ISLAMABAD: Pakistan wishes to work with Japan for peace
By Jonaid Iqbal
ISLAMABAD, Aug 6: National Assembly Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain on Saturday wished Pakistan and Japan work together to make “world peace a reality”.
“We must begin this effort by inculcating in young minds the value of peace and prosperity,” he said while inaugurating here an exhibition arranged jointly by the embassy of Japan and several NGOs to mark the 60th anniversary of the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US.
“Wars bring destruction and do not solve conflicts,” the speaker said. Conflicting parties eventually have to sit at the negotiating table to find a solution so why not do that before starting a war, he observed.
Pakistan believes in peaceful dialogue to solve conflicts, he said in apparent reference to the country’s ongoing composite dialogue with India.
Chaudhry Amir Hussain expressed sympathies to the Japanese nation over the death of 214,000 people, killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after US dropped atom bombs in the two cities.
Japanese Ambassador Nobuaki Tanaka said the devastation of the two cities forged a collective desire in his nation for peace and shaped its constitution and foreign policy.
Japan firmly believes that war should never be employed to settle international disputes, he said.
He hoped the exhibition, titled “Prayer for Peace”, would help build a popular resolve to eradicate “the violence of our times.”
The speaker and the ambassador awarded shields to Shahryar Khan and Saeeda Bibi, the winners of grand prizes in the children’s paintings competition on the topic of building peace in the world.
Eight posters placed in the exhibition hall told the story of the step-by-step revival of the two bombed cities.
They show the heat blasts of super high temperature, mangled human bodies, help received from abroad for reconstruction and the slow death of a young girl, Sadako, which stirred the construction of peace memorial there.
A film Mother’s prayer showed an old mother, who had lost her son during the 1945 atomic bomb blast, trudging her way to the site of the memorial.
