Washington, May 22 (Inditop) Pakistan will accede later this year to an international convention against terror funding, even as it draws up a multi-layered plan to eradicate the scourge, the country’s envoy to the UN says.
“We fully recognize merits of the global counter-terrorism strategy,” APP quoted Ambassador Abdullah Hussain Haroon as saying of the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism that Pakistan would ratify in September.
The 1999 convention aims at enhancing the effectiveness of global criminal bars on terrorist financing and preventing terrorist organisations from obtaining resources to support their activities.
In this context, Haroon said Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari had been pursuing a three-D approach of dialogue, development and deterrence to counter extremism and terrorism.
“We used dialogue to win public support and attain moral high ground, which was earlier monopolized by our enemies,” he said.
“We used the moral capital to expand the military offensive for the restoration of the writ of the government,” he added while delivering the keynote address at the release of a report on “Countering Terrorism in South Asia: Strengthening Multilateral Engagement”.
Pakistani security forces are currently engaged in a bitter struggle against the Taliban in Swat, Buner and Lower Dir districts of the country’s restive North West Frontier Province (NWFP).
The operations had begun April 26 after the Taliban reneged on a controversial peace accord with the NWFP government and moved south from their Swat headquarters to occupy Buner, which is just 100 km from Pakistan’s capital Islamabad.
The operations had begun in Lower Dir, the home district of radical cleric Sufi Mohammad who had brokered the peace deal and who is the father-in-law of Swat Taliban commander Maulana Fazlullah.
The operations subsequently spread to Buner and Swat. Close to 1,100 militants have so far been killed in the action, the military says. No consolidated figures have been released of casualties among the security forces but these are believed to be around 60.
The fighting has seen some 2.5 million civilians, including large numbers of women and children, fleeing the conflict. The UN said Friday $543 million would be required for their rehabilitation. On Thursday, Pakistan had won pledges of $244 million at a donors conference in Islamabad.
