Ambassador (Retd.) Syed Tariq Fatemi was a career diplomat for over 35 years, during the course of which he held various diplomatic assignments in Pakistan Missions abroad, including Moscow (twice), New York, Washington (twice) and Beijing. He was Additional Foreign Secretary (Americas and Europe Division) and later worked in the Prime Minister’s Office, in charge of Foreign Affairs, Defense and Defense Production. In 1999, he was promoted to the highest rank in the country’s civil service, that of a Federal Secretary.
A delegate to UN General Assembly Sessions from 1982 to 1986, he also attended numerous Non-Aligned and OIC Conferences, while also being a member of the UN sponsored Geneva negotiations on Afghanistan.
He served as High Commissioner (Ambassador) of Pakistan to Zimbabwe, with concurrent accreditation to Angola, Botswana, Namibia and Zambia. Later, he served as Ambassador to the United States, Jordan, Belgium and Luxembourg and finally, to the European Union (Brussels), from where he retired in 2004.
On retirement, he taught at the Foreign Service Academy, the National Defense University, the Administrative Staff College and other institutions. He also wrote a weekly column for five years for the daily “Dawn” and later for “The Express Tribune”, on national security issues. He is also a co-author of the Brookings Institution’s Book: “The future of Pakistan”. He is fluent in Russian and Bengali.
In June 2013, Ambassador Tariq Fatemi was appointed as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, in which position he continued to work till April 2017.
