPP. He was a junior minister for parliamentary affairs in Bhutto's second government in the mid-1990s.

Among other appointments announced on Monday, Sherry Rehman, a top Bhutto party spokeswoman, has been made minister of information.

The four-party coalition is made up of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party, Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), the ethnic Pashtun-based Awami National Party and the Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam religious party.