Passage of 18th Amendment bill a great achievement: foreign minister

Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi has said the passage of 18th Amendment is a great achievement and I congratulate all the political parties, Prime Minister Gilani and President Zardari. "A clear change will come in the politics of the country and provinces will also get proper participation", he said while talking to journalists at Multan airport here on Saturday.
Qureshi said that the recent visit to the US was successful. "We attended the Nuclear Security Summit in which for the first time after 1945, about 45 heads of states were present," he said. President Obama has himself said in his address that he and the US government have trust that Pakistan's nuclear assets were in safe hands. He said that all the doubts had been removed and no finger was raised on Pakistan in the summit.
He said that the prime minister met with the delegation of IMF and presented Pakistan's viewpoint that Pakistan was suffering from energy crisis and it would be difficult to raise tariff any further in this situation. The meeting of Board of Governors of IMF would be held next month and hopefully they would release the next instalment of loan to Pakistan.
Talking about the UN report on assassination of Benazir Bhutto, he said,"It would be unjust to say that we have wasted Rs 700 million on the investigation report because Benazir Bhutto was an international leader." Qureshi said that they had taken that step to make the investigation absolutely impartial so that no body could raise any objection. Now the legal experts were examining the report and would present its recommendations to the party. After that the Central Executive Committee of the party would decide the further proceedings.
To a question about the agenda of the government in its upcoming tour of EU, the foreign minister said, "We have two main agendas. Our first priority is to get help to tackle the water crisis because we need economic stability. Water crisis is affecting our economy. The second priority is to have market access to European markets because Pakistan is demanding not aid but trade."
He further said if Pakistan got the relaxation of GSP-Plus then it is expected that Pakistan's exports would increase by $6 billion. As a result around one million people would be able to get jobs. Talking about the water issue with India, Qureshi said that for the first time we have presented this issue in written in the form of dossier to UN and have raised this issue with India because water is directly related to our agriculture, development and prosperity.