The two-day conference for parliamentarians from both sides, which began Friday in an Islamabad hotel, is the first such effort by Indian and Pakistani legislators at sitting across the table and talking about issues that have hampered relations between the two countries for over 51 years.

Organised by the Jang Group of Newspapers, Pakistan's largest newspaper group, the conference is being attended by parliamentarians, journalists, lawyers, politicians and eminent personalities.

In his speech to the delegates, Pakistan's Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz said theroad to good neighbourliness is a difficult one that requires Pakistanis to overcome 50 years of ``mistrust and suspicion.''

For that to happen, Aziz said, India needs to ``demonstrate a clear vision and the requisite political will to resolve all outstanding issues between the two countries.'' But Aziz warned that there remained ``serious misgivings among the Pakistani public whether India is actually willing and able to adopt an approach of good neighbourliness.''

"Sans progress on the core issue, Indo-Pakistan relations will continue to be plagued by mutual mistrust and suspicion, inhibiting normalisation of relations," Aziz told Indian and Pakistani MPs here.

Addressing some 100 Pakistani and Indian MPs at a lunch hosted by him, Aziz said peace would elude South Asia "unless we can move towards a settlement of the Kashmir dispute on the basis of the inherent right of self-determination of the Kashmiri people".

"This is the obvious lesson of the last 50 years. There is no escape from this fact," hesaid.

Aziz said apart from decades-old United Nations Security Council resolutions, the 1973 bilateral Simla agreement also "obligates" both countries to settle the issue.

Neither side is expecting to achieve a major breakthrough at the two-day conference, but former Pakistani foreign minister Gohar Ayub Khan summed up the objectives best: ``It will break the ice... we have a shared history, culture (but) we are like oil and water in a barrel.''

More than 35 legislators from India and 60 from Pakistan are attending the conference.

One of the speakers, Imtiaz Alam of The News said that the subcontinent is home to more than one billion people, is one of the poorest regions in the world and among the biggest buyers of weapons. ``As if the disputes inherited from a divisive history are not enough, Pakistan and India are entrapped in both declared and undeclared wars and a most costly arms race which their economies cannot afford... While elsewhere in the world, military spending has been declining, inSouth Asia it has increased 12 per cent,'' he said.

Lok Sabha MP K Asungba Sangtam said that the desire for ``good neighbourliness'' is what propelled him to attend the conference in Pakistan. ``We have not come with any special agenda... we have come here to become good neighbours.''

Said Yasin Mattoo, a member of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League and Minister of Parliamentary Affairs: ``Our main problem is the dispute of Kashmir... without its solution, there cannot be any progress in any other field.''