India, Pakistan To Free Prisoners, Set Up Hotline

India and Pakistan have agreed in their first talks for four years release all prisoners from each others countries.

Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral and his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, yesterday said they also agreed during a 90-minute meeting to establish a telephone hotline.

We agreed to a hotline between both of us, Gujral told reporters after the meeting at the resort island in the Indian Ocean archipelago, 500 km southwest of the southern tip of India.

Sharif said the two leaders agreed to establish working groups to address various outstanding issues dividing the two South Asian nations, and that their countries foreign secretaries would perhaps meet in Islamabad next month to pursue bilateral talks.

 

Gujral called his first face-to-face meeting with Sharif very warm, very friendly, while the Pakistani leader said the talks were constructive. Gujral said that he was encouraged by Sharifs public statements and that progress in bilateral peace talks had been wholesome.

I like the man very much, Sharif said of Gujral and hoped the negotiations would help settle long-standing differences.

Their talks mark the first meeting between leaders of India and Pakistan since April 1993, when Sharif and then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao met on the sidelines of a SAARC conference.

It follows talks between lower-level officials in March and April this year.

Pakistani foreign minister Gohar Ayub Khan told reporters Pakistan would raise the issue of divided Kashmir. Of the three wars fought between India and Pakistan, two of them were over Kashmir.

Khan said the Indian Army has more or less gone berserk in occupied Jammu and Kashmir.

Asked what India could do to improve ties, Khan said: Reduce the troops concentration, bring down the human rights violations, stop extrajudicial killings.

Indian authorities deny charges of human rights violations in Kashmir and say that they investigate all charges of rights violation and punish army soldiers where they are found guilty.