Ambassador: Lukashenko invited to visit Pakistan

"We are currently working on organising the visit of Belarus’ Foreign Minister to Pakistan, and visits of other senior officials will follow then. We have received a new letter from the Prime Minister of Pakistan addressed to the President of Belarus, stating that the country is looking forward to his visit,” the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan to Belarus, Sajjad Haider Khan, said during his meeting with the Chairperson of the Council of the Republic of the National Assembly, Natalya Kochanova

The Pakistani diplomat recalled that the Prime Minister of his country agreed with the President of Belarus to jointly develop relations during their meeting at the SCO summit in Samarkand and the CICA summit in Astana.

“Over the past two years, I have tried very hard to develop co-operation between our countries in all directions,” Sajjad Haider Khan told Natalya Kochanova. “In 2015, I took an active part in the opening of the Embassy of Pakistan in Belarus. I was on a mission in Berlin then, but I came here to help resolve some issues related to the diplomatic mission’s work. Actually, over the past 7-8 years, huge efforts have been made to develop relations in all spheres, and we now have a joint working group and a commission that are actively involved in the development of relations. Our Memorandum of Understanding contains eighty agreements, and they act as a solid basis for the development of our relations in the future.”

Last month, the joint commission focused on the obstacles that the countries have faced recently, and the diplomat stressed that both sides are working intensively to resolve the problems.

“Unfortunately, exports of the most popular Belarusian product – tractors – have fallen. I personally talked to an importer from Pakistan, asking him of the reasons for his decision to stop buying products. According to him, there are logistics related problems now: i.e. the cost of importing tractors has increased (a tractor that needs to be transported to Pakistan, for example, through Afghanistan or any other territory is now $4,000 more expensive than before). Nevertheless, we know that both sides are working on solving these problems,” Sajjad Haider Khan added.