NEW YORK CITY: Pakistan’s permanent representative to the UN, Munir Akram, remembers the day the recent floods that would eventually submerge a third of his country began.
“The extreme heat melted the glaciers,” he said. “We have 7,000 glaciers in the mountains of Pakistan. This resulted in flash floods. And then the extreme heat led to high precipitation, which resulted in the massive torrential rains that came.
“It is perhaps difficult to imagine the magnitude of the disaster and this became clear to all of us, and to the world, as the waters ran over the rivers into the villages, towns, fields, destroying 7,000 kilometers of roads, 300 bridges, over a million homes, seven million acres of standing crops.”
During a visit to the country this month, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the situation in Pakistan as “climate carnage.” He had never seen anything like it on this scale before, he said, as the flooded land covered an area three times the size of his own country, Portugal.
This disaster of monumental magnitude has resulted in more than 1,400 deaths, and caused damage estimated at more than $30 billion. A catastrophe of hitherto unimaginable proportions, it has once again propelled the issue of climate change to the top of the international agenda, dominating every discussion during the annual gathering of world leaders at the UN General Assembly in New York this month.
“This is the consequence of climate change, of global warming,” Akram told Arab News on the sidelines of the UN event. “And the supreme irony is that Pakistan is not responsible for global warming; we emit only 0.8 percent of global carbon emissions and yet Pakistan is the most significantly impacted country by this.
“I think the (UN) secretary-general has spoken eloquently about that when he visited the affected areas and he has called for massive assistance to Pakistan, not only as a humanitarian gesture but also as part of, like, climate justice.
“It is unjust that Pakistan should face the consequences of the actions of those who are the largest emitters and have been the largest emitters for so many decades.”
China, the US and the nations that make up the membership of the EU are the three largest global emitters of greenhouse gases, which cause the Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere to warm.
Guterres has for years called for the biggest producers of greenhouse gases not only to lower their emissions but also to finance the response to the effects of climate change in less-wealthy countries and regions — such as Pakistan, drought-hit Horn of Africa, and the Small Island States that are also particularly vulnerable to flooding — when they face extreme weather events resulting from those emissions.
“I think that all the honest people around the world recognize that global warming and climate change is a reality and that it is having very enormous impacts around the world, especially on developing countries,” said Akram.
“Therefore there is a growing support for the proposal of the developing countries that at least $100 billion should be provided annually for climate finance, that at least half of this should go to adaptation — so far, it’s only 20 to 25 percent of those (funds that go) for adaptation — and that when countries such as Pakistan (are) damaged so grievously, to the extent of 10 percent of the gross domestic product, that there is a responsibility on the part of the international community, especially those who have a historical and current responsibility for having the highest emissions, to provide support in the recovery of countries which suffer from the impact.”
Pakistan is putting forward a proposal for the creation of a financial facility that would be permanently available to compensate countries for the effects of climate change. This is in addition, Akram said, to Islamabad’s suggestion that climate-adaptation efforts, often deemed the “orphan child” of climate talks, should receive at least 50 percent of all climate financing, along with an increased emphasis on the importance of speeding up mitigation efforts, “especially by those who are the highest emitters and who have been historically the highest contributors to global warming over the last 150 years.”
Turning to the situation in neighboring Afghanistan, the Pakistani envoy expressed “disappointment” at the human rights record of the Taliban in the year since they took over the country by force following the withdrawal of Western forces in August last year.
“We are all disappointed that some of the promises that were made with regard to human rights, women’s rights and counterterrorism have not been fulfilled and it remains a priority for us to promote those objectives,” Akram said.
However he added that it would be counterproductive to disengage from talks with the Taliban government or to try to isolate and punish it. He said such actions would condemn the entirety of the Afghan population to further suffering and starvation “and that is certainly not the objective of the international community.”
Akram urged the global donors to continue to provide humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan and engage in the economic revival of the country, including improvements to its banking system. He also called for the nation to be allowed to use the resources available to it, including the release of overseas assets currently frozen by the international community. Pakistan is actively engaged in this process, he added.
Calling for “a pathway for normalization” as a major weapon in the fight against terrorism, Akram urged the Taliban to “take effective action not only against (Daesh), which is of course the major concern for the international community, but also against terrorist organizations such as the TTP (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan), which is not only threatening but actually resorting to cross-border attacks against Pakistan.”
The plight of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban is another topic that has dominated discussions during the UN General Assembly, with Afghan women living in exile making the case for their compatriots in a country that is the only one in the world that actively denies women the right to an education. They have called on world leaders to label the regime’s actions against women as “gender apartheid,” in the hope the term will become a catalyst in Afghanistan for change in terms of the treatment of women, just as it once did in South Africa on issues of race relations.
Pakistan’s foreign minister, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, told Arab News last week that the plight of women in Afghanistan should be an issue not only for the wider international community but for the Muslim world in particular because “Islam is what gave women their rights. Islam is what protects women’s rights.”
Akram believes in pursuing “a strategy of persuasion” with the Taliban on the issue.
“We need to convince the Taliban that their position on this issue is out of step with the requirements of human rights, Islamic law or Islamic practice as such, and we are fully behind this,” he said.
“All we say is let’s do it in a way of persuasion, of trying to convince them through (for example) illustration of best practices in the Islamic world of how women are treated and how women are contributing to the welfare of the nations.
“And perhaps the Taliban — at least those who are younger, educated and know the world — will soon come to be convinced that this is the right way to do it. And hopefully, Afghanistan will then emerge into a stage of development that is more consistent with international norms.”