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US envoy Kerry to skip Pakistan in 'climate crisis' trip to India, Bangladesh

US climate envoy John Kerry will hold talks with Indian, Emirati and Bangladesh leaders during an Asian tour starting on Thursday in an effort to narrow differences on climate change goals to slow global warming.

Notably, Kerry is not scheduled to hold talks with the leadership of Pakistan, which is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change.

The development comes on the heels of the announcement of a climate summit called by US President Joe Biden later this month (April 22-23) for which he has invited 40 world leaders, including those from India, China and Bangladesh, but not Pakistan.

Pakistan's exclusion from the invitation list for the summit had raised eyebrows, with several analysts questioning the move given the country's vulnerability to global warming and Prime Minister Imran Khan's focus on the environment front. Others perceived it as a snub for the country.

Reacting to Pakistan's exclusion from Kerry's planned Asia trip, Michael Kugelman, a scholar of South Asian affairs at the Woodrow Wilson Centre, said:

"First Pakistan was left off the invitation list for the White House's upcoming global climate summit. Now US climate czar John Kerry is headed to India and Bangladesh for consultations. Ouch."

The Foreign Office had last week hinted that Pakistan was not invited to the White House summit because it was "one of the lowest emitters – with less than one percent of the global emissions".

Responding to a question on the alleged snub by the US, the FO spokesman had said:

"The Leaders’ Summit on Climate Change hosted by President Biden reconvenes the US-led Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, which brings together leaders from countries responsible for approximately 80 percent of global emissions and GDP. The Summit also includes representation from countries holding Chairs of geographic regions and groups including Least Developed Countries, Small Island Developing States, and Climate Vulnerable Forum. Pakistan, despite being among the top ten countries affected by Climate Change, is one of the lowest emitters – with less than one percent of the global emissions."

Kerry's visit to India comes at a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government is facing calls from the United States and Britain to commit India, the world's third biggest carbon emitter, to a net zero emissions target by 2050. India, whose per capita emissions are way lower than that of the United States, European countries and even China, is concerned that binding itself to such a target could constrain the energy needs of its people.

Kerry kicks off his trip on Thursday that will also take him to the United Arab Emirates and Bangladesh, which experts say is especially vulnerable to climate change as it has large numbers of people living in areas barely above sea level, and lacks infrastructure to protect them.

“Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry will travel to Abu Dhabi, New Delhi, and Dhaka April 1-9 for consultations on increasing climate ambition...” the State Department said.

Kerry is leading efforts to get countries to commit themselves to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero by about the middle of the century.

Later this year world leaders will gather for the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow to build on a 2015 Paris accord to halt the increase in global temperatures at levels that would avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

“Looking forward to meaningful discussions with friends in the Emirates, India, and Bangladesh on how to tackle the climate crisis,” Kerry tweeted.

India says it will not only stick to the Paris accord to reduce its carbon footprint by 33-35 per cent from its 2005 levels by 2030 but will likely exceed those goals as it ramps up use of renewable energy.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1615823/us-envoy-kerry-to-skip-pakistan-in-climate-crisis-trip-to-india-bangladesh

The PM is trying to sit between two stools - At stake, the government’s credibility

The government’s populist slogans are not in consonance with its international pledges. While Prime Minister Imran Khan’s economic team was working hard to broker a deal with the IMF, Mr Khan announced 2021 to be year of growth for Pakistan. What this is bound to lead to, is exposure at home and loss of face abroad.

Just when Dr Hafeez Sheikh was celebrating his success in brokering an agreement with IMF and holding conference calls with bond investors, he was unceremoniously shown the door, with some close to the government holding him responsible for the rise in prices. It is widely understood that the IMF’s contradictionary fiscal policy leads to cutting jobs while the policy of reducing the subsidy bill and raising sales and income tax hit the low-middle-income segments, which are already shaken by the increase in electricity prices, food inflation, job losses and pay cuts. Businesses are also feeling the impact. With 1.3 percent GDP growth rate projected for the financial year by the World Bank, there would be more suffering in store for the common man.

Dr Sheikh’s removal is bound to raise eyebrows in international financial circles and among investors. The hints thrown by stopgap Finance Minister Hamad Azhar concerning a possible review of the IMF programme and the State Bank of Pakistan amendment bill are not likely to go well with international financial and rating institutions.

The government has declined to share the draft of the IMF programme with the National Assembly. There is a perception supported by media reports that some of the drastic amendments that were not proposed by the IMF were also introduced to favour the entrenched vested interests. That explains why Mr Azhar refused to commit himself when asked whether the government would make the IMF technical mission’s report public.

