ISLAMABAD: Pakistan will take up the Kashmir issue at the forth- coming session of the United Nations General Assembly but after achieving a national consensus on the issue, according to Pakistani Foreign Minister Sardar Aseff Ahmed Ali.
Talking to reporters at a function at the foreign office, Sardar Aseff said “definitely we will go to the United Nations but after evolving a national consensus on it.”
Parliament’s Committee on Kashmir, headed by veteran politician Nawabzada Nasnullah Khan, was involved in this process, he said.
However, the Foreign Minister did not specify the time frame as to when Islamabad was moving the UN General Assembly on Kashmir.
The coming UN session would be held in September this year.
The Government is apparently Stressing on a national consensus keeping in view the stiff resistance put up by the Opposition led by former Premier Nawaz Shan during passage of a resolution on Kashmir at a joint sitting of the two Houses of Parliament last month.
Briefing reporters later, a Foreign Office spokesperson said it was a “policy” of the Pakistan
Government to internationalize the Kashmir issue.
Asked if Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s statement linking the Kashmir issue to the nuclear question could change the course of the “quiet diplomacy” being currently undertaken between Washington and Islamabad mainly on the nuclear issue, the spokesperson said.
He did not elaborate but said Pakistan had put forward “fresh Proposals” to resolve the nuclear issue to the United States.
Meanwhile, Pakistan has sent delegation led by Hamid Nasir Chattha, President of PML), an ally of the ruling PPP, to Russia and Central Asian and East European countries to project Pakistan’s stand on the Kashmir issue.
Article extracted from this publication >> July 29, 1994
