Pakistan’s new UN envoy Munir Akram is ‘girlfriend basher’, India hater and war monger

Akram, who was Islamabad’s envoy at the UN from 2003 to 2008, had once called India ‘mother of terrorism’ and Kashmir 'India’s Afghanistan'.

Pakistan UN envoy Munir Akram | Flickr

New Delhi: Munir Akram, who is now Pakistan’s new ambassador to the United Nations in New York, is not just another Pakistani diplomat. He is maverick, known to be outspoken, sometimes even rude — and ferociously anti-India. He also has the distinction of once being labelled as a ‘diplo-basher’ by the US in an assault case.

Akram is also known for his strong language. Sample this for instance: When India once charged Pakistan with cross-border terrorism, he had said it was engaged in Kashmir’s “Freedom Struggle”. Akram even accused India of being the “mother of terrorism”.

A veteran diplomat and currently a columnist with Pakistan’s leading English daily Dawn, Akram was Islamabad’s envoy at the UN from 2003 till 2008.

While at the UN, Akram routinely lashed out at India over the issue of Kashmir.

During the 58th General Assembly session in 2003, attended by the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Akram had said what India called “cross-border terrorism” was basically “Kashmiri Freedom Struggle”.

This was in response to India’s then Political Counsellor at New York Harsh Vardhan Shringla, now India’s Ambassador to the US, who had said Pakistan’s claim on combating terrorism was 1 per cent intention and 99 per cent pretension.

Akram had also attacked Vajpayee for rejecting then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s “action plan” and said India was the “mother of terrorism”.

Cut to 2019

After the scrapping of Article 370 that granted a special status to Jammu and Kashmir, Akram wrote an article in Dawn on 18 August in which he called Kashmir “India’s Afghanistan”.

“India’s war in occupied Jammu & Kashmir is over 70 years long. It has been fought by an occupation force of 7,00,000, seven times the maximum number of troops deployed at any time by the Soviet Union or US-Nato in Afghanistan. The Kashmir war will end only when New Delhi realises that it cannot break the will of the Kashmiri people and that it is doing grievous damage to the Indian state. This future is visible now,” he wrote.

His anti-India columns received much appreciation from the Pakistani Army, and one such article titled ‘The new Great Game’ was especially lauded by former Pakistani military spokesperson Asim Bajwa.

Akram had once said “the most proximate impediment to India’s quest for Great Power status remains Pakistan”.

“So long as Pakistan does not accept India’s regional pre-eminence, other South Asian states will also resist Indian diktat. India cannot feel free to play a great global power role so long as it is strategically tied down in South Asia by Pakistan,” he wrote in a Dawn article in 2014.

On September 29, after Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s speech at the UNGA where he spoke about a preemptive “bloodbath” in Kashmir once restrictions are lifted, Akram wrote an article in Dawn in which he referred to the speech as “impassioned, eloquent and substantive”.

“In contrast to Pakistani leaders of the last decade, whose presence at the UNGA was little noted and even less influential, Imran Khan was warmly acknowledged at every event he attended in New York and sought out by the leaders of UN member states, international organisations, global corporations and the mainstream media,” he said.

When Akram called Salman Khurshid a ‘rented Muslim’

Akram was known for his vitriolic statements, sometimes uncouth, even against the Muslim population of India. A case in example is when as a spokesperson for Pakistan’s foreign ministry, Akram called former Indian foreign minister Salman Khurshid as “kirai ka Muslim” (rented Muslim).

Always wearing an angry look on his face, as if he is going on a war, Akram had once called India the “sick man of Asia”. His brother, Zamir Akram, was also a trendy diplomat who had served India.

In a rather funny incident, then Pakistani foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri admitted in his voluminous book, Neither A Hawk Nor A Dove, that during the annual UNGA session in 2005, President Musharraf and Kasuri were looking forward to meeting the then Indian PM Manmohan Singh and foreign minister Natwar Singh on the sidelines.

However, after Musharraf’s speech at the UNGA, the Indian side turned ice cold because of a “hard-hitting” speech delivered by Musharraf, who had a year ago spoken about extending an olive branch to India and even sit for a dialogue on Kashmir, and New Delhi had agreed to it.

But the mood changed after Musharraf’s speech, in which he said India was trying to delegitimise the Kashmir struggle and was taking advantage of international anti-terrorist sentiment that became prevalent after 9/11. Kasuri later admitted in his book that the speech was written by Akram, who was a rabid India-basher, and neither Musharraf nor Kasuri had vetted it beforehand.

Accused of assaulting live-in partner

In 2003, when Pakistan was batting for a seat at the UN Security Council as a non-permanent member, Akram got embroiled in a major controversy, leading to the US State Department asking Islamabad to take away his diplomatic immunity.

This happened after Akram’s reported live-in partner Marijana Mihic had made a distress call to police at 1:36 am in December 2002, complaining that she was assaulted by him. But she changed her statement, when the police reached the couple’s “luxury townhouse”, and said she got injured after she fell down.

Meanwhile, the then city commissioner-in-charge of United Nations issues Marjorie Tiven wrote to the US Mission in New York on 26 December, demanding that Akram’s immunity be removed.

In an interview to the New York Post, Akram had said, “My government sent me here to represent my country. I came to stay — and my government wants me to stay.”

Owing to lack of evidence and Mihic’s refusal to press charges, no action was taken against Akram and he continued to remain Pakistan’s envoy to the UN until 2008.