ISLAMABAD, 2 September 2005 — Pakistan and India will sign an agreement in October on notifying each other about ballistic missile tests, Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary Riaz Mohammad Khan said after talks with his Indian counterpart yesterday.
The agreement would be signed during a meeting of Pakistani and Indian foreign ministers in Islamabad, Khan told reporters.
“We have agreed to inform each other prior to missile tests and an agreement will be signed on Oct. 3 during a meeting of foreign ministers of both the countries,” Khan said.
The foreign ministers of both the countries will be meeting Oct. 3-5 to review the peace process and initiate the third round of composite dialogue.
The announcement came after a first day of talks between Khan and India’s Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran to review a peace process re-launched in early 2004, which has greatly improved the mood between the nuclear-armed rivals but moved very slowly.
The two officials held “positive” talks in Islamabad yesterday to review the peace process and prepare the ground for a meeting between the leaders of the two countries.
“The talks this time were held a bit in advance because there is an important meeting which is taking place in New York between President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh,” Khan told reporters. The two South Asian leaders will meet on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly conference on Sept. 14.
“We thought it useful to have this meeting and ... discuss matters relating to this important meeting in September,” Khan said after the talks, which lasted around two hours.
“Today we had a good, a positive meeting in a cordial atmosphere. We reviewed the entire gamut of the second round of composite dialogue which had spread over almost one year,” he said.
At the last meeting between Manmohan and Musharraf — they jointly declared the peace process “irreversible”.
Yesterday’s talks were also in preparation for a meeting between the Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers between Oct. 3-5 in Islamabad, Khan said.
The peace process has so far produced a number of largely symbolic steps, including a bus service across the divided Kashmir and the resumption of sporting ties.
The two countries also recently agreed to set up a hotline and other measures to stop an accidental nuclear exchange.
But progress has been sluggish on central issues such as Kashmir itself.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz raised the issue of alleged human rights violations in Indian-held Kashmir when Saran called on him late yesterday. “The prime minister hoped that human rights violations in IOK (Indian-occupied Kashmir) would be brought to an end and Kashmiris would be made part of the Pakistan-India peace process,” a foreign ministry statement said.
Aziz said he hoped that “progress in all areas of the composite dialogue would be in tandem meaningful and result oriented.”
He also expressed the hope that a proposed Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project would contribute to building economic confidence between them. Other issues covered by the peace dialogue include a decades-long military standoff on a glacier high up in the mountains of Kashmir and boosting trade and cultural ties. Saran will also call on Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmoud Kasuri during his stay in Islamabad, officials said. He is due to return to New Delhi today.
Pakistani officials have previously complained that India is slowing up the peace process, while India continues to blame Pakistan for supporting rebels who have waged a 16-year insurgency in Indian-controlled Kashmir that has killed tens of thousands of people.
F-16s Upgrading From Next Year
An official said yesterday that Pakistan will begin up-grading its F-16 combat aircraft indigenously from early next year.
“We will up-grade our F-16s under a program called Mid Life Updates (MLUs) for them at Pakistani air bases,” Air Vice Marshal Shahzad Hassan Chaudhry said. — Additional input from agencies.
