ISLAMABAD, 12 September 2006 — Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf said yesterday he hoped to have substantive talks with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the sidelines of the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Cuba. He said his talks with Manmohan carried “much importance.”
“I hope and will make full efforts to make the talks substantive, so that these are result-oriented,” Musharraf told reporters before leaving for Belgium.
This will be the first high-level contact between the two countries since multiple blasts on commuter trains in India’s financial capital Bombay in July stalled a peace process between nuclear-armed rivals.
India and Pakistan launched peace talks, aimed at resolving their decades-old dispute, in January 2004, two years after retreating from the brink of their fourth war.
The rivals had completed three rounds of talks when New Delhi abruptly suspended the dialogue following the July 11 Bombay attacks which killed 200 people and wounded more than 800.
India pointed the finger at Islamabad and a Pakistan-backed rebel group for the blasts.
Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry rejected as baseless the allegations that it was harboring terrorists that carry out attacks in India.
Musharraf, who last met Manmohan in April 2005 in India, said he would try to remove Indian misunderstandings. Musharraf yesterday left Islamabad for Brussels at the start of a three-nation foreign tour.
After three days of talks with Belgian and European Union leaders in the Belgian capital, Musharraf is to head to Havana to attend the Non-Aligned Movement summit there and then to New York for the United Nations General Assembly session. In New York, he will launch his book “In the Line of Fire.”
At the end of his tour, he is to visit Washington, where he is scheduled to meet President George W. Bush.
Pakistan is considered a key ally of the United States in the global fight against terrorism, but Washington has concerns over a peace deal Islamabad recently signed with pro-Taleban tribes in the Waziristan region bordering Afghanistan.
Musharraf told journalists before departing that Bush has invited him and Afghan President Hamid Karzai to an “iftar” party and their discussions on the occasion would help clear up “misunderstandings.”
Karzai has been critical of Musharraf’s government for not doing enough to prevent fighters with the Taleban and militants with the Al-Qaeda terrorist network from moving across the Pakistani border into Afghanistan.
