This article appears in the June 23, 2023 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Dialogue Between Pakistan’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and Helga Zepp-LaRouche
A New World Order of Development for All Nations
[Print version of this article]
June 16—A 15-minute dialogue for public distribution took place June 9 between H.E. Hina Rabbani Khar, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs of Pakistan (since April 2022), and Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder and international leader of the Schiller Institute, on the occasion of the visit of Minister Khar to Denmark. The Embassy of Pakistan in Denmark invited the Schiller Institute to have a discussion with her, with Helga Zepp-LaRouche participating via Zoom. Also present were Tom Gillesberg, President, and Michelle Rasmussen, Vice President of the Schiller Institute in Denmark.
A YouTube video of the dialogue is available here.
Following the interview, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry issued a press release, stating in part:
The MOS (Minister of State) engaged with the Danish chapter of the Schiller Institute on Pakistan’s approach to key regional and international issues. The talk was joined in via Zoom by the president of the international Schiller Institute, Helga Zepp-LaRouche.
The press release about Minister Khar’s trip to Denmark and Finland, including her meeting with Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the Schiller Institute in Denmark, was published by a number of Pakistani media, including The International News, The Nation, Dispatch News Desk, Pakistani Observer, and Pakistan Today. Radio Pakistan, The Business Reporter and Urdu Point mentioned the Schiller Institute in Denmark. It was also included in the Ministry’s RSS feed, appearing on Pakistan’s Embassy in Denmark homepage, and probably similarly at other Pakistani embassies.
H.E. Hina Rabbani Khar is a leading politician in Pakistan, having served as Minister of Foreign Affairs (2011–2013); Minister of State for Finance (2008–2011) and Minister of State for Economic Affairs (2003–2007); as well as a Member of Parliament. She represents the Pakistan People’s Party. Minister Khar is the second minister in the Foreign Ministry after the Foreign Minister.
The Foreign Ministry’s website reports this about her:
Her term as Foreign Minister is best remembered for the “Regional Pivot” to Pakistan’s foreign policy, where she concentrated on building ties with Pakistan’s immediate neighbors. This included the normalization of trade relations with India, a policy of reaching out to all political parties and ethnicities in Afghanistan. Her tenure in Finance & Economic Affairs led Pakistan’s bilateral and multilateral economic diplomacy.
Hina Rabbani Khar graduated from the prestigious Lahore University of Management and Sciences with a BSc in Economics and later went on to do her Masters in Management from University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s background was summarized briefly by Michelle Rasmussen, when introducing Zepp-LaRouche to Minister Khar.
At the end of the meeting, Michelle Rasmussen presented Minister Khar with the three volumes of the “World Land-Bridge” books to date by Executive Intelligence Review and the Schiller Institute: The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge, Vol. 1, in 2014; and Vol. 2, in 2018, A Shared Future for Humanity; and the 2017 book, Extending the New Silk Road to West Asia and Africa: A Vision of Economic Renaissance.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche and Pakistan Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Hina Rabbani Khar in Dialogue
Her Excellency Hina Rabbani Khar: [Reading aloud the title of EIR and Schiller Institute Special Reports,] The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge.
Michelle Rasmussen: Yes. I’m going to give this to you. I would like to say that on behalf of the Schiller Institute, I’m so honored that [Chargé d’Affaires of the Embassy of Pakistan in Denmark] Dr. Shomaila Usman invited us to have a dialogue with Your Excellency Minister Khar, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, and I want to just give a short introduction of Helga Zepp-LaRouche. She founded the Schiller Institute in 1984, and she has been its international chairwoman. She was married to the late American economist and statesman Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., who died at the age of 96 in 2019.
Since the 1970s, they have led an international campaign for creating a new, just world economic order. Then, with the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, they proposed to build a Eurasian Land-Bridge across Eurasia, which they also called the New Silk Road. And the principle is “Peace Through Economic Development.”
This principle is embedded in Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche’s Ten Principles for a New International Security and Development Architecture, which was her response to the crisis that we’re facing, the world crisis, with escalating war and the consequences.
So, I give the word to you, Minister Khar.
Minister Khar: Thank you. Well, because we have the time that we have, I really want to be here to be able to exchange and let this be an interactive discussion. And anything you’d particularly like me to touch upon, whether it’s the regional situation; whether it’s how we, what is called the “rest”—which is not the West—look at what’s happening in the West, because we do have a view on what’s happening. [laughs]
I was just at the European Council on Foreign Relations. I was asked this question about, “Oh, what will Pakistan choose? How will you see it?” But, I said, “How did we end up with a world in which sovereign countries are asked, ‘Which side are you on?’ We’re on our own side! We don’t have to pick a side, we’ve already picked a side: Our side is the Pakistan side.” And sometimes, our interests, our value system is going to be aligned with what one country is trying to project in the world or do in the world, and sometimes it will be with another country. And sometimes it will be with one set of countries, and sometimes another.
But the whole thing, which in some way threatens us right now, is that in the last many decades, post-1945, I think we were all told in the developing world that we are part of a global village and whether your companies are ready for it or not, free trade is the way to go, open up your markets, free flow of people, information, investment, and all of that. And suddenly, we’re told, “No, no, no. Now, we need to build fences, and some of them are good investments, and some are bad; in some trade is good, and in some, is bad.”
So, it seems quite dichotomous, and a little bit—I won’t use the word that comes to my mind—so that’s where we are.
