"We should not accept the Indian denomination that they are trying to isolate Pakistan because Pakistan cannot be isolated. We are a prominent member of the international community, we're the fifth largest country by population. We are an important player in the region within the Islamic world, within the United Nations. So, by definition, Pakistan cannot be isolated": said Ambassador Munir Akram during an interview on PTV World Program Fault Lines. The anchor of the program was Syed Shabahat Ali.
He said that "India's attempt to depict Pakistan as a sponsor of terrorism and so forth is producing diminishing results because India's own reality is becoming exposed to the world". "Pakistan, during the tenure of Prime Minister Imran Khan has played an active role in exposing the reality of India's policies in Jammu and Kashmir, India's policies towards Indian Muslims, India's policies in the region, and the nature of the regime which rules India today, and it is not a pretty sight": he added further.
"People at the popular level, at the individual level in various parts of the world including the Western world, recognize the nature of this new India, which has a fascist face, which has a ideology of hate against Muslims, and other minorities. And this is not a pretty face, and we have to expose it in order to change India's policies and enabled it to accept to apply the principles of the United Nations Charter in its dealings with Pakistan. So that is the reality": he asserted further.
In response to another question regarding FATF, he said that: "I think that there are two aspects to the part of story. First of all, there is the aspect of the need to have transparency in financial transactions in order to ensure the integrity of transactions and the honesty of transactions, I think, Pakistan has seen an outflow of a lot of our own precious resources through corruption flowing out of the country and the Prime Minister has spoken about this very eloquently and therefore, we need to tighten our financial regulations and financial laws to ensure against criminal transfers, and criminal behavior".
He further added" " India, with the support of some of its allies exert financial pressure on Pakistan by threatening to downgrade us into the greylist in that blacklist". So, in order to avert this pressure, to avert the objectives of India, we have to first, improve our own regulations and laws in order to ensure that we have nothing that can be pointed a finger at. And then secondly, we need to rectify whatever has happened in the past. Now Pakistan's diplomacy of course has tried to expose the difference between the two, the difference between legitimate desire to have good regulations and the illegitimate desire of our enemy, in order to harm the economic fortunes and economic development of Pakistan and I think we have to a considerable extent exposed the Indian machinations of exerting pressure on Pakistan. But they will continue and we will continue to frustrate them" : He contended.
In response to the question on Kashmir cause he said: "I think we have been engaged in a diplomatic campaign ever since the Prime Minister's pathbreaking speech at the United Nations, where he spoke openly and from the heart, about the Kashmir cause and Pakistan's commitment to the Kashmir cause. For the first time out of almost 50 years, Pakistan brought the issue to the Security Council. Past governments have been reluctant to do so. But we took a bold step, and a decision by the Prime Minister to take it to the Security Council, the security counselors now discussed it on three occasions, the Jammu and Kashmir dispute and those discussions are important, both from a political point of view, as well as a legal point of view. This has kept the issue of Jammu and Kashmir, alive on the agenda, it is on the active agenda of the Security Council and we will try to keep it alive because it exerts pressure on India. It also underlines the fact that Jammu and Kashmir is an international dispute, it is not an integral part of India as the Indians claim. So the existence of the dispute the existence of the legal basis of the dispute has to be kept up and raised at the United Nations and the Security Council is the highest body, the Security Council is a place where, which has taken the decisions on the table to resolve the Kashmir dispute through a plebiscite. We will keep up the pressure and keep raising the issue of the Security Council, but apart from that, in the Human Rights Committee, there is a wide ranging campaign we have raised it in every forum at the United Nations. In the Human Rights Council over 50 countries joined us in a joint statement, right after 5 August measures and denounced the Indian unilateral measures that were taken. 18 Special Rapporteurs of the Human Rights Council have sent two joint communications to the Indian government asking questions on various aspects of human rights on summary executions on disappearances on collective punishment on the treatment of journalists, a whole range of issues where they have said that human rights are in freefall in India and especially in Jammu and Kashmir. India has to respond to this. And we will keep up the pressure on India to respond to this, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, wants to go to India, and to improve the Pakistani side of Jammu and Kashmir to the Indian side of Jammu and Kashmir": he said.
"We have to keep the moment of pressure on India because it is only through pressure only when the major governments begin to question India's record in India's policies that those policies will change and therefore we need to maintain that pressure, and we will keep that pressure": he said.
Our government prepared a composite dossier of India's sponsorship of terrorism in Pakistan. We shared that with the Secretary General and the Secretary General has promised that they will study the dossier very carefully, and they will come back to us with responses to the evidence that has been provided. We have also written to the Security Council, and asked the Security Council Committee, which lists the terrorist organization associated with al Qaeda and ISIS, those we have written to them. And we have asked for a meeting, a consultation investigation of the allegations of India support to the TTP, and to the JUA, we have specifically asked for that investigation" : he informed.
"We are going to keep pressing them to open that discussion, of course, India is now sitting in the Security Council itself, and is likely to block discussions, but we will keep up the pressure, and we are going to raise it in all organs of the Security Council and applies the monitoring team, the Office of counterterrorism, etc. We have kept them apprise of India's activities in sponsoring terrorism against Pakistan and the objective is to expose this and to expose this in front of the international community, and we are succeeding to expose the fact that India sponsored terrorism against Pakistan. And we are hopeful that once we have a settlement in Afghanistan that India will lose the ungoverned spaces from which it is sponsoring that terrorism against Pakistan": he concluded.
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