'Improving Sino-Indian relations not to harm Pakistan'

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Sunday, November 16, 2003

'Improving Sino-Indian relations not to harm Pakistan'

A former Pakistani foreign minister has said that he does not think the improving Sino-Indian relations will do any harm to Pakistan.

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A former Pakistani foreign minister has said that he does not think the improving Sino-Indian relations will do any harm to Pakistan.

The 83-year-old Yaqub Khan Sahabzada, who served as Pakistani foreign minister from 1982 through 1992, said so in an exclusive interview with Xinhua Saturday, one day after China and India started a joint military war game in the sea waters near Shanghai, China's largest city, for the first time in the history of the relations between the two nations.

The war game has seemingly deepened the concerns some Pakistanistrategists have been expressing since May this year, when Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee paid an official visit to Beijing.

Sahabzada, however, shrugged off all the suspicions, noting that China being a friend instead of an enemy of India will do more good to the resolving of the long-standing India-Pakistani disputes. In his view, the Sino-Pakistani friendship will not be weakened "under any climate change" in global arena.

He recalled a meeting between him and the then Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in 1966, when he was serving in the military and was leading a delegation in Beijing seeking military aid.

Although China itself was experiencing tremendous difficulties at that time, it offered generous assistance to Pakistan, which had deeply moved him and would forever be engraved on his mind as an evidence of the time-tested Sino-Pakistani friendship.

After his retirement in the 1990s, Sahabzada has paid a couple of private visits to China. The great social and economic achievements China has scored impressed him so much and he told his friends, who are still in office, time and again that Pakistanhas to learn something from China in its way of handling internal and external issues.

"Pragmatism and patience. These are the two things we should learn from our Chinese friends," he said, adding that he is 100 percent confident of the even brighter future of the Sino-Pakistani relations.

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