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ISLAMABAD, Oct 16: Pakistani and Indian foreign secretaries will meet in mid-November in New Delhi to resume peace talks between the two countries that were stalled after last July’s train bombings in Mumbai, Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri said on Monday.
The talks, dates for which are yet to be set, will be a follow-up of a decision taken by President Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at a meeting in Havana last month on the sidelines of a non-aligned summit.
Mr Kasuri, talking to journalists during an Iftar dinner at the Foreign Ministry, first said the foreign secretaries’ meeting would be held in the second week of November and then added it would be “in mid-November”, without giving specific dates for the resumption of what the two sides call the “composite dialogue” aimed to settle outstanding disputes between them, including the main issue of Jammu and Kashmir.
In a joint statement after their Havana meeting on September 16, President Musharraf and Prime Minister Singh had directed their foreign secretaries to resume the dialogue, which was earlier called off by India after the Mumbai train bombings of July 11 that killed at least 180 people and New Delhi blamed it on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-i-Taiba militant group.
Mr Kasuri, who had accompanied President Musharraf to Havana and during a tour of Europe and the United States, said the peace process with New Delhi had moved forward despite the difficult nature of the problems between the two rivals and recent statements by the Indian prime minister that New Delhi could not agree to change of borders vis-a-vis Kashmir and that he would not discuss a Kashmir autonomy proposal in public.
As signs of the perceived move forward, he cited Kashmir-specific confidence-building measures such as permission to Kashmiris for bus travel between the Azad Kashmir capital of Muzaffarabad and Indian-held Kashmir summer capital of Srinagar without passport, the Indian leadership’s talks with the anti-India All Parties Hurriyat Conference, and visits to Pakistan by Hurriyat leaders and a pro-India former chief minister of Indian-held Kashmir, Farooq Abdullah.
Asked about the chances of a Kashmir settlement while India was not ready for any change of borders, the foreign minister pointed to Pakistan’s refusal to accept the military Line of Control dividing the disputed Himalayan region and Kashmiris’ refusal to accept a division of their former princely state, and said a solution could be sought in a formula acceptable to all the three parties.
Besides formal standpoints of the two countries on Kashmir, “something different is being discussed by other sources,” he said in a reference to officially-encouraged “back-channel” contacts between former diplomats and other experts from India and Pakistan, but gave no details.
IRE FOR AFGHAN FOREIGN MINISTER: Mr Kasuri seemed bitter about Afghan Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta’s latest charge that Pakistan was trying to play down the threat of international terrorism by labelling the Taliban uprising as an ethnic issue and said an understanding reached between President Musharraf and Afghan President Hamid Karzai during a meeting with US President George Bush last month to avoid airing their differences in public should also apply to foreign ministers of the two countries.
He said Mr Spanta, who made the remarks in Kabul on Sunday, should not have spoken like this “while he was going to have a meeting with me”. But he did not have to say when this meeting would take place.
“The Pakistan president wants to play down the issue of international terrorism...to an ethnic issue in Afghanistan — that’s not true,” Mr Spanta said in response to President Musharraf’s remarks during his recent US trip that the Taliban insurgents had roots in Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribes.
Mr Kasuri said the president had talked about Pashtuns in the context of the recent peace deal with tribes in North Waziristan agency and added that Pakistan neither wanted to give the Afghan insurgency an ethnic colour nor interfere in Afghanistan’s internal affairs.
The foreign minister said he had heard reservations of European and American officials about Islamabad’s proposals to block cross-border movement of Afghan militants such as shifting Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan’s border areas to Afghan border areas and mining or fencing the border areas, and added: “But possibly these proposals are now being seriously considered”.
