The two-day summit of the eight-nation South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) closed yesterday in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo with a clarion call for greater cooperation against terrorism. As in previous years, the meeting was dominated by tensions between India and Pakistan, made worse by the bombing of Indian Embassy in Kabul in June. This was, however, the first time the Indian government had formally met the new Pakistan administration of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani. While Pakistanis continue to dismiss New Delhi’s assertion that Islamabad’s shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was behind the attack, both governments reaffirmed the four-year peace process between them should continue. Afghan President Hamid Karzai — who has himself accused Pakistan of supporting Taleban rebels — was also at the summit and also met the Islamabad government leaders for the first time. The Sri Lankans, still mired in their own troubles, deployed over 20,000 troops and police to ensure that the SAARC summit went off peacefully.
It is quite clear why terrorism, in all its bigoted and fanatical manifestations, took center stage but the summit also finally advanced another important platform on the SAARC agenda. As long ago as 1995, a regional trade pact was agreed to facilitate a greater flow of goods and services between member states, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. 13 years on, little of the agreement has been implemented in a region with a total market of over 1.5 billion people. Yet this in the end is a key ambition because with greater economic cooperation between states will come greater wealth, which will in its turn bring better education, welfare and services and so undermine the fields of poverty and ignorance from which terrorists recruit their support.
There was also an agreement to focus more closely on food and energy security. A demonstration of the impact of inadequate energy supplies came even as the delegates were going into their final session. Indian industrial giant Tata announced it was abandoning four year-old plans to invest $3 billion in a range of plants in Bangladesh because the authorities could no longer guarantee the flow of natural gas necessary to power them. This is a bitter blow to the Bangladesh Investment Authority which has worked so hard on this important deal but it clearly underlines the need for a better regional policy on energy supplies.
Delegates reached another important agreement on the establishment of emergency food aid for use in regional crises such as those which regularly afflict Bangladesh. It is a pity that SAARC did not go further and decided to establish a supranational disaster relief organization with the equipment, training and resources to go wherever it is needed. Hopefully such a facility, for which many — including this newspaper — have long argued, will be considered at next year’s summit. Despite the distractions of terrorism and the sadly inevitable Indo-Pakistani tensions, this was not a bad SAARC summit, which possibly laid the groundwork for much greater things and helped some heads of state to a better understanding of their differences.
