Pakistan blasts U.S. after $4SM in aid is cut off

Press, 10 April 1979, Page 8

Pakistan blasts U.S. after $4SM in aid is cut off

NZPA Islamabad Pakistan reacted angrily yesterday to a cut-off of American economic development aid, saying the action was inspired by “Zionist and Israeli circles” which fear Pakistan might provide Arab nations with atomic weapons. Last Friday the United States announced the aid cut-off, saying Pakistan had refused to place a nuclear fuel-enrichment plant under international inspection and safeguards. The State Department said the plant could be used to produce the highly enriched uranium needed for atomic weapons.

“We are prepared to accept inspection on an equal, non-discriminatory basis,” said a high Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman, who asked not to be identified.

“We find it invidious that the whole attention is focused on Pakistan’s research programme. No country opens its research to others except on an agreed basis and this we are prepared to do,” the spokesman said. The American aid cutoff was taken under a 1977 amendment to the United States foreign-aid law, which requires termination of aid to countries that do not accept international safeguards on nuclear facilities built after 1977.

Facilities built before 1977, such as those in Israel and India, are not affected.

While maintaining Pakistan’s nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes only, the spokesman would not confirm or deny the United States charge that Pakistan has a centrifuge enrichment

Slant, capable of making omb-graae material.

Atomic safeguards have been a problem in the subcontinent for several years. India diverted some nuclear fuel from a peaceful process and made a bomb, w r hich it exploded in 1974. Pakistan is India’s bitter rival and surrounded by nations — the Soviet Union, China, and India — which have nuclear weapons. The aid cut-off will cost Pakistan SUS4O million in this financial year and all of the SUS4S million Congress has been asked to supply for 1980. Pakistan will also lose about SUS6OO,OOO a year in aid for military training. “It is categorically denied that Pakistan’s peaceful programme has behind it the intention or purpose of developing nuclear weapons,” the Foreign Ministry’s official spokes-

man told a news conference in Islamabad. He said Pakistan regarded the halt in aid as an act of discrimination against it. The spokesman said that India, Israel, and South Africa all had nuclear capability but had not been subjected to the same treatment by Washington.

“We summarily reject as false that Pakistan is developing its nuclear programme with the assistance or in partnership with Libya or any other country.” The spokesman told reporters he accepted the American State Department’s statement that there was no relation between the timing of the aid announcement and the execution of the former Prime Minister, Zuifikar Ali Bhutto, two days earlier.