Musharraf blames hostile groups

Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf said yesterday that elements inimical to his government were also responsible for attacking India while clearly spelling out that he would not start a war with India.

"Whoever is involved in this kind of activity is also interested in destabilising Pakistan," Musharraf said. The attacks are being carried out by people who "want to raise tensions as much as possible."

He said that the same people who carried out two major terrorist attacks in India conducted similar assaults in Pakistan - attacking a church that was frequented by foreigners and a bus carrying French engineers helping the Pakistan navy build a submarine.

Dressed in his khaki military uniform, Musharraf said in a nationally televised prime-time address that Pakistan has taken "bold steps" referring to a January 12 speech in which he banned five militant groups.

Musharraf who appealed for national unity in the face of the threat of war, and also promised to hold parliamentary elections between October 7-11, claimed his crackdown had ended any infiltration into India from Pakistani territory.

"Unfortunately we have not seen any positive response from the Indian side. I urge the world community to ask India to move toward normalisation of relations," he said, interrupting his Urdu-language speech with a section in English that clearly was directed at the international community.

Musharraf offered a formula for peace, calling for a de-escalation of tensions on the border, initiation of a process of dialogue, cessation of "atrocities" by India in Kashmir, and permission for international media and aid organisations to enter the region and see the situation on the ground.

India however reacted angrily to Musharraf's address, disputing his contention there is no infiltration across the two countries' de facto border in Kashmir.

Indian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Nirupama Rao said officials needed to carefully analyse Musharraf's speech before making a formal response but that New Delhi does not believe he has delivered on his January 12 promises and "what you see is not what you get as far as Pakistan is concerned."

Omar Abdullah, Indian minister of state for external affairs, told a private television channel "I think it is obviously going to make us very angry. The stuff we had about Hindu terrorists and the rest of it. I have yet to hear of Hindu terrorists operating in Kashmir."

U.S. President George W. Bush, Russian President Vladimir Putin and other world leaders have urged the two countries to pull back from the brink and told Musharraf that he should do more to prevent cross-border incursions into Indian territory for terrorism, as British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw arrived in the Pakistani capital Islamabad last night.

Straw and German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said earlier yesterday in Berlin that Europe would do all it could to help foster a peaceful resolution to the conflict between India and Pakistan. But they said it was up to the two South Asian nuclear powers themselves to step back from the brink.

Straw told a joint news conference with Fischer that the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir was one of "the most serious of all conflicts", adding: "the world would be astonished and bewildered if those two nations tried to solve this dispute by the use of arms."