15 January 2002 00:00
CONCERNING RUSSIAN-INDIAN COOPERATION ON INTERNATIONAL SECURITY ISSUES
Russia is flatly against the use of double standards in the settlement of relations between India and Pakistan, Oleg Chernov, deputy secretary of its Security Council, said. He arrived Sunday in New Delhi at the head of a delegation of SC experts for consultations with their Indian colleagues on international security issues.
Along with the antiterrorist struggle, Chernov noted, the subject of the sides' attention also will be promoting strategic stability, which has a special significance in the light of the recent US decision to launch the procedure for leaving the ABM Treaty, and questions of development of cooperation between the apparatuses of the security councils of Russia and India in 2002.
"It is gratifying," Chernov said, "that we are unanimous with our Indian friends in the belief: double standards in the fight against terrorism are unacceptable and lead not to the eradication of terrorism but to aiding and abetting it." "There can be neither Kashmiri nor Chechen 'freedom fighters' if they use terrorist methods to attain their objectives," he declared. "Duplicity and connivance at them, as practiced by the military junta in Islamabad, inflicts harm upon everyone, and most of all, upon the prestige of Pakistan itself."
Touching on the idea of mediation in the resumption of dialogue between New Delhi and Islamabad, Chernov noted that the Indian leadership had repeatedly spoken against that. The stand of Russia on this issue, Chernov said, including on the settlement of the Kashmir problem, is essentially that this is a matter of bilateral relations, in the settlement of which India and Pakistan must proceed from the Simla Agreement reached between them in 1972, and the Lahore Declaration of 1999. "Mediation will be productive for no one," he said, adding that "Russia and India are strategic partners, and this speaks volumes."
At present, he went on to say, the situation has acquired new qualitative dynamics, associated with the antiterrorist operation in Afghanistan. Of course, the Pakistani government "has limits of resources of influence on many of the foundations with which the Near and Middle East is overrun." "We proceed from the realities," said Chernov.
He also expressed condolences over the armed attack on the Indian parliament carried out on December 13 last year. "The barbaric terrorist act, perpetrated by Islamic extremists, has once again strikingly confirmed the urgent need to take the most drastic measures against those who trample on the most precious thing - man's right to life," Chernov said.
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