TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2002
China to go ahead with port construction in Pak
BEIJING: Overcoming the initial hiccups, China and Pakistan have decided to implement their ambitious plan to develop the strategically located Gwadar deep-sea port along the Balochistan coast.
"The Gwadar deep-sea port plan will go ahead as planned as it would enhance China's strategic depth in the region," an official source said here today.
A high-level Chinese government delegation led by Vice Premier Wu Bangguo is set to visit Pakistan next month to attend the ground-breaking ceremony at Gwadar, he said.
Apart from the Gwadar port, Pakistan and China are actively pursuing 653-kilometre-long coastal highway from Karachi to Gwadar. China is to partly fund the phase-I of the port with an estimated cost of 248 million US dollars.
Several Chinese technical delegations have already visited the site and a Pakistani delegation is likely to visit Beijing soon to tie up pending issues concerning the Gwadar project.
Earlier there were reports that China threatened to pull out of the project to protest Islamabad's handing over of two airports to the US for operations in Afghanistan.
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, who visited Beijing en-route Kathmandu for the SAARC summit, was reportedly asked to explain circumstances in which the US was allowed exclusive access to the two major airports at Jacobabad and Pasni.
China was also upset that the US had reportedly been allowed to set up some listening posts in the northern areas to monitor any nuclear or army activities in the region, which borders China's restive provinces of Xinjiang and Tibet.
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