LAHORE, Feb 22: Special parliamentary committee on Kashmir chairman Maulana Fazlur Rehman says solution to the dispute is a pre-requisite for long-lasting peace in South Asia. He was talking to the media here on Sunday after expressing his solidarity with South Asia Free Media Association’s Imtiaz Alam who had been attacked by some unidentified people a couple of days ago and attending wedding ceremony of held Kashmir’s leader Yasin Malik.

Mr Rehman, who is also president of his own faction of the Jamiat Ulema-Islam (JUI), said (peaceful) relations between Pakistan and India depended on just resolution of the Kashmir issue. The matter, he said, should be considered seriously.

To a question about the Swat peace deal, he said had the Hasba Bill, passed unanimously by the previous NWFP Assembly, been implemented, the government would not have to enforce the Nizam-i-Adl at gunpoint. The bill, he said, carried all the clauses included in the Swat agreement. Referring to PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif’s first direct attack on President Asif Zardari, he said solidarity of the country must be the top priority of all the political forces.

Urging leaders of both the parties to refrain from confrontational politics, he warned them that the country could ill-afford it and they should decide all their disputes through negotiations.

He said Nawaz’s statement about Kargil depicted that he was a weak prime minister and had no control on the armed forces.

About lawyers’ planned long march, he said the movement for an independent judiciary had been reduced to a movement for reinstatement of Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry for almost all the deposed judges except Justice Iftikhar had been restored.