SCO for coordinated fight against Covid

Sandeep Dikshit

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, May 13

The Covid pandemic along with terrorism against the backdrop of the two horrific attacks on a maternity hospital and Gurdwara Har Rai Sahab, both in Kabul, dominated the videoconferencing of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Foreign Ministers from India, Pakistan, China, Russia and four Central Asian countries.

The SCO meeting took place days after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo initiated a videoconferencing of his counterparts from India, Israel, Brazil, South Korea, Japan and Australia where attempts were made to corner China.

In contrast, an SCO joint declaration, also endorsed by India, strongly called for centrality of the UN system in combating Covid and noted the need for effective cooperation with the WHO and other international bodies.

In a rare exception, the SCO did not become a battleground over Kashmir. Pakistan’s veteran Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi eschewed the K word and instead spoke allegorically.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said, “Terrorism continues to be the overwhelming threat to security and stability in the SCO region and would require collective action.”

The US-led interaction on Monday saw attempts to blame China for the spread of the disease and hiding its initial spread. At the SCO meet, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov came to China’s defence. “We have to state that even in the conditions of a pandemic, our American colleagues and their allies do not abandon their attempts to escalate confrontation, to use the current situation to impose their point of view, which they call an order-based on rules. As you know, they invent the rules themselves,” Lavrov said while dismissing the accusations against China as “baseless”.