| THRISSUR,
India — Church leaders in India and Pakistan have
welcomed the thawing of relations between their governments following
meetings of the two rival neighbors at a summit of South Asian
countries, held in Islamabad this week.
“The churches in India consider the agreement to start dialogue
between India and Pakistan as a new chapter of peace-building
in South Asia,” said the National Council of Churches in
India, a grouping of 29 Orthodox and Protestant Churches.
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister
Atal Behari Vajpayee met during the summit of the South Asian
Association for Regional Cooperation in Islamabad. They issued
a joint statement on Jan. 6, announcing a timetable for bilateral
talks on issues such as Kashmir, a region bordering both countries
that has dogged their relations for decades.
The year began with restored air links between India and Pakistan.
Trade treaties were signed during the seven-nation summit. The
Musharraf/Vajpayee agreement seeks to halt violence, hostility
and terrorism in Kashmir and to promote dialogue.
The Kashmir dispute began after the partition of the Indian sub-continent
into Hindu majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan in 1947,
while the countries were under British colonial rule. Tensions
over the area became an obstacle to the development of a regional
trading group.
Relations between the two nations hit a low after a December 2001
attack on India’s parliament carried out, said Delhi, by
Kashmiri Islamic militants fighting for separation from India
with the support of Pakistan. After the attack, India threatened
to attack camps in Pakistan it said were used to train terrorists
for a jihad (holy war) in Indian-controlled Kashmir.
Hundreds of thousands of Indian and Pakistani soldiers had lined
both sides of their porous 630-kilometre long border for months,
with the nuclear-armed neighbors raising fears of a fourth Indo-Pak
war.
“We are happy that the national leaders have realized the
need to have peace instead of wasting resources on the army and
nuclear arsenals,” said Metropolitan mar Aprem who heads
the 30,000-strong Assyrian Church of the East in India, based
at Thrissur in India’s southern state of Kerala. India and
Pakistan, he said, “simply cannot afford to be enemies.”
“Everybody is happy. This is what we have been demanding
for the last 50 years,” said Victor Azariah, a Presbyterian
who is general secretary of the National Council of Churches in
Pakistan in a telephone interview with ENI from Lahore. The Pakistan
church council groups four major Protestant churches in Pakistan.
The National Council of Churches in India has said that special
prayers for India-Pakistan dialogue will be offered from Jan.
18-25 during worldwide Christian unity celebrations.
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