Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has been mocked online for a verbal gaffe in which he was perceived to suggest that post-war Japan and Germany had joint industries along their shared border, despite the 9,000km between them.
Imran Khan’s supposed geographic blunder happened during a joint press conference with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Monday. He was speaking in somewhat jumbled English, touting the benefits of having economic ties to defuse political tensions between neighbors.
The more trade you have with each other your ties automatically become stronger… Germany and Japan killed millions of the civilians until after the Second World War [when] they decided that they would have on border, on the border region of Germany and Japan, they had joint industries. So now there is no question of them ever having bad relations because their economic interests are tied together.
The East Asian island nation of Japan and the European power Germany were allies during WWII despite being separated by a great distance. Giving Khan the benefit of the doubt, one would presume he was referring to Japan and Germany trading with their respective neighbors – former targets of their war of aggression – to overcome the hostile attitudes after the war.
Still the way he put it gave an opportunity to many commenters to poke fun at the PM, who seemed to imply geographic proximity between the two former Axis members.
The current chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party used the opportunity to mock Khan’s apparent dearth of geographic knowledge, but was in turn quickly smacked down by the PM’s head of communications.
Khan has fallen afoul of geography in the past, referring to the continent of Africa as “an emerging country” in December, during the Envoys Conference on Economic Diplomacy in Islamabad.
The Japan-Germany snaffu did not deter President Hassan Rouhani from announcing the creation of a joint ‘reaction force’ on the (real) border between Pakistan and Iran, however.
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