America
Kerry speaks to Sharif to reduce India, Pakistan tensions
By
By Arun KumarWashington, June 17
"Enormously concerned" over
recent increase in tensions between India and Pakistan, US Secretary of
State John Kerry has spoken with Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif
to work out how to tamp them down, acknowledging that the latter had
just finished a conversation with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The
increase "in the tensions publicly between India and Pakistan" over
India's surgical cross border strike against militants in Myanmar, was
"of enormous concern to all of us for all the obvious reasons," he said
via teleconference Tuesday.
The 71-year-old diplomat, who
suffered a broken leg two weeks ago, made a surprise appearance at the
State Department's daily press briefing on crutches on a television
screen remotely from his Boston home.
"These are two very, very
important countries playing a critical role with respect to regional
interests," said Kerry who broke his right femur in a bicycling accident
in France and had surgery at a Boston hospital.
"And it's very,
very important that there be no misinterpretation or miscalculation with
respect to any of the back-and-forth and the empowerment some entities
might feel as a result of that," he said.
"The prime minister was
extremely forthcoming," said Kerry adding, "He could not have been more
direct. He had actually just finished a conversation himself with the
prime minister of India," Narendra Modi.
"And we welcomed some
thinking together about how we can work, all of us, to try to reduce
those tensions over the course of the next days and weeks," he said.
Kerry,
who was due to fly to Washington later Tuesday, did not say whether he
had or planned to have similar conversations with Modi or other Indian
officials.
After introducing the department's new spokesman, John
Kirby, on what was Kirby's first day at the podium, Kerry gave a short
statement starting with his conversation with Sharif earlier in the day
about tensions between India and Pakistan.
He also tackled questions from reporters about the Iran nuclear talks, Syria and other hot issues.
After
"spending a fair amount of time in the next few days focused on China
for the Security & Economic Dialogue," he would be going to Vienna
"to conduct what one hopes would be the closeout" of Iran nuclear talks.
Kerry
said the talks, which have a deadline of June 30, "remain tough," but
insisted the US had not changed its position "one iota" in recent
months.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at [email protected])