Pakistan and India will hold talks this month during which the 60-year-old thorny territorial dispute over the Himalayan region of Kashmir is expected to be the main focus, Islamabad envoy in Egypt told a Cairo gathering on Tuesday. However, Ambassador Seema Nagui said that she did not expect the talks would not yield much progress in resolving the bloody Kashmir conflict, which bedevils relations between the two nuclear-armed Asian countries. "In the meantime, Islamabad is still fully committed to a diplomatic solution to the Kashmiri dispute with New Delhi," Ambassador Nagui told the event, which was held at the Pakistani Commercial Office to mark the Kashmir Solidarity Day. She called on the international community and world organisations to pressure New Delhi to respect UN resolutions, which give the people of Jammu and Kashmir their legitimate right to self determination after six decades of Indian occupation. She said that the Islamabad Government still demanded the holding of a UN-supervised plebiscite to determine the wishes of Kashmiri people, who want to be part of Pakistan due to ethnic, religious and geographical reasons. Nagui said that it was high time to find a peaceful settlement to the Kashmir conflict, which had triggered two wars between Pakistan and India and left hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed and displaced since the dispute erupted 60 years ago. While India maintains that the whole of Kashmir, the country's only Muslim-majority state, is its territory, Pakistan contests the claim and says Kashmir remains an unfinished element in the 1947 partition of the subcontinent into what is known today as India and Pakistan. Solving the Kashmir dispute, she said, would restore peace and security to one of the world's hot spot areas and help restore confidence building between Pakistan and India. She said that Pakistan and India were locked in a conflict in the Siachen Glacier region in northern Kashmir, where the Jhelum River that runs through the two countries. Ambassador Nagui denied India's allegations that Islamabad was helping guerrilla groups fighting Indian rule in the Kashmir region. "Pakistan only provides political, moral and diplomatic support to the people of Kashmir, have lost their families, homes and friends under the violence of the Indian occupation forces,” she said. But, Nagui affirmed that the Kashmiri people, whose sacrifices did not go in vain, had not lost the hope for achieving their right to self determination, freedom and liberty. "Pakistan assures the people of Kashmir of its firm resolve to realise their fundamental rights,” she said, urging the international community to play its role in ending the repression, violence and human rights abuses in Kashmir. To achieve this aim, Nagui continued, Pakistan will continue its moral, diplomatic and political support for the just cause of the Kashmiri people.
