The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum

=> Pakistan/Turkey- Defense Venture

Posted by Aleksander (Guest) - Saturday, October 25 2003, 22:52:35 (EDT)
from 65.33.93.139 - 139.93.33.65.cfl.rr.com

Commercial -

Windows XP -

Internet Explorer
Website:
Website title:

Turkey, Pakistan agree to launch joint defense production venture

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ANKARA - Turkish and Pakistani military officials, meeting in Pakistan's capital Islamabad, agreed to embark on joint ventures in defense production.

Details of the joint venture deal, which came at the end of the second meeting of the Pakistan-Turkey Military Dialogue Group on Thursday, were not immediately clear as they were to be finalized soon in talks between technical experts of the two countries, sources told the Turkish Daily News.

Deputy Chief of Staff Gen.Ilker Basbug is meeting Pakistani officials in Islamabad to discuss ways to enhance military cooperation between the two countries.

The two sides agreed to launch joint defense production ventures after two days of exhaustive deliberations "held in a cordial and frank atmosphere," the Pakistani Defense Ministry said in a statement carried by Pakistani media.

There was no immediate statement from the Turkish military on the deal.

Pakistan has been producing Al-Khalid tanks and has offered Turkey a joint production undertaking, as part of which Turkish defense companies would provide some vital components for the tanks, such as night vision systems.

Pilot production of the tanks in Heavy Industries Taxila, Pakistan, has been underway since 2000.

The Turkish side has been cool to the offer and officials have said the Turkish Undersecretariat for the Defense Industry has already been examining offers from three bidders, none of whom are Pakistan.

Thursday's session was co-chaired by Gen Basbug, and Lt-Gen Hamid Nawaz Khan, the Defense Secretary. Both said that the defense relations between the two brotherly countries were progressing well, and that they could once again see "tangible evidence" of this in the form of practical action being undertaken on both sides, Pakistan's Dawn newspaper said.

They observed that the military dialogue group had been significantly successful in identifying "the thrust lines" for future cooperation in the fields of defense and technology, which included a spirit of cooperation while avoiding competition, capitalizing on each other's areas of strength and benefiting from the removal of sanctions on Pakistan for enhancing cooperation without reservations.

It was also agreed at the meeting to carry forward the work on specific items into the working groups who will hold mid-term review meetings for speedy implementation of the decisions.

The offices of the military attaches in both the countries would be actively involved in this connection to monitor the progress and would be provided access to the focal points of the working groups.

The next meeting of the group will be held in Ankara in 2004.

Turkish Daily News

---------------------

- BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

The full topic:
No replies.

Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/msword, application/x-gsarcade-launch, application/vnd....
Accept-encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-language: en-us
Cache-control: no-cache
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-length: 3247
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Cookie: *hidded*
Host: www.insideassyria.com
Referer: http://www.insideassyria.com/rkvsf/rkvsf_core.php?.08IW.
User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)