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HomeDiplomacyPakistan’s new UN envoy Munir Akram is 'girlfriend basher', India hater and...

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'.

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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”.


Also read: Pakistani diplomats, families stage Kashmir protest — inside high commission in Delhi


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.


Also read: For Indian & Pakistani diplomats, harassment is the old normal


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.

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10 COMMENTS

  1. I am sure the girl friend must be writers sister as He instead of talking international politics, he is talking personal. And I am sure Munir fingures India pretty good, there fore you must come out to degrade him. You 1000 year slave mentality. Get out of it.

  2. Fight fire with fire. Terrorist so called freedom fighters of Pakistan should be given a taste of it. India needs to train and create freedom fighters for India to fight against our enemies. Conventional war is not going to work out for Pakistan since they are cowards and will die hearing the word war. Your not fighting with lion but with a street dog so to our strategy also should be different. Need to learn from Pakistan how to do Jihad since they have good experience in Afghanistan against Soviet. India needs to start Jihad training from Pakistan and use against it.

  3. If you’re saying so much negative about this fellow, there must’ve been some amazingly good about him being the Pakistani. Also, the so called “ridiculous narrative of Pakistan Sponsored Terrorism” is actually nothing but and aid to the Kashmiri Freedom Fighters. Why India hasn’t deployed 750-800 thousands army in any other place than Kashmir? That too to Govern only 8 Million people. Basically, they are scared and know it by heart, Kashmir doesn’t belong to India. The day it’ll be given the opportunity of a plebiscite, they’ll choose to live free of Indian Occupation.

    • Uyghur muslims in China’s detention camps; parents separated from children; young kids’ indoctrination in Chinese way of life in full swing in state schools. Please check out Western media sources.

  4. Not sure why we’re surprised that a wife beater, war monger is Pak ‘diplomat’! After all the PM isnt exactly an exemplary role model, who doesnt even acknowledge or fulfill his role as a father! Ask Tyrell White!

  5. Domestic violence cannot be condoned, along with sexual harassment.
    The RSS male is prone to inflicting both.
    Some BJP leaders have been accused of rape. Some took out processions in Jummu in support of a child rapist and murderer.
    All these people including this Pakistani disgust me.

  6. But this guy appears to be a spent cartridge – not much firepower left! It’s also a sign that Pakistan is actively headhunting for those with anti-India credentials on their CV

    • Former US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott recounts his years as a diplomat during the Vajpayee Government: “In general, our sessions with the Pakistanis, while occasionally more exciting than those with the Indians, lacked a comparable degree of intellectual engagement…The Pakistanis had no game plan. They always seemed to be either hunkering down, lashing out or flailing about.” (Talbott, 2004: 105-06, Engaging India, Brookings Institution Press).

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