Mr Azhar’s own credibility got a hit a day after he got the additional portfolio. On Wednesday, after presiding over the ECC meeting, he announced that it was decided to import cotton and sugar from India. The next day the decision was reversed by the cabinet. This was the outcome of the interplay of countervailing pressures on the government which wants to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.

https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2021/04/01/the-pm-is-trying-to-sit-between-two-stools/

Biden Must Press Pakistan to End Persecution of Religious Minorities

By Qasim Rashid

Last year the U.S. State Department labeled Pakistan a country of particular concern over its increasing persecution of religious minorities.

This label is the State Department’s strongest condemnation under the International Religious Freedom Act, and normally mandates sanctions for the designated country. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo intervened, however, with a presidential waiver to avoid such punishment.

The alliance between the two nations has sent $70 billion in economic and military aid to Pakistan since Pakistan’s founding. If not for the sake of sheer justice, then at least for the sake of protecting American interests, President Joe Biden must hold U.S. ally Pakistan accountable to repeal its discriminatory anti-Ahmadi legislation and actions. While the legislation particularly targets Ahmadi Muslims, it tragically also enables societal discrimination and violence against Pakistan’s Christian, Sikh, Hindu, and Shia communities.

Most recently, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) has intensified the government’s decades-long violent persecution of religious minorities — particularly that of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community. For the first time, the PTA has filed a lawsuit against two American citizens who belong to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, seeking to shut down a U.S. based website, trueislam.com. The PTA argues that because Ahmadis built the U.S.-based website, it violates Pakistan’s anti-Ahmadi laws. The PTA applied the same convoluted logic to order Google to remove any app built by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community from the tech giant’s Play store.

Google has, sadly, capitulated to the draconian demands. Sam Brownback, the former U.S. Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, has compared Pakistan’s persecution of Ahmadi Muslims to the Chinese dictatorship, exclaiming, “[This is] Pakistan following in the China model.”

A Brief History of Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan

The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community was founded in 1889 by a man named Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who claimed to be the awaited Messiah to reform Muslims, peacefully revive Islam, and reject all forms of religious violence. Despite suffering decades of violent religious persecution, it is well documented that Ahmadi Muslims have maintained their position against all forms of religious violence. Pakistan’s persecution of Ahmadis escalated in 1974, when, in an unprecedented vote, the General Assembly amended the country’s Constitution to formally declare the  Ahmadiyya Muslim Community ‘outside the fold of Islam.’

Imagine, for a moment, if the United States passed a constitutional amendment declaring Catholics outside the fold of Christianity? Notwithstanding this absurd amendment, in 1984 Pakistan added Ordinance XX to its penal code, criminalizing any Ahmadi Muslim who proclaims to be a Muslim with arrest and fine. By 1986, Pakistan added Section 295-C, mandating up to and including the death penalty for Ahmadi Muslims.

These draconian laws have predictably left Ahmadi Muslims to languish in apartheid conditions. All books, literature, events, speech, and websites belonging to the Ahmadiyya Muslim community in Pakistan are criminalized. Pakistan denies Ahmadis free and fair voting and forces Ahmadi Muslims to declare their faith on their passports as a means to prevent them from performing the Hajj pilgrimage. To perform Hajj, a Pakistani citizen must have “Muslim” on their passport for religious affiliation. To obtain a passport with “Muslim” as the religious affiliation, Pakistan requires applicants to complete a form declaring Ahmadi Muslims as “non-Muslim.” Since Ahmadis refuse to declare themselves non-Muslim, they are identified as “Ahmadis,” and thus denied the ability to perform Hajj. In other words, Pakistan’s government has created special ID cards to single out Ahmadis.

These apartheid conditions have led to systemic persecution of Ahmadi Muslims, including mass murder, grave desecration,  expulsion of school children for their faith, and a complete lockdown of all religious practice. Pakistan has faced repeated condemnation from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) for its incessant violation of religious freedom, yet the discriminatory laws remain.

The U.S. Must Demand Justice for Ahmadi Muslims

When President Biden repealed the ‘Muslim Ban’ his first day in office, he condemned the ban as “contravening our values, undermin[ing] our national security, jeopardiz[ing] our global network of alliances and partnerships and a moral blight that has dulled the power of our example the world over.” Indeed, we cannot ignore the connection between persecution of religious minorities and collapse of national and economic security. Look no further than the last four years in the United States. The United States has seen historic highs in hate crimes targeting American Muslims, Jews, and Black, Indigenous, and persons of color (BIPOC) individuals — all of which has undermined American national security.

Pakistan’s government has traversed this dangerous road for several decades, suffocating its own national security, and becoming “a safe haven for certain regionally focused terrorist groups,” according to the State Department. Pakistan’s economy also suffers as a consequence. For example, in the 1960s—prior to enacting discriminatory legislation—Pakistan’s economy grew at a rate of 6% per year, double neighboring India’s growth. By the 1990s, as Pakistan was in full swing of enforcing discriminatory legislation and implicitly legitimizing extremist groups, India surpassed Pakistan’s growth, and has never looked back. Major U.S.-based companies have already threatened to leave Pakistan due to its censorship laws.

