Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri on Sunday said Pakistan took the initiative to hold talks with Israel to help Palestinians. Talking to PTV he said, when Palestinian President Mahmood Abbas visited Pakistan, he asked President Musharraf to utilise his good offices to plead the Palestinian cause.
He said: "The main reason driving us is that we feel we ought to play a role in the peace process between Palestine and Israel and you cannot play any role whatsoever if you are not even prepared to talk to one party."
The foreign minister said: "We felt that unless we are prepared to engage with the other party, this little role we could not play."
He said before Pakistan decided to go ahead with this meeting the President personally spoke to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia as well as the President of Palestine. Certain other friendly countries were informed at the foreign secretaries-level, he added.He said: "The decision is Pakistan's own. We feel that what we have done will help the Palestinian. This is our assessment."
He said: "It also creates greater diplomatic space for Pakistan to play a role on this issue and we cannot just ignore the development that have been taking place all over the world and a large number of Arab countries and many other Muslim countries have recognised Israel."
He said: "We thought that time had come and on the whole this would be useful. He categorically said: "We made no promise, I made no promise that this amounts to recognition, recognition is contingent upon the creation of an independent and a viable Palestinian state and in my declaration in the presence of the Israeli foreign minister, who is also the deputy prime minister, I said what I said privately to him, I repeated it to the international media that Pakistan looks forward to the creation of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital."
To a question he said: "As far as this process of engagement is concerned, what we really have done is that there had been back channel contacts for decades and now a lot has started appearing in the newspapers as well."
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