SAARC suffers for members’ indolence

Sluggishness creeps into the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation with no political impetus from top leaders of all eight member countries as they collectively failed to meet in the last five years in violation of a commitment the countries jointly made in 2014 to hold summit ‘every two years or earlier’. 
The SAARC Council of Ministers, comprising foreign ministers of the member countries, and the standing committee, comprising foreign secretaries, also did not meet in the last two years in breach of a formal instruction from the heads of the member countries to convene their respective meeting ‘at least once a year’. 
‘We feel lack of political impetus in the SAARC process as no summit was held after 2014 and no meetings of the council of ministers and the standing committee in last two years,’ a senior South Asian diplomat with knowledge of the matter said.
‘As a result, SAARC is going through a bureaucratic process limiting its activities in only routing things,’ the diplomat said.
It is a clear violation of the Kathmandu Declaration 2014, said the official. 
Most of the commitments made in the declaration adopted by the heads of the states and the governments, at the eighteenth summit held in Nepal in 26-27 November 2014, also remain unfulfilled for lack of impulsion from the political leadership, said a Bangladesh diplomat, also familiar with the SAARC process. 
‘SAARC is very much a political organisation which has been suffering from lack of commitment since the beginning,’ Bangladesh Enterprise Institute acting president M Humayun Kabir told New Age on Saturday, adding that the summit of the heads of governments, the council of minister and the standing committee are interconnected in the making of SAARC decisions.
‘South Asian leaders require reinvesting their commitment if they really want to revitalise SAARC,’ Kabir, who was a secretary to the foreign ministry, said.
The SAARC leaders committed in 2014 to substantially enhance regional connectivity in a seamless manner through building and upgrading roads, railways, waterways infrastructure, energy grids, communications and air links to ensure smooth cross-border flow of goods, services, capital, technology and people emphasising the need for linking South Asia with contiguous regions.
A diplomat regretted that there was hardly any progress at the regional level as a section of influential member countries were keen to keep the matters limited within their immediate neighbourhood leaving out the requirement of the region. 
The question of connectivity through multimodal transportation remained limited to conducting studies, said an official. 
A trial-run of movement of vehicles at the sub-regional level BBIN involving Bangladesh, Bhutan, Indian and Nepal could not complete its expected circuit as Bhutan backtracked from the process in the last minute. 
Fulfilling the leaders’ commitment to accelerate free trade in goods and services and implementation of trade facilitation measures for eventually installing ‘South Asian Economic Union in a phased and planned manner through a Free Trade Area, a Customs Union, a Common Market, a Common Economic and Monetary Union’ for ensuring ‘equitable benefits of free trade arrangements’ remains elusive for absence of meetings of the policymakers, says an official.
Discussion on installation of South Asian Free Trade Area did not proceed much while people in the region were yet to get benefit of SAARC Preferential Trading Arrangement as all member countries still maintained separate restricted lists of goods and services, officials said.
In the cultural area, Mahasthangarh, an iconic archaeological side in Bogura of Bangladesh, was declared the cultural capital of SAARC for 2016-17, an official said, but Bangladesh had to stop in the last minute in January 2017 from arranging the launching programme due to objections from India, Bangladesh cultural ministry officials said. 
Bhutan was awarded approval to host SAARC cultural capital for 2017-18, but it could not arrange programmes for unknown reasons. India has proposed to host the first SAARC cultural capital in 2018-19. 
According to the SAARC charter, presence of all the heads of the governments or heads of the states of the member countries is mandatory for holding the summit.
The 19th SAARC summit was scheduled to be held in Pakistan capital Islamabad in November 9-10, 2016. The summit was postponed as Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Bhutan and India had refrained from participating in the summit when India sought to isolate Pakistan in the wake of attack on a military base in the disputed region of Kashmir, which killed 18 Indian soldiers. 
Sri Lanka and the Maldives are also members with Nepal being the current SAARC chair for last five years. 
Founded in Dhaka on 8 December 1985, SAARC is the only regional body in which both India and Pakistan, which were engaged in armed conflicts in 1965, 1971, 1999 and in January this year, are members. 
‘SAARC couldn’t proceed due to hostility mainly between India and Pakistan,’ Bangladesh Institute of International and Strategic Studies chairman Munshi Faiz Ahmad observed. 
Decisions at all levels in SAARC are set to be taken on the basis of unanimity.
In absence of political thrust, the SAARC secretariat in Kathmandu of Nepal coordinates operations of the old initiatives, including South Asian University in India and SAARC Agriculture Centre and South Asian Regional Standards Organisation in Bangladesh, as there was no new initiative since 2014.
The last meeting of the SAARC Council of Ministers, which is the policy making body of the organisation, was held in 2016. Since then, Bangladesh has not sent ministers at the policy level meetings while India has kept its presence at as low a level as possible. 
SAARC Standing Committee, assigned to submit periodic reports to Council of Ministers and make reference to it as and when necessary for decisions on policy matters, too held its last meeting in 2016.
Programming Committee, comprising joint secretary and additional secretary level officers of the member-countries, now looks after the operations of SAARC with concurrence of their respective government. 
Incumbent SAARC secretary general Amjad Hussain B Sial, who happens to be a Pakistani diplomat, completed two years of his three-year tenure. He visited six, out of eight, member countries as Bangladesh and Indian authorities could not make room for his visit due to ‘busy schedule’ of the dignitaries of the two countries. 
SAARC Secretariat is likely to begin soon the process of selecting the next secretary general from Sri Lanka.

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net