The persecution of Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan is increasing, with yet another innocent Ahmadi gunned down last month in a spate of targeted murders. The U.S.-Pakistan alliance should continue. However, it should not be indiscriminate. If we do not emphatically demand justice of Pakistan’s government to its own citizens, we give a greenlight to not only continue that violent persecution, but also escalate in targeting American citizens. Advancing the U.S.-Pakistan alliance on the principles of justice and protecting religious minorities is imperative for a just, prosperous, and secure future.

https://www.justsecurity.org/75383/biden-must-press-pakistan-to-end-persecution-of-religious-minorities/ 

No Place For Minorities In ‘Naya’ Pakistan – OpEd

By Nilesh Kunwar

Two years ago, while speaking on the occasion to mark 100 days of his government being in office, Prime Minister Imran Khan made many a boast and promises. Besides waxing eloquent on turning Pakistan into a “model Islamic welfare state,” he also hit out at his Indian counterpart by saying, “We will show the Modi government how to treat minorities.”  Unfortunately, despite this bold assurance, instances of atrocities against minorities in Pakistan have increased manyfold under Khan’s watch. 

US Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, Samuel Brownback has made things embarrassing for Khan by making it clear that as far as Pakistan was concerned, “a lot of their actions [against religious freedom] are done by the government.” So, it’s not at all surprising that Washington has designated Pakistan a ‘country of serious concern’ for engaging in or tolerating “systematic, ongoing, egregious violations of religious freedom.”  To make matters even more humiliating, Khan’s “how to treat minorities” barb directed at Modi boomeranged when US State Department summarily rejected US Commission for International Religious Freedom’s recommendation to designate India a ‘country of serious concern’. 

Khan wants everyone to believe that his “Naya [new] Pakistan is Quaid’s [Jinnah’s] Pakistan” in which “minorities are treated as equal citizens, unlike what is happening in India” but this claim has hardly any takers. Au contraire, in its ‘World Report 2020’, Human Right Watch [HRW] has noted that along with women and transgender people, religious minorities in Pakistan “continued to face violence, discrimination, and persecution, with authorities often failing to provide adequate protection or hold perpetrators accountable.” Even Human Right Commission of Pakistan [HRCP] has been extremely critical about the PTI led government’s abysmal failure in protecting minorities, which it rightly feels are “doubly vulnerable”.

Islamabad dismisses widespread international criticism for failing to institute adequate safeguards to prevent religious persecution of its minorities by terming it an ‘opinion based on disinformation’.  However, in its annual ‘State of Human Rights in 2019’ report [released in 2020], HRCP has noted that “Religious minorities remained unable to enjoy the freedom of religion or belief guaranteed to them under the constitution” adding that “Both the Hindu and Christian communities in Sindh and Punjab continued to report cases of forced conversion.” It also confirms that:

• “In Punjab, girls as young as 14 were forcibly converted and coerced into marriage.”
• “In Sindh, the case of two Hindu girls whose families claimed they had been kidnapped for marriage and converted forcibly, drew widespread attention when the Islamabad High Court ruled that the girls were not minors at the time of marriage and allowed them to return to their spouses.” 
• “For the Ahmadiyya community in Punjab, this [religious persecution] included the desecration of several sites of worship.”

Contrary to Khan’s promise to ensure “that our minorities are treated as equal citizens,” the year 2020 saw an alarming swell in incidents of persecution of minority communities-the most common being the repugnant practice of Hindu, Christian and Sikh girls [some as young as 12 to 13 years] being abducted and after being converted, being forced into marriage.  Even Pakistani NGOs estimate that about 1,000 such incidents occur every year and this is why no one takes Khan’s assurance of minorities in Pakistan being “treated as equal citizens” seriously.

Another issue of concern is brazen desecration of holy sites of worship sites belonging to minority communities. On Jan 03, 2020, a mob attempted to vandalise the historic Nankana Sahib Gurdwara and the entire incident was captured on video. However, Pakistan’s Foreign Office [FO] played down this incident by calling it a “scuffle” between two Muslim groups over a “minor incident” at a tea stall. In reference to New Delhi’s complaint against desecration of this holy Sikh shrine, the FO stated that “Attempts to paint this incident as a communal issue are patently motivated.”Whereas one would have really loved to believe that this incident had no communal angle, but following facts belie the FO’s assertion:

• If the incident was merely a minor scuffle between two Muslim groups, then how come the Gurudwara became the target of their ire? 
• In the video, a mob can be heard cheering lustily as a speaker tells them that “We will ensure that there is not a single Sikh left in Nankana. And the name of this place will soon be changed from Nankana to Ghulam-e-Mustafa”.So, if this incident was just a row between two Muslim groups, then what explains the rabid anti-Sikh tirade of the speaker and its frenzied endorsement by the crowd? 
• Lastly, if it was genuinely a minor and inconsequential incident as the FO claims, then why did Khan term this incident as “condemnable’ and take all the trouble of downplaying its distinctly communal character by saying that there’s a “major difference between the condemnable Nankana incident and the ongoing attacks across India on Muslims and other minorities”?  

