Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf (left) with his Swedish counterpart Tarja Halonen at the presidential summer residence in Kultaranta, Sweden. (AFP)

Stockholm, July 6 (Reuters): An iron curtain is descending between the West and the Muslim world, Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf warned yesterday.

Political injustices, poverty and illiteracy are fuelling religious fundamentalism and terrorism, he said in a speech while on a visit to Sweden, urging rich countries to help Muslim nations with investment and socio-economic reforms. Most of Pakistan’s 150 million people are Muslims, and a third live in poverty.

Many people in the Islamic world “feel deprived, hopeless, powerless” and could be “indoctrinated by distorted views of Islam”, Musharraf said.

“A new iron curtain seems to be falling,” he said. “This iron curtain somehow is dividing the Muslim world on one side and the West on the other side. This is very dangerous,” he said in an interview after the speech.

“Muslim states are seen as the source of terrorism,” he said, warning of new “depths of chaos and despair” and more “terrorism and an impending clash of civilisations” if the West, particularly the US, and Muslim countries failed to eradicate the root causes of resentment. A solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seen as just by mainstream Muslims might end 75 per cent of global terrorism, Musharraf said.

Creating a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel behind the pre-1967 war borders would likely require “political coercion” from Washington, he said.

Musharraf, who took power in a bloodless military coup in 1999, is a staunch ally in Washington’s war on terrorism.

Around 600 al Qaida militants have been captured in Pakistan, he said, dismissing criticism from domestic Muslim hardliners that his military’s crackdown on suspected fundamentalist militants was done to please his US masters.

“I am not doing it at the behest of the US, but it happens to suit them also. It is in our national interest.” Musharraf last year narrowly escaped two assassination attempts by what he says were al Qaida terrorists. “We will not allow terrorism to exist in Pakistan.“We will root them out wherever they are,” he said.

But that was not enough.

“If we are just killing terrorists, we are not achieving anything ... I call them the leaves of a tree. As long as the tree is there, the leaves will keep growing.”

“If you manage to finish off one organisation like al Qaida ... you’ve chopped off a branch of that tree, but the tree will still grow. You must identify the root, and the root happens to be political disputes ... the root happens also to be illiteracy and poverty.”

Convicts sentenced

A Pakistani anti-terrorism court sentenced three members of an outlawed Islamic group to death today, finding them guilty of killing at least six minority Shias, lawyers said. The convicts belong to the extremist Sunni Lashkar-e-Jhangvi group, which has ties with the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan.