United Nations: Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Jalil Abbas Jilani has found Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s accusations against India convenient to deflect from Islamabad’s own record of terrorism.
Speaking at a news conference here on Friday, Jilani said the Canada issue is “very unfortunate” and is a “very, very serious situation”.
Trudeau has accused India of involvement in the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey in British Columbia in June.
Nijjar, a Khalistan secessionist leader, had been declared a terrorist by India.
Jilani asserted that India had carried out assassinations in South Asian countries, “but this is perhaps for the first time that it has gone global”.
“This is like the mask that they had coming off the Indian face”, he said.
Since it took place in “a very, very important country, which is a member of the G20, which is also part of the [NATO] alliance system”, he said, “probably it would raise concerns in almost every corner of the world”.
Asked by a reporter if Pakistan’s pleas on Kashmir were going unheeded, Jilani said that he found wide support in meetings he had with countries and groups.
He said that there was “a reiteration of the support that is being extended or will continue to be extended to the people of Kashmir” and “that is the impression that we have caught during all the interactions that we have had, whether they were bilateral meetings or whether they were in the context of the overall ministerial meetings or the [Organisation of Islamic Cooperation] Contact Group”.
However, in reality, with the General Assembly’s high-level meeting nearly three-quarters of the way through with 147 of the 193 leaders already having spoken, only one country besides Pakistan has mentioned Kashmir.
Turkiye President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a mild reference to Kashmir leaving it as a bilateral issue between the two countries, saying that “the
establishment of a just and lasting peace in Kashmir through dialogue and cooperation between India and Pakistan” will lead to “regional peace, stability and prosperity in South Asia”.
At last year’s session also, Turkiye was the only country other than Pakistan to speak of Kashmir.
(Arul Louis can be contacted at arul.l@ians.in <aru.l@ians.in> and followed at @arulouis)
— IANS
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