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INDIA, PAKISTAN TALKS

Rivals pledge to move forward

AFP, New Delhi
India and Pakistan agreed yesterday to strive for a final settlement to their 56-year-old dispute over Kashmir and to reopen consulates in their largest cities in the latest step to repair relations.
The nuclear-armed rivals, wrapping up their first talks in three years on Kashmir, issued a joint statement pledging to "con-
tinue the sustained and serious dialogue to find a peaceful, negotiated final settlement" on the dispute.
The statement said the two countries would immediately restore staff strength at their embassies in New Delhi and Islamabad to 110, the level before a near war in 2002, and reopen consulates in Bombay and Karachi closed in 1994.
The consulates in the two largest cities will make travel easier for members of families that were broken up by the subcontinent's partition in 1947.
The statement said Pakistan and India would formalise an agreement to notify each other of the testing of missiles and release all fishermen and other civilians who strayed into each other's territory.
The chief Pakistani negotiator, Foreign Secretary Riaz Khokhar, said the joint statement was "not overly ambitious, which is the right approach."
"We are moving carefully, cautiously, but in the right direction," Khokhar told the Indian news channel NDTV.
The countries during the two-day talks had a "free exchange of views" on Kashmir which has triggered two of their three full-fledged wars, Indian foreign ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna said.
"Naturally these proposals are going to be studied on both sides," Sarna said.
The negotiators reached no agreement on opening a long-proposed bus service between the two sides of Kashmir. Khokhar denied there was no progress, saying a technical-level meeting would be held on the bus.
"When we sit at the table we will discuss it," Khokhar said.
The New Delhi meeting marks the first attempt to resolve the Kashmir dispute since a failed summit in June 2001 between India's then-prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in the Taj Mahal city of Agra.
Sarna said the two sides this time had a timeframe for future talks, with the foreign secretaries,
who led the delegations in New Delhi, due to meet in the third week of August ahead of a previously scheduled higher-level meeting between foreign ministers.
Sarna said the peace process would not be derailed by violence.
"It was underscored that terrorism is not good for India or Pakistan and we must work together to remove this scourge from our midst."
India says all of Muslim-majority Kashmir is an integral part of its territory and accuses Pakistan of fomenting an insurgency against Indian rule that has claimed tens of thousands of lives since 1989.
Pakistan, which controls about a third of the disputed region, rejects the charges but calls the rebellion a "freedom struggle" and demands a plebiscite among Kashmiris as called for by UN resolutions.
Khokhar said the insurgency was not a "stumbling block" in negotiations, as "what is happening inside the (Kashmir) Valley is not our problem."