Daily Times

Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari called on Monday for a ‘free, fair and impartial’ investigation into the alleged assassination attempt on PTI chief Imran Khan. In an interview to CNN with senior journalist Christiana Amanpour, the minister reiterated his “unequivocal condemnation” of the attack and maintained that an impartial investigation would help bring facts forward. “Whatever 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,” Bilawal stated. Commenting on Imran’s 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 “we agreed we want to stay neutral in this conflict”. “We understand how this can be misinterpreted as Pakistan taking sides… [but] we do not want to get dragged into yet another conflict,” he said, adding that he wanted to focus on the “many” devastating crises within the country.

The 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. Bilawal stated that Pakistan was currently the chair for the G77 plus China – a group of 77 UN countries – and had been successful in adding loss and damage to the agenda of the conference. “We have adaptation, mitigation and a third agenda item now as a result of successful negotiations,” he said.

Highlighting 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. He 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 “tragedy of this scale will have some sort of mechanism available as far as loss and damage is concerned”. “As 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,” he said.