Pak FM Bilawal to attend SCO meet in India next month
Islamabad: Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari will attend a meeting of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO) to be held in India next month, the Foreign Office said on Thursday. “Bilawal Bhutto Zardari will be leading the Pakistan delegation to the SCO Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) being held on May 4-5 2023, in Goa, India,” FO spokesperson Mumtaz Zahrah Baloch announced in a weekly media briefing today.
She said the foreign minister would be attending the SCO CFM meeting at the invitation of the current chairman of SCO CFM, Minister for External Affairs of the Republic of India Dr S. Jaishankar.
Earlier in January, India had invited Pakistan’s foreign minister to the SCO meeting, signalling a possible thaw in relations between the nuclear-armed rivals. The invitation from Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had been delivered by the Indian High Commission in Islamabad.
India took over the rotating presidency of the eight-member grouping in September last year, and sent formal invitations to all the SCO-member countries, including Pakistan and China.
The invitation had come days after Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had called for talks with India over all outstanding issues, including India-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK), before clarifying that talks cannot take place until the “illegal actions of August 5, 2019” were reversed.
There has been a drought of bilateral visits, and Hina Rabbani Khar was the last Pakistani foreign minister to visit India in 2011.
After the Modi government abrogated Article 370 in India-held Jammu and Kashmir in 2019, the already strained Indo-Pak bilateral ties have been adversely affected.
The SCO currently has eight member countries (China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan), four observer states interested in acceding to full membership (Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, and Mongolia), and six “Dialogue Partners” (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Turkiye).
The Shanghai Five, which was formed in 1996, became the SCO in 2001 with the addition of Uzbekistan. The SCO expanded to become one of the largest multilateral organisations in the world, representing more than 30 per cent of the world’s GDP and 40 per cent of the world’s population, with the addition of India and Pakistan in 2017.
In the media briefing today, the FO spokesperson said that Pakistan’s participation in the SC meetings reflected the country’s commitment to the SCO Charters and processes and the importance Pakistan accorded to the region in its foreign policy priorities.