NEW DELHI, 3 April 2007 — South Asia’s expanding but underperforming SAARC grouping needs to work harder and overcome internal rivalries to boost regional cooperation, officials said yesterday on the eve of a summit.
“We are at a defining moment in SAARC history,” External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee said ahead of the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit today and tomorrow.
“We have a collective opportunity to leapfrog and undertake a quantum jump for development,” he said, calling for member states to set aside bilateral tensions and model infrastructure links on those of the European Union or the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).
The ministers met yesterday to prepare for the regional summit in which terrorism will be a key topic, and welcomed Afghanistan into the group.
SAARC is made up of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Afghanistan will also be formally inducted into the bloc at the summit.
The grouping was set up in 1985 as a collective development platform to do business with wealthier cousins, such as ASEAN, but scant progress has been registered between the region of 1.4 billion people.
Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury, Bangladesh’s interim foreign minister, also echoed concerns over lackluster progress.
“We have to interact between ourselves. We must expand our connectivity ... and develop a South Asian identity,” he said following the summit agenda-setting talks between the ministers.
SAARC members, he said, “have proceeded with circumspection” when it came to cooperation.
A South Asian Free Trade Agreement came into effect last year, but Pakistan’s refusal to grant India Most Favored Nation trading status has helped keep intra-regional trade mired at five percent of the countries’ total.
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri said the peace process with archrival India, launched in January 2004, would give “furtherance to the SAARC process.”
Senior defense officials from Pakistan and India are to meet later this week for talks on possible troop cuts at the Siachen Glacier, an Indian official said yesterday.
In a significant development, the SAARC foreign ministers yesterday took a defining step to promote greater mental connectivity in South Asia by deciding to grant special stickers to 50 journalists from each member country that will enable them to move freely across the region.
“They decided that 50 journalists from each country of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation will be given SAARC stickers for freer travel in the region,” Menon told reporters at the end of the daylong meeting here yesterday.
The ministers directed immigration officials of each country to meet within two months and flesh out the modalities of the SAARC sticker, Menon said.
The visa stickers will be issued by the respective governments. “The decision will be that of the government,” he said.
In the afternoon, the South Asian Free Media Association (SAFMA), which concluded its two-day conclave yesterday, had vigorously pushed for SAARC stickers for 50 journalists from the mainstream media so that they don’t have to suffer cumbersome procedures of intelligence clearance for visas.
Earlier in the day, Mukherjee told the SAFMA conclave that SAARC foreign ministers had decided to remove restrictions before the next meeting of the council of ministers, which is expected around November.
“We have decided to remove restrictions before the next meeting of the council of ministers,” Mukherjee, who took over as chair of the SAARC council of ministers, told journalists at a meeting.
