Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari called on Monday for a \u2018free, fair and impartial\u2019 investigation into the alleged assassination attempt on PTI chief Imran Khan.
\nIn an interview to CNN with senior journalist Christiana Amanpour, the minister reiterated his \u201cunequivocal condemnation\u201d of the attack and maintained that an impartial investigation would help bring facts forward.
\n\u201cWhatever anyone thinks of Mr Khan domestically, this was an attack on a former prime minister. An attack on anyone should be investigated in an impartial and proper manner,\u201d Bilawal stated.
\nCommenting on Imran\u2019s visit to Russia while he was still in power and his handshake with Russian President Vladimir Putin the day the Russia-Ukraine conflict began, FM Bilawal said that across the political divide in Pakistan \u201cwe agreed we want to stay neutral in this conflict\u201d.
\n\u201cWe understand how this can be misinterpreted as Pakistan taking sides\u2026 [but] we do not want to get dragged into yet another conflict,\u201d he said, adding that he wanted to focus on the \u201cmany\u201d devastating crises within the country.
\nThe interview was on the sidelines of the COP27 conference ongoing in Egypt. Amanpour asked the foreign minister if this was the summit that would help Pakistan get loss and damage.
\nClimate, loss and damage
\nBilawal stated that Pakistan was currently the chair for the G77 plus China \u2013 a group of 77 UN countries \u2013 and had been successful in adding loss and damage to the agenda of the conference.
\n\u201cWe have adaptation, mitigation and a third agenda item now as a result of successful negotiations,\u201d he said.
\nHighlighting that one-third of the country was underwater, with one out of seven people affected by the floods that lashed the country earlier this year, the FM said that there was a sudden realisation that there was no international mechanism to address a catastrophe of this scale.
\nHe hoped that with loss and damage as part of the agenda, Pakistan will work with the international community and that the next country to be hit by a \u201ctragedy of this scale will have some sort of mechanism available as far as loss and damage is concerned\u201d.
\n\u201cAs far as loss and damage is concerned, rather than emphasising it as compensation, we should look at this as a collective responsibility because loss and damage is a fact that we have to address and work together to achieve an end. It is the shared responsibility of the global community to address not only adaptation, not only mitigation but also loss and damage,\u201d he said.
\nBilawal maintained that Pakistan contributed less than 1% to climate change but was the eighth most climate-stressed country on the planet.
\n\u201cThere is an incredible injustice where we didn\u2019t contribute as much as other countries, but we are feeling the brunt of it, while the financial commitment which was $100 billion per annum has not been met,\u201d he said.
\nThe FM furthered that Pakistan was aware that the world faced \u201cincredible economic difficulties\u201d due to a host of issues, but still emphasised that Pakistan was still entitled to meet the promised pledge.
\nHe urged \u201cout of the box solutions\u201d, including financial instruments that will help the country \u201cfinance adaptations, finance mitigation and find ways to finance loss and damage\u201d.
\nDetailing the efforts of the UN, the foreign minister stated that the \u201cUN has been fantastic\u201d and that the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres championed the Pakistani cause, visited the country immediately, and was at the Pakistan pavilion at COP27. He hoped that the UNSG would work with Pakistan for its donors\u2019 conference.
\nBilawal stated that the secretary general\u2019s support was \u201cabsolutely admirable\u201d.
\n\u201cThere are a lot of reasons to be pessimistic, but we have to find reasons to be optimistic and one of the reasons I\u2019m optimistic is that I believe it\u2019s an incredible achievement \u2013 particularly on behalf of the G77 plus China \u2013 that we got loss and damage on the agenda. This means the world will be working on ways and means to address this issue,\u201d he said.
\nUkraine crisis
\nTalking about the Ukraine crisis, he claimed that the conflict devastated economies worldwide and raised fuel prices across the globe, including Pakistan.
\n\u201cAdd on top of that the Covid crisis, add on top of that the climate catastrophe,\u201d he said. He hoped that in this \u201cextremely difficult situation\u201d, dialogue and diplomacy took place so that war and human conflict could end, and the world could focus on the \u201cgreater existential threat to the human race\u201d.
\nHe maintained that the world was \u201ca difficult place\u201d and that Pakistan was just emerging from the \u201cforever war\u201d in Afghanistan, which had catastrophic consequences. Bilawal further said that the world was still affected by the Covid pandemic as well.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s not about what went wrong or who\u2019s at fault vis a vis Ukraine, but it does directly impact us,\u201d he said, adding that Pakistan imported its wheat from Ukraine and the ongoing war impacted food security issues.
\nHe also stated that the effect on global fuel prices was impacting Pakistan.
\n\u201cRegardless of the perspective we ultimately want to see this conflict end so we can focus on the important issue, on the existential threat to the human race which should unite us from east to west so we can tackle climate change and survive as a planet,\u201d FM Bilawal said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari called on Monday for a \u2018free, fair and impartial\u2019 investigation into the alleged assassination attempt on PTI chief Imran Khan….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2604,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news-updates"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2603\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}