The Hindu : SAARC full agenda seems to be elusive

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Aug 30, 2002

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SAARC full agenda seems to be elusive

By Amit Baruah

NEW DELHI Aug. 29. Is being able to meet together an achievement? Or is imparting content to meetings more important? Senior diplomats attending the recent SAARC Council of Ministers meeting in Kathmandu took the view that the very fact that the SAARC summit took place in January and the Foreign Ministers met last week is in itself an achievement.

The fact that the SAARC process was derailed following the October 1999 coup in Pakistan is well known. It took nearly three years for the SAARC presidency to pass from Sri Lanka in 1998 to Nepal in 2002 - the 10th SAARC summit was held in Colombo in July 1998 and the 11th in Kathmandu in June 2002.

While meeting in itself is welcome, what about the content of the declarations that are issued from time to time by the wise men and women of South Asia? That the SAARC process is weak in content and SAARC leaders are content to tread the beaten path was evident from the fact that the formal meetings attended by the Foreign Ministers and the Foreign Secretaries tended to last for but a few hours - a full-agenda seemed to be elusive.

``There is no need for the Foreign Secretaries and the Foreign Ministers to meet for two full days each. All these meetings can be telescoped into one-day affairs,'' a diplomat who has been associated with the SAARC process for long said. "After all, we are poor countries and it costs a lot of money to host these meetings,'' the diplomat added.

It is instructive to look at some of the detailed declarations issued by the SAARC leaders over the years. At the 11th SAARC summit held in January this year, the leader said: "The Heads of State or Government reaffirmed their commitment to the promotion of mutual trust and understanding and, recognising that the aims of promoting peace, stability, and amity and accelerated socio-economic co-operation may best be achieved by fostering good neighbourly relations, relieving tensions and building confidence, agreed that a process of informal consultations could prove useful in this regard.''

While the declaration in Kathmandu is unexceptionable, this is what South Asian leaders said after the 10th summit held in Colombo in 1998: "The Heads of State or Government reiterated their commitment to the promotion of mutual trust and understanding and, recognising that the aims of promoting peace, stability and amity....'' And, this is what the Ninth summit declaration said in Male in 1997: "The Heads of State or Government recalled their commitment to the promotion of mutual trust and understanding and, recognising that the aims of promoting peace, stability and amity....''Clearly, what we are seeing here is a case of more of the same.

Once agreed upon, the diplomats of the SAARC countries are quite content to repeat the same formulation by altering a word here or there.

Negotiating fresh phraseology would require considerable time and effort and so repetition is an easy way out.

The people of South Asia deserve better. If regional cooperation has to have meaning, SAARC must have more content.

Here, economic content is most important - will SAARC be able to agree on an eventual economic union? Or, is the organisation condemned to repeating the same phrases year after year?

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