Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto said on Saturday that the kind of political infighting he had witnessed while the nation was reeling from a devastating natural calamity of epic proportions was unprecedented worldwide.
The Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) chairman made the remarks while speaking to BBC Urdu. On the contrary, he said, nations the world over united in face of national tragedies. Rapping the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI)-led opposition, he said, they remained engrossed in holding shows of power and demanding general elections.
The PTI, he said, had an unenviable track record of doing so irrespective of whether the party was in office or opposition. He said the party had failed to provide any assistance to the people of Sindh when the province witnessed monsoon flooding in 2020.
Providing relief to those impacted was an immediate goal of the federal government. He said rehabilitation constituted a close second. The foreign minister also said that he had postponed a scheduled visit of European countries given the pressing situation in Pakistan.
Pakistan has been facing a pressing challenge in the form of severe floods. Over 900 people have have lost their lives due to floods and heavy rainfall since June. Homes in the tens of thousands have been destroyed. Incessant rain and floods have swept 3,000 kilometres of roads separately. Mobilisation of public resources and urgent media coverage of the devastation caused by ongoing monsoon-related flooding in Sindh, Balochistan, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Saraiki Vasaib, Chitral, Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir has been called for.
