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Sharief will not go to Durban after all

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharief has decided against going to Durban, South Africa, for the 12th summit of the Non-Aligned Movement.

The eleventh hour cancellation, owing to serious internal problems, have ended hopes of another round of Indo-Pak prime ministerial talks.

Sharief and his Indian counterpart Atal Bihari Vajpayee were to meet on September 2 during the summit, to be held from August 29 to September 3.

The announcement did not come as a surprise in New Delhi, which was playing down the proposed talks.

As a result, even as late as Friday evening, the hype and hoopla surrounding Vajpayee's trip to Durban and his scheduled meeting with Sharief was far less than what it was preceding his visit last month to Colombo for the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation summit.

The reason probably is because the one-to-one meeting between Sharief and Vajpayee had got bogged down over Pakistan's insistence on talking only about the Kashmir dispute.

"The problem in negotiating with Pakistan is that it has a one-topic agenda -- Kashmir, and only Kashmir," said former foreign secretary M K Rasgotra, presently with the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation. "What they conveniently forget is that even on Kashmir, there are different issues such as their withdrawal from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and support to terrorism."

The Colombo Indo-Pak meeting, the first after India's May 11 and 13 and Pakistan's May 28 and 30 nuclear blasts, had raised expectations of a major breakthrough. What it actually achieved was only an agreement to resume the foreign secretaries dialogue.

Whether Vajpayee will meet South African President Nelson Mandela, however, remains to be seen. "We have suggested such a meeting, but nothing has been fixed yet. It all depends on Mandela's schedule and availability of time," the official said.

With South Africa taking over the chairmanship of NAM, Mandela is expected to have a very busy schedule.

South Africa had criticised India's nuclear blast, and the upcoming summit will be the first global summit after Pokhran II. There is the fear that NAM members may criticise India's blasts.

"India must seize the opportunity to explain to the world why we had to go nuclear. But having done that, India must once again espouse the cause of disarmament and nuclear arms elimination," insisted Rasgotra.

The MEA official pointed out that the prime minister's principal secretary, Brajesh Mishra, had visited South Africa post-Pokhran to explain India's stand on the nuclear blasts. He also said that total nuclear disarmament and arms control remained on the agenda of the NAM summit, which India would support.

Rasgotra pointed out that Vajpayee's announcement that India will not use nuclear weapons first or that it will not use them against any non-nuclear country is a positive step which most of the other nuclear powers have not yet declared. "On the basis of this stand, we can still seek a disarmed world," said the former foreign secretary.

The NAM countries are also likely to rake up the issue of the United States' bombing of 'terrorist' targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. What position India takes remains to be seen.

The difficulty for India in this regard is that it too claims to be a victim of cross-border terrorism. Yet supporting the US stand would put it in conflict with the remaining NAM members, especially the Arab world.

The MEA official insisted that there would be no conflict of views in the final draft. "We will go along with the consensus view of the NAM members on the bombing in Afghanistan and Sudan," he stressed forcefully.

Incidentally, certain Arab countries have called for a NAM fact-finding mission to find out whether the chemical factory in Sudan and the camps in Afghanistan were actually for terrorism purposes. The MEA official refused to comment on what stand India would take, only saying that time will tell.

The NAM summit comes a few weeks before the start of the United Nations General Assembly session, where India might face censure for the nuclear tests.

However, the MEA official played down any link between the NAM summit and the UN General Assembly meet. "The General Assembly will have many things to discuss, so one cannot say whether the Indian nuclear blasts will be discussed. And if they are, we have our answers ready," he said.

Besides politics, the NAM meet will discuss economic issues. Rasgotra strongly felt that NAM should now concentrate on the latter. "NAM has served its old Cold War purpose, and must new set itself a new agenda," stressed Rasgotra. "And that should be development and poverty eradication among the NAM countries."

He pointed out that most of the political disputes which NAM had fought for had been resolved. "The old issues of the 1960s and 1970s such as colonialism, apartheid, the Palestine question, etc have now disappeared. Hence, it is time that members of NAM now seek to improve intra-NAM cooperation, and work on development programmes," said Rasgotra.

For India, the important factor is that it will be Vajpayee's first big multilateral summit (SAARC has only seven members) with the heads of states or governments of over a hundred countries present. It will also give India a chance to explain its stand on the nuclear blasts.

The prime minister is not flying directly to Durban. He is going via Oman and Namibia and will return via Mauritius. The top level summit will take place on September 2 and 3, and will be preceded by a meeting of senior officials on August 29 and 30, and of the foreign ministers on August 31 and September 1.

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