GILGIT, July 4: President Gen Pervez Musharraf has said that the Karakoram Highway will be linked to the southern Gwadar port in Balochistan. He was addressing a ceremony marking the inauguration of a dry port in the border town of Sust, 200km north of Gilgit, on Tuesday.

The dry port, a Pakistan-China joint venture, was built in 2,004 at a cost of Rs90m to streamline border trade between the two countries.

The president said that a rail link between Pakistan and China would be another landmark in the Pakistan-China friendship.

He said that an oil pipeline from the Middle East to western China would be laid via Balochistan and a gas pipeline from Central Asia to Pakistan through the Northern Areas was also under consideration.

Earlier, Northern Areas Deputy Chief Executive and Chairman of the dry port Mir Ghazanfar Ali Khan said that tax on border trade should be withdrawn and three per cent of the income of the dry port should be spent on development of the area.

He also demanded withdrawal of development cess levied on goods import by the NWFP government in the name of the Kohistan Development Fund.

Federal ministers Nilofer Bakhtiar, Amanullah Jadoon, Sher Afgan Niazi and Dr Gulab Jamal, adviser to the prime minister on economic affairs Salman Shah, Pakistan Muslim League president Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and General Secretary Mushahid Hussain attended the ceremony.

APP adds: The president said that the dry port would bolster commerce with China to new levels and help in realising Pakistan’s potential as the hub of regional trade.

“This landmark project is poised to give further depth and strength to Pakistan-China economic and political ties and help expand Pakistan’s commercial linkages with the regional countries, including Central Asia states”, he said.

President Musharraf spoke of Pakistan’s central geo-strategic location at the heart of the regions, which includes western China, Central Asian states, Afghanistan, Iran, India and the oil-rich Gulf, and envisioned a pivotal role for Pakistan in augmenting trade among them.

“Such is Pakistan’s geo-strategic strength. It would play a vital role in promoting trade among the members of major regional groupings, including Saarc, Economic Cooperation Organisation and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Trade interaction among the region’s countries has to take place through Pakistan.”

Dwelling on the importance of the 10,000-foot high Sust Dry Port, he said the state-of-the-art facility, an elaborate network of infrastructure being put in place across Pakistan and improvement in Karakoram Highway would provide China the shortest access to the Middle East and other world markets through Pakistani deep sea ports, including Gwadar.

Pakistan, he said, would become a trade and energy corridor for China and landlocked Central Asian countries.

“We are talking of Pakistan-China inter-connectivity in terms of energy and trade, improvement in the highway, development of railway link and gas and oil pipeline linkages and even fibre optic connectivity along the highway under one project.”

The president said the highway had been hailed as the eighth wonder of the world and added: “We are capable of creating ninth and 10th wonders in the form of railway and (oil/gas) pipeline linkages between Pakistan and China.”

He also referred to the strengthening of quadrilateral arrangement between Pakistan, China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.