ISLAMABAD, Sept 7: Pakistan on Wednesday welcomed last Monday’s landmark meeting between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Kashmiri resistance leaders in New Delhi, hoping the event would help the peace process move forward. Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri, while talking to reporters here, also welcomed the conciliatory statements made after the meeting by Mr Singh and Kashmiri delegation leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, head of his moderate faction of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) umbrella organisation.

“The most important thing is the spirit behind it,” the minister said about the New Delhi meeting that was marked by Mr Singh’s reported hints about the possibility of troop reduction in occupied Kashmir and was hailed by Mr Farooq as the beginning of a “triangular” process to help a Kashmir settlement.

Mr Kasuri said Islamabad welcomed the APHC decision to talk to the Indian government “because that is the only way this process can...move forward”.

He was talking to newsmen after inaugurating a media centre of the South Asian Free Media Association non- governmental organisation.

Mr Kasuri referred to three wars and other minor conflicts between India and Pakistan in the past 58 years and said: “We feel (that) for a durable peace, there has to be a resolution of the Kashmir dispute. And there are three parties (Pakistan, India and Kashmiris) and we want all of them to sit across the table.”

But he said India was not yet prepared for such a tripartite dialogue, and called the APHC leaders’ visit to Azad Kashmir and Pakistan earlier this year and their talks with the Indian government now as an “interim measure”.

Mr Kasuri said Pakistan wanted to live in peace with India so that the two countries could focus on development and end their people’s poverty but added that we have to be realist.

“Past has taught us that in the presence of the Kashmir dispute we not had peace, we had six wars, three major ones and three minor ones....”