Pakistan’s forgotten anti-imperial flex (1947-52)🧵 
Newly minted in ’47, Pakistan walked into the UN and began dismantling colonial trusteeship deals the Great Powers had drafted for post-war spoils. The Libya question became its proving ground.
Britain, France & the US wanted to park Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fezzan under separate Anglo-French-Italian mandates, slow-bleed colonialism dressed up as “trusteeship.” Pakistan said no.
On 21 Nov 1949 the General Assembly adopted Res 289 (IV): Libya to be a single, sovereign state no later than 1 Jan 1952. Pakistan was elected to the 5-member commission tasked with making that independence real, its first major UN committee seat.
Islamabad’s diplomats pushed for immediate elections, a unified constitution and the repatriation of wartime forced-labour Libyans still in Italy. King Idris’s coronation in Dec 1951 closed the file 3 weeks ahead of the UN deadline, 1 of the speediest decolonisations on record.
Same hall, same session. Pakistan torpedoed Rome’s bid to keep Italian Somaliland. By ’54 the UN blueprint had flipped, Somalia would graduate to full statehood in ’60, not languish under another decade of Italian “guidance.”
Eritrea was harder. Pakistan argued for outright independence, but Cold-War arithmetic favoured an Ethiopian federation. The vote slipped away, yet the record shows Pakistan alone among the smaller states refusing to trade self-determination for Western security deals.
Why it matters, because it was not charity. Pakistan saw Muslim and Third-World liberation as strategic depth, building future allies across the Mediterranean-Horn arc while cultivating an image that couldn’t be boxed in by either superpower.
The playbook blended moral clarity with procedural mastery. Draft counter-resolutions, hustled floor votes, and rallied Arab-Asian blocs that out-flanked the colonial old guard. It was lawfare before the term existed.
As per U.S. cables from 1949–51, Pakistan was flagged as among the most uncooperative Muslim states in UN votes on Libya and Somalia, its pro-independence stance consistently frustrated American and Italian diplomats.
So the next time someone paints Pakistan as a perennial client of the West, pull this ledger. In its first 5 UN years it cracked 2 imperial locks and tried a 3rd, not bad for a state that was itself only learning to stand.
Libya and Somalia owe part of their early sovereignty to Pakistani diplomats who understood that votes, not bayonets, could still redraw maps.
From Tripoli to Mogadishu the green crescent on early UN documents is the watermark of a republic whose first foreign-policy instinct was to break chains, not polish them.
From Tripoli to Mogadishu the green crescent on early UN documents is the watermark of a republic whose first foreign-policy instinct was to break chains, not polish them.
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