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Pakistan stays N-tests, offers fresh peace talks with India

Pakistan on Thursday offered a moratorium on nuclear testing as well as fresh ''peace'' talks with India.

''The Government of Pakistan has decided to announce a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing,'' said a statement issued by Pakistan's foreign ministry.

Foreign Secretary Shamshad Ahmad conveyed to the Indian high commissioner, Islamabad's willingness to resume dialogue on the basis of agreement reached in the last round of bilateral talks in June 1997, a ministry of foreign affairs statement in Islamabad said.

"Pakistan has proposed that in view of the current situation, the two sides should address, on a priority basis, the issues of peace and security and Jammu and Kashmir," the statement said.

The Pakistani offer comes ahead of next month's SAARC summit in Colombo where the prime ministers of the two countries are likely to hold bilateral discussions.

"Pakistan has decided to announce a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing. We are ready to engage constructively with India and members of the international community to formalise this arrangement. In the first instance, we are ready to arrive at a no-nuclear test agreement with India as an important confidence building measure at the regional level," the statement said.

"...Urgent attention may be given to arriving at mutually agreed measures for avoiding conflict as well as promotion of nuclear and conventional restraint and stabilisation measures," it said.

India has already announced a moratorium on further nuclear testing besides offering a no-first-use agreement with Islamabad.

Meanwhile, in an interview, Foreign Minister Gohar Ayub Khan said, "We wanted to clarify our position . . . So there would be no confusion that we will unilaterally agree to a moratorium on testing.''

Ayub also warned the international community that without a settlement on Kashmir, there is a strong possibility of a fourth, most probably nuclear, confrontation between India and Pakistan.

''It (Kashmir) is the only flashpoint in the world . . . There is no other,'' he said in a telephone interview.

''Here there is an open conflict going on daily,'' said Ayub. ''Where there is such a threat... you can expect a nuclear launch and a nuclear escalation'' of a conflict between the two countries.

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan is to send a special envoy to India and Pakistan to cool tempers and lay the groundwork for his own visit to the region, said the state-run Associated Press of Pakistan.

Ayub said the UN as well as the G-8 nations, who are to meet on Friday in London, have their work cut out for them.

"They have to assert themselves where they have been sleeping in the past . . . They are like a person in a deep slumber who has been rudely awakened,'' he said.

UNI

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