Besides Nankana Sahib Gurudwara, places of worship belonging to other minority communities in Pakistan were also subjected to vandalism last year. On May 9, 2020, a mob damaged the main gate and boundary wall of a church in Hakeempura area of Shekhupura district in Pakistan’s Punjab district and desecrated the Church’s Holy Cross. Once again, the authorities tried to brush this patently communal act under the carpet by terming it a property related dispute. In February, three Pakistani Christians who were constructing a church in Punjab’s Sahiwal district were assaulted and just two months later, a Pastor, his wife and son were attacked for building a wall on their own land. Once again, these incidents of intimidation of minority community members were passed off as instances of personal rivalry!

2020 also saw multiple incidents of Hindu religious shrines being either destroyed or desecrated. On Jan 26, idols of deities in Mata Deval Bhittani temple in Tharkarkar district of Pakistan’s Sindh province were desecrated and burnt holy texts kept inside. The police claimed that the perpetrators were minors and had broken into the temple just to steal money. What the police didn’t explain is that if their motive was only robbery, then why did the juveniles waste their time and energy in defacing idols and burning holy books? 

On October 10, idols of deities inside Shri Ramdev Temple in Kario Ghanwar area of Badin district, Sindh, were destroyed, and the police once again ruled out communal angle by saying that the culprit was of unsound mind and a drug addict! Just two weeks later, a mob vandalised Nagarparkar Temple in Sindh province, damaging the idol of Goddess Durga during the holy ‘Navratri’ period. No one has been arrested. On November 2, a huge mob descended on Sheetal Temple in Karachi’s Lee Market area and destroyed idols of deities and other holy relics. This time the police sought to justify this highly communal act by terming it public reaction to blasphemous statements made by a Hindu boy.

On December 27, a mob not only vandalised and set ablaze a 100-year-old shrine housing samadhi [memorial] of a revered Hindu saint in the Karak district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Dawn News TV quoted an eyewitness saying that the incident of desecration and arson occurred after “More than a thousand people led by some local elders of a religious party held a protest and demanded the removal of the Hindu place.” Two developments make official apathy [or tacit complicity?] obvious. One, according to news reports, “The locals also revealed that residents of the nearby villages had announced a protest demonstration with demands of removal of the Hindu shrine, adding that the police totally ignored it” and two, it was Chief Justice of Pakistan and not Prime Minister Khan who was first to take official cognisance of this sacrilegious incident. 

Once again, the police tried to obfuscate reality. The District Police Officer [DPO] refused to acknowledge that the shrine had been vandalised and instead told media that a mob “attacked and demolished the under-construction building [within temple premises].”  But Federal Minister for Human Rights Ms Shireen Mazari graciously acknowledged reality by tweeting- “Strongly condemn the burning of a Hindu temple by a mob in Karak, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa” – which is clearly visible in videos of this incident.

But desecration of religious shrines and abduction of girls followed by their forced conversion and marriages aren’t the only problem minorities face in Khan’s ‘Naya’ Pakistan. Even their settlements are being illegally demolished, often with official patronage. In May, a HRCP tweet mentioned that “HRCP is gravely concerned at reports that houses belonging to the Hindu and Christian communities of Yazman in Bahawalpur have been demolished, allegedly by local authorities with political influence.” It also stated that “evictions, the demolition of people’s houses, and land grabbing, esp. [especially] when such communities are doubly vulnerable, are highly condemnable.” 

But if the administration is to be believed, then all’s well in Pakistan as far as minorities are concerned. Girls from minority communities aren’t being abducted but are of their own accord, eloping with their beaus [who at times are almost double their age]. Vandalism of holy shrines belonging to minorities isn’t due to the prevailing communal frenzy but the handiwork of petty thieves, drug addicts, mentally deranged persons, or consequences of some land dispute and occasionally, ‘justified’ collective punishment of a minority community for some alleged blasphemous utterance by one of its members. Coupled with this, since Khan keeps harping on how “minorities are treated as equal citizens,” in his “Naya Pakistan,” why worry or lose sleep over this issue?

https://www.eurasiareview.com/01042021-no-place-for-minorities-in-naya-pakistan-oped/