CHAKOTHI: Nov 26: Pakistan said on Friday its ceasefire with India along the military Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir had held well for full one year but it was not enough and must be followed by concrete results as an abrupt hand-waving on an important dividing point marked the truce anniversary.

The military's top spokesman told a group of visiting journalists from India and Indian-held Kashmir that there had been no firing of weapons between the two sides since the ceasefire came into effect on November 26 last year after years of intermittent clashes although India had technically violated the truce by constructing a barbed-wire fence on its side of the LoC.

But Major-General Shaukat Sultan, talking to the group at Chakothi border point facing Indian bunker posts across the LoC, said Pakistan had refrained from stopping the Indians from laying the fence because it did not want to spoil the newly revived peace process between the two countries although the matter was raised at the bilateral level and with the United Nations military observers in the region.

General Sultan, who is the director-general of the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), acknowledged that the cease fire agreed by the two governments last year after a prolonged period of high tension and deadly artillery duels across the line, had been "one of the best CBMs (confidence-building measures)" that broke the ice before the commencement of dialogue between the two sides.

But he said a CBM would be of no good if it were not followed by dialogue and concrete results. Apparently being aware of the identity of the visitors, several Indian troops came out of their bunkers in battle dress and waved to the journalists, who responded in the same manner.

It was the first ever visit by journalists from India or Indian-held Kashmir to make a visit to the Pakistani side of the LoC, which the Pakistani authorities had agreed to become part of a return trip by the group sponsored by the South Asian Free Media Association (Safma), a non-governmental organization seeking free flow of information and movement of journalists in the region.

Major-General Sultan said he did not think India had ever allowed access to its side of the LoC to foreign journalists, and noted that a group of Pakistani and Azad Kashmir journalists who made a similar path-breaking visit to the Indian-held Kashmir last month was also denied such an opportunity.

A warning reading "caution: you are within 100 metres from enemy post", written on a wooden frame, confronted the Indian and Kashmiri journalists as local Pakistan army officers led them through a camouflaged stony trench to an observation post facing the Indian post across a nullah over which only a shaky foot bridge stands in place of blown up bridge on what used to be the main road to Kashmir before the 1947-48 war.

"We are already at the enemy post," remarked one Indian journalist. General Sultan said it would take army engineers not more than 24 hours to build a bailey bridge if the two countries agreed to start a bus service between the Azad Kashmir capital Muzaffarabad and the Indian-held Kashmir summer capital Srinagar. But he said he did not know yet whether the bridge would be built by Pakistan or would be a joint project. "Now that you see enthusiasm on either side of the LoC, the bus service should start," he said.

"We do hope people from each side will meet each other and their miseries will end," he said. "We also hope that there would be a permanent peace and a resolution of the (Kashmir) dispute."

General Sultan rejected a suggestion that militants from Azad Kashmir might still be crossing into the Indian-held Kashmir to fight New Delhi's rule and said this could not be possible because of at least three layers of the Indian defences in addition to the new fencing as well as censors and patrolling.

"How can a human being cross these layers?" he asked and said if some people could still cross the LoC "they are super-humans or those manning the layers are sleeping." He said the fencing laid sometime ahead of the Indian position and at places behind their positions was of no military significance.