We present you the speech by Riaz Hussain Khokhar, private consultant and senior Fellow at the China-Pakistan Joint Think Tank at the National University of Science and Technology, at the RIW group meeting in the Chechen capital Grozny.
I congratulate you and express my admiration for the success and achievements that we have witnessed in the past 24 hours.
It is a famous region known for its remarkable beauty for many centuries. We had an opportunity to pay the tribute to the memory of your father, who was a martyr of Islam.
Your Excellency, I should tell you about two events. First of all, it is a significant improvement of relations between Russia and Pakistan, a number of leading Russian authorities visited Pakistan as well as Pakistani authorities visited Russia. More specifically I should mention that the Minister of Defence of the Russian Federation visited Pakistan. We showed him the region where we conducted major operations against terrorism. He showed great interest in the visit. We are planning joint exercises in a very serious military operation. We killed about 14,000 terrorists, but we lost about 60,000 Pakistanis.
We suffered very badly in economic terms, so we have a huge experience in the fight against terrorism.
Another important aspect is the current visit of Your Excellency Mr. Rustam Minnikhanov, the President of Tatarstan, to Pakistan. A few weeks ago, he received warm hospitality and he was very pleased with the level of mutual understanding between our leaders. We talked about economic cooperation between Tatarstan and Pakistan, and we are also very interested in developing economic cooperation with Chechnya.
Talking about the problems of the Islamic world, I must say the following, Your Excellency: unfortunately, today the Islamic world is more divided than even last year and those who sow the seeds of discord are happy people. We talk a lot about everything but still don’t know who created ISIS, who finances it and who benefits from it.
Curiously, the happiest country in the Middle East region is Israel. I sympathize with the Palestinians and the representative of Palestine, who spoke here. He spoke about the suffering of the Palestinians.
It is sad to see the root problem of the Middle East being put on the backburner. It is overlooked in comparison with the fight against terrorism and extremism.
The main problem, as I see it, is the need to think over the situation seriously. We can’t postpone the decision of our problems. We should explore the depth of the problem, invent ways of how and where to solve this problem and how to stop those who want to interfere in the Islamic world and stop us from resolving our issues. There are hundreds of meetings, scholars’ proposals, however, we couldn’t pinpoint contemporary real problems of the Islamic world. I consider the meeting like this should focus on a specific set of issues and their solutions.
I would like to stress our gratitude and our great respect for the Russian leadership and President Putin, who presented a major vision to the world and brought into line a new balance of power in the Middle East.
Russia has made a large contribution. Russia is a natural partner of the Islamic world. It shares borders with so many Islamic countries and certainly should play its role.
I would like to thank again the President of the Chechen Republic for his kind invitation. We sincerely wish that you further restore and develop the Republic. In Pakistan, we would be very glad to assist you in the process of Chechnya’s economic development. If you talked to President Minnikhanov after his visit to Pakistan, you would have decided to visit Pakistan, too.
Thank you.
GSV "Russia - Islamic world"