Pakistan has historically been a shameless nation, and its citizens have been learning from the best. If the diplomats of a country cease to portray themselves in a manner befitting their position, what can be expected of the ordinary Pakistani? In what now comes as another shocker from Pakistan’s infamous foreign service stable, a diplomat in Zimbabwe has landed in a soup for his involvement in human trafficking.
In October-November 2019, three Pakistani’s were arrested in Beitbridge, while they were being shipped off to South Africa, all this while Zimbabwe was being used as a transit point. During questioning, the three individuals named Waqas Ahmed, a Pakistani diplomat based in Harare, who still seems to be employed by the embassy. The diplomat allegedly helped the three Pakistani’s attempt an illegal crossover.
The woman arrested last year, during questioning minced no words and called Pakistan a “facilitator of human trafficking”. Videos of the investigation then got leaked and spread like wildfire in Zimbabwe, causing a major loss of face for Pakistan. Tensions between Harare and Islamabad, meanwhile, are simmering.
This is not the first time that Pakistan has been caught in an embarrassing spot. Only this month, Waqar Ahmed, a foreign service officer working in the capacity of a first secretary in Kiev’s Pakistani mission in Ukraine, was exposed as a sexual molester. Ahmed is said to have sexually harassed a local cleaner and then sacked her. The man has been dismissed by Pakistan over his gross misconduct. As a matter of fact, Pakistan is quite the name in foreign affairs circles when it comes to buffoonery and terror links.
Munir Akram, now Pakistan’s permanent representative to the United Nation’s, had during the Christmas-New Year holidays of 2002, beaten his live-in partner. Having been caught in a domestic violence scandal, the then ‘ambassador’ got away without facing the law owing to immunity granted to diplomats from prosecution under local laws.
Incidentally, Munir Akram replaced former permanent representative of Pakistan, Maleeha Lodhi at the United Nations. The infamous Lodhi, as we know, was caught in a major embarrassment in 2017, when she held up a picture of an injured Palestinian girl in the General Assembly claiming that she was a Kashmiri.
In 2001, Mohamad Arshad Cheema, another diplomat working as a first secretary in Pakistan’s embassy in Kathmandu, was caught with 16 kilos of RDX. He is said to have been linked with the IC-814 hijacking of December 1999. Cheema was one of the two Pakistani officials who had met the hijackers at Tribhuvan airport right before the hijacked airplane took off.
Amir Zubair Siddiqui, a Pakistani diplomat, while posted in Sri Lanka in and around 2014, had conspired to have American and Israeli consulates in South India attacked, much like what was seen in 26/11. Pakistani diplomats and terror plots have, over the years, developed a bond perhaps not seen in any other sphere of life. Take for instance Farheena Arshad, who as second secretary working in the Pakistani mission in Dhaka, was caught having ties with the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen.
In 2018, a high ranking Pakistani official, meanwhile, was caught on camera stealing the wallet of a Kuwaiti delegation member who was visiting the country.
What can, however, be said of lowly diplomats when the country’s dummy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister decide to make a daily clown out of themselves? While Imran Khan and his never-ending fascination with India’s supposed ‘fascism’ needs no introduction, his Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, recently had made Indians laugh their guts out, when he, in place of using the word “Hindutva supremacy”, said “Modi’s Dravidian supremacist ideology” instead. Narendra Modi, in all likelihood, like all his sympathizers, perhaps considers the Aryan-Dravidian theory to be a joke.
Pakistani diplomats are indeed, noticeably so, learning from the best. While they are making a joke out of their already delegitimate persona worldwide, it serves as a comedy nonetheless, to witness Pakistan being laughed at globally. However, the links of Pakistani diplomats to terror organizations is no joke, and what would serve as poetic justice would be for all countries to diplomatically boycott Pakistan.