Prague, June 7
Vice-President Hamid Ansari today expressed optimism over the prospect of India and Pakistan resolving their differences and said “looking to the future” rather than the past was the key.

Ansari said India and Pakistan almost got there in solving their problems during the tenure of Pakistan former president Pervez Musharraf and asserted that attempting to normalise relations with Islamabad has been the characteristic of every Indian government.

He said South Asians had a strange way of solving their problems, referring to the problems India had with Bangladesh.

“For many years with our eastern neighbour Bangladesh we had problem and yet a few months back we managed to resolve most of them. So I think, looking at that we will be able to resolve the question of Pakistan because the SAARC can make headway in these two countries,” he said.

In an interactive session after delivering an address at Prague Security Studies Institute, he said: “During General Musharraf, we had a series of back channel exercise with him. Very successful bilateral exercise. We almost got there which very few knew about. We almost solved the problem”.

Ansari said relations of India with Pakistan were more complex and the partition of the two countries was more painful than what the erstwhile Czechoslovakia witnessed.

“Here you call it velvet divorces. But in our part of the world in our living memory, divorces have been more painful and poisonous,” he said.

The Vice-President said despite Pakistan’s “underhand tactics”, successive Indian governments have been trying their best to improve relations with its western neighbour.

He said the solution of the problem lies on the acceptance of existing realities and “looking to the future” and not to the past.

The desire to normalise relations with Pakistan has been the characteristic of every Indian government, he said, citing the example of Atal Bihari Vajpayee who undertook a historic bus journey to Lahore.

“In late 90s we had a government headed by a political party which is perceived to be very hostile to the idea of Pakistan and yet the Prime Minister of the day and the leader of that party in a symbolic gesture travelled to Pakistan -- not in a Prime Ministerial plane but in a bus.

London, June 7
The Sri Lankan government has threatened to execute the country’s jailed former Army chief and war hero Sarath Fonseka if he continues to suggest that top officials may have ordered war crimes during the final hours of the bloody civil war.

The threat has been issued by the country’s powerful Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, the brother of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who said Fonseka would be hanged if he deposes before any investigations into the alleged war crimes.

Fonseka, 59, who fell out with the President after the Tamil Tigers were crushed in May last year, bringing an end to an almost thirty year civil war on the island nation, is currently being tried by court martial on two separate charges of corruption in defence deals and politicking while in uniform.

Gotabhaya responded angrily to the prospect of Fonseka giving evidence, “He can’t do that. He was the commander!.” The Defence Secretary told BBC “That’s a treason. We will hang him if he does that. I’m telling you!....How can he betray the country? He is a liar, liar, liar.” The Lankan Defence Secretary also ruled out the possibility of an independent third party investigations of alleged war crimes committed both by the country’s army and the Tamil Tigers in the final phase of the war.

“We are an independent country, we have the ability to investigate all these things,” The Guardian quoted Rajapaksa as saying in an interview to the BBC programme ‘Hard Talk’ to be broadcast later this week.

Guardian said, Fonseka had roused the fury of the Rajapaksa clan when he suggested there was eyewitness evidence of the Defence Secretary ordering army officers to shoot and kill surrendering Tamil Tiger leaders at the end of the war. The British daily said the witness is said to be a Sri Lankan embedded journalist who is hiding overseas.

The paper also claimed that in a clandestine telephone interview, Fonseka had confirmed that he had heard this account and would be prepared to testify before an independent investigation of alleged abuses. — PTI