Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari of #Pakistan is speaking @CFR_org . Both his mother and grandfather were Prime Ministers who were assassinated. His nation "faces a catastrophe of Biblical, apocalyptic proportions. The monsoon rains came in June, and..."
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2/"...went on...until the end of August.
"A 100 km lake formed in the middle of my country.
"More than a month on we're still in an ecological disaster. One in 7 people affected -- 33 million people. Homeless, lost and staring death in the face."
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3/ "We're still in the rescue and relief phase..but we expect one crisis to follow another."
Epidemics are starting.
"Four million acres of standing crop are devastated...We are staring into the face of epidemic catastrophe and food crisis."
But aid is not coming.
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4/ Bhutto says <1% of the CO2 in Earth's atmosphere has come from #Pakistan but it has been devastated by #ClimateChange -- "Where is climate justice," he asks.
We need $30 billion to rebuild, he says.
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5/ Bhutto suggests debt swapping might save #Pakistan -- forgiving the nation's outstanding debts so that it can rebuild. "This is a global crisis, and it's solution is surely global. There is irony that those that contribute the very least CO2 are the worst affected."
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Health, food and economic crises are ensuring, even as much of #Pakistan is still under water. Bhutto says meanwhile he is trying to maintain peace with hostile #India "which is increasingly becoming an anti-Muslim State."
Suggests USA can "engage" Pakistan now.
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7/ Bhutto: "When times are tough, & people are hungry, they tend to grasp onto backward things." He is responding to questions abt #Afghanistan opposition to women's rights & spillover of such anti-woman ideas in #Pakistan . Notes link between economic horror & female oppression.
8/ Bhutto's mother & grandfather were assassinated -- risk for him? "I didn't choose this life. It chose me," he says, quoting his mother to explain why he is on the political stage, despite risks in #Pakistan .
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