ISLAMABAD, 28 December 2004 — Pakistan urged India yesterday to decide whether to join a pipeline project to bring gas from Iran, as Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi arrived in Islamabad for talks on the pipeline and other issues.
The proposal for a $4-billion pipeline from Iran to India through Pakistan has been discussed for years but New Delhi has been lukewarm given its troubled relations with Islamabad.
At a weekly news briefing, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan reiterated that Islamabad would welcome India’s participation, but added: “Iran is on board, Pakistan is on board, India has to make up its mind.”
Pakistan says it is talking to several countries as well as India about the project. Kharrazi met Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf but details were not immediately available. He was due to stay until today and meet other Pakistani leaders.
Khan said that aside from the gas pipeline, Kharrazi would brief Pakistani leaders on Iran’s talks with the International Atomic Energy Agency and European countries on a nuclear black market.
Meanwhile, Pakistan and India’s top Foreign Ministry officials began two days of peace talks yesterday in the shadow of the catastrophic earthquake and tidal waves that have struck much of Asia.
Indian Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran and his Pakistani counterpart Riaz Khokhar met in Islamabad in a bid to breathe new life into a sluggish peace process which the nuclear rivals launched in January.
Pakistan began the talks by making renewed offers of aid to its neighbor India following Sunday’s disaster, as well as to the badly-hit South Asian nations of Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
Khokhar “conveyed sympathy and condolences of the government of Pakistan to the government and people of India over the massive destruction in southern India”, Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan told a regular news briefing at the end of the first day of talks.
“He offered Pakistan’s assistance for relief and rescue,” he added. President Pervez Musharraf, whose country was left unscathed by the quake, told the affected countries that Pakistan “stands with you in this hour of need” in comments reported by the Associated Press of Pakistan.
Khan said the Indian foreign secretary had “thanked the government and the people of Pakistan for these expressions of support and condolences”.
Islamabad’s speedy offer of help to New Delhi — which is reeling from the deaths of more than 6,000 people in southern India — comes amid continuing efforts to resolve nearly 60 years of hostility on the subcontinent.
The talks yesterday reviewed the progress made in other rounds of dialogue over the past year, especially on the nuclear and conventional confidence-building measures between the two countries, Khan said.
The two senior bureaucrats discussed proposals but they would have to be “studied, analyzed and sifted” before any concrete steps were taken.
Today’s session will center on the thorny issue of Kashmir. Khan said that “while in some areas, especially in the realm of confidence building, forward movement had been satisfactory, in others such as Jammu and Kashmir and peace and security more efforts were required”.
Analysts have predicted little chance of any major breakthrough in the talks.
