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ISLAMABAD/NEW DELHI, Dec 21: India and Pakistan agreed to restart from next month coordinated patrols of their international border suspended after an attack on the Indian parliament two years ago, officials said on Sunday.
The agreement came after a meeting between officials of India’s Border Security Force and Pakistan’s border Rangers near the Pakistani frontier town of Wagah on Saturday, the first since December 2001, military officers from both sides said.
“We have decided to carry out joint coordinated patrolling which will commence from January,” the leader of the Pakistani delegation, Lt-Col Sher Zaman, told Reuters.
Zaman said the patrols would cover the international border between the two countries, which does not include divided Kashmir, where Indian and Pakistani forces separated by a military Line of Control agreed a truce last month.
Another Rangers officer said the patrols would be launched after another joint meeting planned in the Indian town of Atari in mid-January. Indian officials said coordinated patrols could involve simultaneous patrols under separate Indian and Pakistani command on their own sides.
Before the coordinated border patrols were stopped the military-to-military meetings had been held once a month.
Relations between India and Pakistan have warmed since April, and the process has speeded up ahead of a regional meeting in Islamabad early next month which Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee is due to attend.
The weekend meeting at Wagah followed an offer by President Pervez Musharraf, made in an interview with Reuters last Wednesday, to set aside Islamabad’s decades-old demand for a UN-mandated referendum on the future of the disputed Kashmir region.
The meeting also discussed ways to curb smuggling and border formalities ahead of a planned resumption of rail services in January, Pakistani and Indian officers said. The leader of the Indian delegation, Darbara Singh, a commandant in the Border Security Force, told reporters that preparations for the resumption of the patrols would start immediately.
He said the aim of the meeting was to increase mutual cooperation and avoid unnecessary tensions. while Sher Zaman said it was held “in an extremely conducive atmosphere”.—Reuters
ACCORD YET TO BE SIGNED: Meanwhile, Interior Secretary Tasneem Noorani told Dawn in Islamabad on Sunday that Rangers from Pakistan side and Border Security Force (BSF) from Indian side met on Saturday at Wagah border as part of their “periodical meeting” which was held on “regular basis” after short intervals.
He, however, refuted reports that a decision regarding joint patrolling was taken on the occasion. “An agreement is required to be signed between the two countries for conducting joint patrolling. Border security forces on the two sides cannot do this on their own,” he maintained.
During the Saturday’s meeting, Mr Noorani said, the two sides discussed various other issues of mutual interests.
ISPR Director-General Maj-Gen Shaukat Sultan said it was wrong to say that Pakistan Rangers and the BSF would conduct joint patrolling.
He said they would rather carry out what he called “common patrolling simultaneously within their respective sides along international border”.
The ISPR chief said security forces of the two sides had been conducting common patrolling in their areas but the exercise was suspended two years ago following an attack on Indian Parliament in December 2001.
