ISLAMABAD: Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif on Friday confirmed that Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa would be traveling to Saudi Arabia next week for a crucial conference on the Saudi-led military alliance.
He confirmed the visit of Pakistan’s top civil and military leadership to Riyadh after the meeting of National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, which met here to discuss the Saudi alliance.
The in-camera meeting, however, was marred by hot exchanges between Committee Chairman Khusru Bakhtiar and PTI MNA Shireen Mazari, who eventually walked out of the meeting in protest when the panel refused to take up her bill seeking compulsory parliamentary ratification of the government’s multilateral agreements.
Before storming out of the committee’s meeting, Mazari also had a heated debate with the foreign minister. The PTI MNA said the government’s move to block her bill showed that the civil and military bureaucracy never wanted parliamentary oversight of foreign affairs or national security.
She insisted that in real democracies, seeking parliament’s ratification for international agreements was a normal practice.