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India Not Sincere in Moving Towards Peace: Musharraf
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Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf |
By Ayesha Ahmad, IOL Washington Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Feb. 15 (IslamOnline) – Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf accused India of being “insincere” in its efforts to reach a stage of dialogue with Pakistan, holding them responsible for the “climate of possible war” that currently engulfs South Asia.
“We need to resolve the Kashmir dispute to bring peace into the South Asian region,” he said. “Unfortunately, India has not show the required degree of sincerity in resolving the Kashmir dispute.”
Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. after a luncheon, the former general said that the fate of the troubled Himalayan state remained the core obstacle to peace in South Asia.
“Indo-Pakistan relations and the Kashmir dispute is a threat, a challenge and we need to convert that into an opportunity.” For peace, it is necessary to “resolve the main dispute… I say this with conviction because we have fought wars over Kashmir.”
Giving his own analysis of the Agra summit last July, generally regarded as having failed as a meaningful attempt at dialogue, Musharraf said that he interacted with “40 or 50” elites as well as media personalities, and “each one without exception agreed that Kashmir was the main dispute,” while the Indian government tried to push Kashmir aside.
“I’m very sure that there is disharmony in [between] the thoughts of the people of India and the government of India,” he said.
The president accused India of practicing “brinksmanship at its worst” by fomenting military tensions after a December attack on the Indian parliament, saying that they were “creating a climate of possible war between two countries holding nuclear potential.”
He added that the crux of the current problem was in the capability of action by massed Indian troops, and that “a real de-escalation is reduction in capability… We will cooperate fully in de-escalation, anytime,” he added.
Musharraf also cited India for its negative responses to steps he took after the parliament attack through his Jan. 12 national address, especially in banning certain Islamic groups and arresting individuals involved in armed activism.
After he announced on Jan. 12 the steps he was taking, Musharraf said, “India should have responded positively and de-escalated and taken the forces back” to their peacetime locations.
The president reiterated a point made in his earlier speeches that bilateralism has failed to resolve the India-Pakistan tensions.
“Bilateralism is a word coined in the civilized world,” he said. “It is good if they have sincerity between the two powers,” he said, insisting that India had not been sincere.
“Mediation and facilitation is the only choice,” he concluded, and “the only country that can go for mediation and facilitation is the United States of America.”
He would not comment on the possible solution of Kashmir as an independent state, saying that “if we start talking on solutions we’re not going to move ahead,” and proposing a step-by-step process towards reaching a stage at which solutions can be created.
The Kashmir issue and India-Pakistan relations were part of what he described as external challenges faced by Pakistan in the post-September 11 world; he described other external as well as internal challenges in his speech, bringing up many of the issues he has touched on in addresses and briefings over the past two days of his visit here.
On this trip, his second visit to the United States, he spoke at the Woodrow Wilson Center on Tuesday about his vision for Pakistan, and met Wednesday with President George W. Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and other senior officials. He was scheduled to meet with Secretary of State Colin Powell after his luncheon address.
September 11 created “a quantum change in the challenges that Pakistan today faces… but I’m an optimist,” Musharraf said, adding that the changes wrought also provided “tremendous opportunity for us to exploit to our own advantage.”
The president touched on Afghanistan briefly, summarizing remarks made during his Tuesday speech on his support of interim government leader Hamid Karzai, whom he referred to Tuesday as “an excellent selection.”
He also reiterated his belief that the international peacekeeping forces currently deployed in Afghanistan should expand, and that power in the war-ravaged nation should centralize from the fractured warlord-controlled regions towards Kabul.
In discussing Pakistan’s internal challenges, the president first emphasized that his country was largely misunderstood, and took time to try to portray Pakistan as a nation of moderates, rather than extremists, that still retained its Islamic identity.
“Pakistan is a moderate Islamic society,” he said firmly, stressing that in all of the steps he has taken to curb extremism, “the people are with me, even in villages, the people are with me.”
Problems arise only if the government is not strong enough and leaves the “religious extremists” to sway the people, he said. The extremists, he added, are a small minority among Pakistanis, as are the “ultra-liberal modernists,” but the vast majority he defined as “center-course moderates.”
“Every religious man is not an extremist, he’s not a terrorist,” Musharraf stressed, describing three categories of religious groups in Pakistan: the mashaikh, or those descended from the Sufi mystical order; the ulema, or religious scholars; and the politico-religious parties and their leaders, whom he described as exploitative.
He described the vision of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, of a “liberal, tolerant, progressive, dynamic and a strong Islamic state,” as he described in his Tuesday speech. “I would very much like to follow in his footsteps,” Musharraf said of Jinnah’s vision.
Two essentials of fulfilling that vision, he said, were to establish “the writ of the government” in Pakistan and to develop a “focused national development strategy” – which he called a “jihad-e-akbar… the bigger jihad against illiteracy, poverty, corruption, exploitation and disease.”
His national development strategy includes plans for economic revival, poverty alleviation, good governance and political restructuring. Among these programs, steps would be taken to free Pakistan from its debt trap, to check corruption in law enforcement and judicial authorities, and restructure the education system.
Musharraf briefly detailed his plan to introduce new subjects, including math, Pakistan studies, science and English, into some of Pakistan’s madrassahs, or religious schools, which on Tuesday he described as having an important “welfare and humanitarian aspect” to them in that they feed, house and educate “the poorest of poor children.”
And he elaborated on the nature of his plan for Pakistan’s political restructuring, revolving around the elections he has promised for October 2002 and the “real essence of democracy” he plans to bring through the functioning of the elected government.
Musharraf also responded to questions about kidnapped U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl, of whom media reported earlier today that the chief kidnapping suspect said he may already have been killed. The Pakistani president refuted the suggestions, however, and reiterated his belief and hope that Pearl was still alive.
“If he was not alive, I think we would have gotten his body from somewhere,” he said, apologizing for the frankness of the statement. On Wednesday, Musharraf had said he was “reasonably sure” that Pearl was still alive.
In response to a question about his position on possible military action against Iraq, the president clarified that in giving his full support to the war on terrorism, he did not mean that Pakistan would physically participate in any military action against other countries.
When pressed to label possible action against Iraq as good or bad, he said, “You need to ask President Bush this question,” drawing laughs from the audience.
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