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Pakistan ruler to visit China to refresh relations

ISLAMABAD: Pakistani military ruler General Pervez Musharraf leaves for China on Monday for a two-day visit that Islamabad says will refresh relations between the two traditional allies.

The trip will be Musharraf's first outside the Islamic world since he seized power in a coup on October 12 last year and comes amid fresh Pakistani tensions with another big neighbour, arch-rival India.

"The visit is intended to reaffirm Pakistan's close and cordial ties with China," a Pakistan Foreign Ministry statement said on Saturday.

It said Musharraf would hold an "in-depth exchange of views" with Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji besides meeting President Jiang Zemin and parliamentary speaker and former premier Li Peng, who is number two in the Chinese political hierarchy.

"The emphasis of his discussion will be on further strengthening the bilateral relations and expansion of economic and trade relations," the statement said.

Musharraf will be accompanied by Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz and Commerce and Industry Minister Abdul Razzaq Daud. But there was no information on whether the two sides would sign any new economic or trade promotion agreements.

General Musharraf, who has assumed the title of Chief Executive, has visited several Islamic countries in apparent moves to gain international acceptance of his government.

He is trying to offset Western-led criticism of his coup that toppled prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

China has been a close ally of Pakistan since the 1960s.

VISIT COINCIDES WITH INDO-PAKISTAN TENSIONS

Musharraf last visited China in May last year during a critical military standoff between Pakistan and India over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.

His current trip coincides with renewed Indo-Pakistan tensions caused by the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane last month that New Delhi says was masterminded by Islamabad.

Islamabad rejects the allegation and accuses India of using the eight-day hijacking -- which ended on December 31 in Afghanistan with the militants freeing their hostages in exchange for the release of three jailed comrades and their own escape -- to isolate Pakistan.

Musharraf will be the second Pakistani leader to visit China since last June when Sharif went at the height of the confrontation with India, which ended the next month after guerrillas vacated strategic heights occupied in the north of the part of Kashmir that is under Indian rule.

India controls about 45 percent of Kashmir and Pakistan just over a third of a region over which the two countries have fought two of their three wars since their independence from Britain in 1947. China holds the remainder of Kashmir.

China openly backed Pakistan's claim on all of Kashmir in the 1960s and 1970s but appeared to avoid taking sides in recent years while Beijing and New Delhi moved to end years of tensions between them dating from their 1962 border war.-Reuters