The foreign ministers of India and Pakistan made crossover
visits to the United Arab Emirates this weekend, after it was revealed the Gulf
nation has been mediating between the hostile neighbors.
اضافة اعلان
"Good to be in the #UAE," Pakistan's Shah Mahmood
Qureshi
tweeted late Saturday, after announcing a three-day trip which ends
Monday.
His Indian counterpart Subrahmanyam Jaishankar visited the
emirate of Abu Dhabi on Sunday, a spokesman for New Delhi's ministry of
external affairs tweeted.
Pakistan's foreign ministry said there was no scheduled
meeting between the two ministers.
Islamabad suspended trade and diplomatic ties with India in
2019 after New Delhi revoked the special status of the part of divided Kashmir
that it rules.
But in February, Islamabad and New Delhi pledged to end all
firing along the disputed frontier, after months of violence between the
nuclear-armed rivals.
Yousef Al Otaiba, the UAE's envoy to Washington, confirmed
last week that the Gulf nation had played a role "in bringing the Kashmir
escalation down and created a ceasefire, hopefully".
"They might not, sort of, become best friends but at
least we want to get it to a level where it's functional, where it's
operational, where they are speaking to each other... that's our goal," he
added, in an online talk with
Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since
their acrimonious separation in 1947. The region has been a cause of two of their
three wars since then.
A 2003 ceasefire has prevented another full-blown war from
erupting but has largely failed to quell the skirmishes.
Further signs of rapprochement include an exchange of
letters between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Pakistani
counterpart Imran Khan, who have both called for peaceful relations.
Read more
region & world
