Nations helping Pakistan cope with major floods are arranging new talks in New York in September and in Brussels the month afterward to assess the response, a senior official said. The talks would follow a gathering last week at the United Nations, which raised more than 200 million dollars more to assist Pakistan with its worst-ever floods that have affected 20 million people.
"The world is realising that this is not just a flood, this is a mega-flood, this is a flood of the century," Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told "The Charlie Rose Show" on US public television. Qureshi said he, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "discussed another possibility of an international event on September 19 here in New York."
"We have also agreed to an event in Brussels in the European Union," Qureshi said in the interview broadcast over the weekend. A September 19 event in New York would come at the start of the UN General Assembly, an annual time of speeches and meetings that draw some of the world's top leaders to the world body's headquarters.
Brussels was already scheduled to hold a meeting in October of the Friends of Democratic Pakistan, a forum set up in 2008 to support the country key to global efforts against extremism as it shed a decade of military-backed rule. Ban and Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy on Afghanistan and Pakistan, have said that the floods would likely become a new focus of the talks.
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