Pakistan, India set for new peace talks

PAKISTAN: India and Pakistan are set to hold talks Tuesday aimed at kickstarting their slow-moving peace process, in the first such contact since a new civilian government took power in Islamabad.

The talks are expected to focus on the divided Himalayan region of Kashmir and on terrorism, the two issues that have most troubled the nuclear-armed neighbours since they launched a dialogue in January 2004.

The talks come a day after an Indian army soldier died in shooting across the military ceasefire line dividing Kashmir, which is split between the rivals and claimed in full by both.

Indian foreign secretary Shivshankar Menon — the country’s top foreign ministry bureaucrat — is to meet his Pakistani counterpart Salman Bashir Tuesday for a review of the four rounds of talks held over the past four years.

Their meeting will prepare the ground for talks between Indian external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee and his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi on Wednesday, a Pakistani foreign ministry statement said.

“The review meetings will help the two sides to assess the progress made in the fourth round of the eight segments of composite dialogue process and deliberate on how to address the outstanding issues in a more meaningful way,” it said.

The talks will be the first high-level contact between the two sides since February 2007, when Mukherjee travelled to Pakistan.

They will also be the first since a coalition of parties hostile to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf came to power in March after winning elections the previous month. India and Pakistan were partitioned in 1947 after independence from Britain and have fought three wars since.

They also had a skirmish in Kashmir in 1999 and a major border standoff in 2002. While ties have improved, the rivals have made no significant progress on their key dispute — the status of divided, Muslim-majority Kashmir.

Kashmir has been the trigger for two of their wars and the Indian part of the region has been rocked by an insurgency since 1989. New Delhi accuses Islamabad of supporting the rebellion, a charge Pakistan denies.

India was also stunned by serial blasts in the city of Jaipur a week ago which killed 63 people, but did not point the finger at Pakistan as it has done in the case of other attacks in the past.

Islamabad, Tuesday, AFP