France has decided not to help Pakistan upgrade its fleet of Mirage fighter jets, air defense system and Agosta 90B class submarines, a direct consequence of Prime Minister Imran Khan’s strong criticism of French President Emmanuel Macron’s defense of the Right to mock religion after the murder of a French school teacher, people familiar with the matter said.
France has also told Qatar, one of the countries that bought the Rafale fighter jets, not to allow Pakistani-born technicians to work with the plane over concerns that they could leak technical information about the fighter to Islamabad, as the Omnidirectional plane is the Front Line Fighter of India. Pakistan is known for sharing vital defense data with China in the past.
Paris has already started putting Pakistani asylum claims under close scrutiny in light of the strained ties between the two countries and the stabbing incident in front of the former Paris office of the controversial Charlie Hebdo magazine. In September, Ali Hassan, an 18-year-old Pakistani origin, stabbed two people with a butcher knife outside the magazine’s former office, unaware that the magazine had been taken down. His father, who lives in Pakistan, later told a local news channel that his son had “done a great job” and is “very happy” about the attack.
India’s Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla was briefed on the French government’s decisions when he visited Paris on October 29 after New Delhi criticized the personal attacks on President Macron. France also assured Shringla that it is very sensitive to the security concerns of its strategic ally and has issued instructions on keeping Pakistani-born technicians away from the Rafale fighter jet under the export control regime in light of concerns from Indian security that has inducted the Rafale fighters into India. Air Force.
The French government’s decision not to upgrade the Mirage III and Mirage 5 fighter jets could seriously affect the Pakistani Air Force, which has had around 150 Mirage fighter jets made by French firm Dassault Aviation. However, only half of them are useful.
Pakistan has been buying Mirage jets for decades, some of them scrapped by other countries, according to a 2018 AFP report, and it has a facility outside Islamabad to restore old fighter jets to keep them flying. Diplomats in New Delhi and Paris told the Hindustan Times that Pakistan had recently requested improvements from France to keep the fighter jets aloft. “The request has been rejected,” said a diplomat in Paris.
A similar request to improve the Franco-Italian air defense system has also been denied.
The diplomats said that a third request from Pakistan to upgrade its Agosta 90B-class submarines with air independent propulsion (AIP) systems that would allow them to stay underwater for longer was also rejected by France.
Pakistan has three Agosta 90B submarines: Khalid, Saad and Hamza.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel had previously rejected a similar request for the supply of AIP systems to upgrade the submarines in Pakistan’s inventory due to its role in promoting terrorism, in particular Islamabad’s lack of cooperation in identifying the perpetrators of the truck bomb attack on the German Embassy in Kabul in May 2017.
The French government’s decisions were made shortly after Prime Minister Khan, along with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, led the indictment against President Macron after his statement about the beheading of a teacher near the school where he had shown the his students caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. considered blasphemous by Muslims.
Prime Minister Khan continued his harsh criticism with an open letter to the leaders of Muslim-majority countries, calling on them to unite against “growing Islamophobia in non-Muslim states.” Pakistan’s National Assembly went one step further by passing a government-backed resolution calling for the revocation of Pakistan’s envoy to Paris. He later realized that Pakistan had not had an ambassador in Paris for three months.
On the streets of Pakistan, there have been calls for a boycott of French products. Tehreek-e-Labaik Pakistan, a hard-line Islamist group, which held a sit-in in Islamabad for republishing the cartoons in France, revealed last week that the government had agreed to boycott French goods. The group had made public an agreement with the signatures of the federal minister for religious affairs and the interior minister that accepted the boycott.
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