And the other thing that I think we have to respect, is that each one of us, each country—and this is what is supposed to enrich the multilateral fora—has its own lessons that we’ve learned from how some decisions have been taken in the world.
Now, the two interventions—especially the two interventions, one in Afghanistan, which was in our backyard, and it has been 40 years of one intervention or the other, of one player or the other—those have been very costly. The world’s attention moves away, the cameras move away, but the chaos from those interventions remains!
And the impact and the repercussions, and currently the push factors, which have been celebrated, because I was at the Doha Forum on Afghanistan, that the Security Council, and the Secretary General organized; and many countries were celebrating over there. “No, we have not failed! We have held on to sanctions, and we have made sure that the banking channels are not working, and we have made sure that they don’t have access to their reserves.” So, I said, “Well, that’s quite like strangulation of an economy, and if we’ve come to a point that we’re celebrating that girls who cannot go to school, can also not be fed, is that our answer to a regime that we don’t agree with? And many of us don’t.”
So that’s where we are. When it comes to a country like Pakistan, at best a middle-power country, we have many challenges: such as to feed our children, such as to educate them, such as to develop them, such as to make sure that our GDP per capita increases. And in the midst of these challenges, we have the overhanging, not challenge, but catastrophic events led by climate change. You have also, COVID, which exposed to all of us, that we can’t secure ourselves within our borders. Borders don’t hold, when you have pandemics and when you have climate change. And what we do cannot have an impact on how the impact of those catastrophic events are going to be honored! No matter, even if you go completely green, today, we will still be at the receiving end!
So, it feels rather sad—and a little bit immature—to think that at this time, when the world should be getting together and saying, “OK, what do we do, at an international level, in terms of regulation for artificial intelligence; regulation and encouragement for climate change; and for any next big event that we might be facing?”, we are very, very busy right now, trying to divide the world further and further into pieces.
That’s my two minutes.
Zepp-LaRouche: Well, first, let me express my happiness to be able to speak with you. I have heard a lot about you, and I think that it’s a very good occasion.
I’m extremely worried about the danger of world war, which is very immediate and the danger that the combination of the escalation of the Ukraine crisis and the effort to establish Global NATO is really increasing the tension in the world to a point that world war is quite possible. That’s one big subject.
But I don’t want to only focus on that, because, at the same time, I think we have an incredible potential, because the Non-Aligned Movement, which was more or less out of action after the—you should know that my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, developed the idea of an International Development Bank, in 1975, and we discussed this with all the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement, which adopted practically that proposal at their Colombo, Sri Lanka summit in 1976.
And at that time, it did not function, despite the fact that the vast majority of the world wanted to have a new world economic order, because the powers that be destabilized all the countries participating: Indira Gandhi [India] was destabilized; Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike [Sri Lanka] was gotten out of office. I know that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto [Pakistan] was also having a very tragic history. And so, for a long time, this Non-Aligned Movement was not really a factor in the world.
But I think in the recent years, mainly because of the Belt and Road Initiative, the fact is that now there is a potential for real development. For example, in Pakistan, there’s the CPEC, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is one expression of that, just one example. But there is right now, a complete revival of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Spirit of Bandung [initiated at a meeting of Asian and African nations, mostly newly independent, on April 18–24, 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia]. The idea that it is possible to end colonialism once and for all, is back.
And I think that there is a tremendous potential in that, because if you only look at the world from the standpoint of the Global North, and its conflict with Russia and China, it almost looks very hopeless. Because if the world falls into totally separate blocs, I agree with Dr. Mahathir of Malaysia, that that embodies the danger of World War III as well.
So, I think that the Global South, the countries of the Global South, that represent the vast majority of the human species, and who are right now in an upbeat mood, as you can see by the fact that 30 members have applied to become members of the BRICS, for example; I think the Global South has to have a much stronger voice, because as President Sukarno [Indonesia] and Prime Minister Nehru [India] said in Bandung, if it comes to a world war, it will affect the Global South as much as the Global North, and people may die a little bit later, but they will die as well.
So, I think that gives the Global South the absolute right to speak out and make their voice heard. And that’s why I have proposed this new, global security and development architecture, with a very concrete proposal of ten principles, which—and I know that the time now is too short—but I would like to bring it to your attention, because I think that that is something which urgently needs to be put in the discussion. Because, at the verge of World War III, and at the verge of the danger of a collapse of the financial system of the Trans-Atlantic world, it is really the question: Are we, as the only creative species existing—or that we know of—are we capable of giving ourselves an order which allows the survival of all nations and the development of all nations? So this is what I think.
Minister Khar: Absolutely, I could not agree with you more. And I think this gets reflected everywhere. I was at the European Council on Foreign Relations just yesterday: And it was quite funny, because I spoke about what I thought was just common logic, basic logic. And everybody came to me and said, “It was so refreshing to hear your perspective.” I thought it was very unrefreshing. It should have been the most common of—.
So, as you were speaking, I was writing. I’m going to write an article on the South is the new North. So, in some ways we are reminding the world of the lessons that we were taught, which we cannot unlearn, now. And in some ways, we cannot run into, or waltz happily into conflicts.
So I look at it as competition, changing it to confrontation, then, perhaps, converting into conflict. And the others see what we are seeing—that what is missing is cooperation; it’s just completely out! It’s almost like you cannot cooperate as a world, that you divide into two separate parts.
So, I think what I will do, I will read your Ten Principles, and I think it will be really worth our while to try and absorb it, and also put it in our thinking, and in our formulation and introduce it to our Foreign Office, and then, of course, there is The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge….
