Asia Times: Can SAARC succeed?



	September 25, 1999	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

Can SAARC succeed?
By Akhilesh Upadhyay

KATHMANDU - Last year it was the nuclear tests - first set off by India and later matched by Pakistan - which threatened SAARC, the regional grouping of seven South Asian countries. This year it is Kargil.

Regional unity is regularly tested by the two hostile neighbors, but it was at the SAARC summit in Colombo last year that the Indian and Pakistani prime ministers tried to heal their rift in bilateral meetings on the fringes of the conference.

Although the 14-year-old group has yet to grow beyond infancy, regional leaders realize it offers them the only permanent forum to forge common positions. It also provides an opportunity to sort out bilateral differences.

''Just before the Colombo Summit last year, the nuclear tests took place and there were fears that the summit could be affected,'' recalled SAARC Secretary-General Nihal Rodrigo. As it turned out, tensions ''didn't affect SAARC activities'' and, building on the bonhomie established in Colombo, the Indian prime minister made a historic bus journey to meet his Pakistani counterpart in Lahore in February 1999.

It is too early to say if fence-mending exercises will be on the agenda of Indian and Pakistani delegations to the upcoming 12th SAARC Summit in Kathmandu in November, but SAARC officials are definite the summit is ''very much on'', notwithstanding the recent fighting in Kargil.

Officials at the SAARC Secretariat in Nepal's capital city say they even expect to ''cover new ground'' at the annual meeting of SAARC members, which include Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Nepal's Foreign Minister Ram Sharan Mahat, who has just completed his pre-summit tour of South Asian capitals, was brimming with confidence. ''We have been able to sell our economic agenda which has been welcomed by member countries as refreshing. There were apprehensions after Kargil but both Pakistan and India have pledged total support to make the summit a success.''

Four years ago the grouping took the first step to economic cooperation when it ratified the South Asian Preferential Trade Agreement. But the ''pace of cooperation is slow'', observed Rodrigo, SAARC secretary general, explaining that ''unlike other regions, SAARC's problem of asymmetry is huge''.

The pressure and perils of domestic politics have held up the process of economically integrating the region, home to one fifth of the world's population, and poor and marginalized.

A group entrusted with conducting a comprehensive study of the prospects of SAARC warned last year that South Asia would get further marginalized unless it took urgent measures to catch up with the rest of the world.

The world trading system is in the process of being divided into three mega-groupings centred in Europe, the Americas and the Asia-Pacific and these, the report argued, are designed mainly to bolster their competitive positions through expanding the scale of the markets and in mobilizing larger resources for research and development.

The report warned: ''Those outside the megagroupings, which include the South Asian countries, are being progressively marginalized in the world economy. Their option is either to join one or more of these groupings - which in not feasible because they are either not welcome or have to pay an entry fee which they can ill afford - or form groupings of their own to place themselves in a better bargaining position to come to terms with the megagroupings.''

For a second straight year, the ambitious recommendations of the report will set the tone of the summit.

The group's report planned a three-phase unification program that sets out with the establishment of South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) by 2010, a South Asian Customs Union by 2015 and finally, a single-market South Asian Economic Union by 2020 with an integrated transport, telecom and energy infrastructures.

''South Asia has to gear up,'' Rodrigo encouraged. ''It's all about how one-fifth of the world population gels with the other four-fifths. The approach is to move ahead with both political and economic agenda together, without pursuing one at the cost of the other. These are parallel processes. One [economic cooperation] is inside SAARC and the other is a bilateral process.''

''It's trade that now attracts the world's attention,'' warned analyst Sridhar Khatri. If ''conflict-ridden Europe, where such powers as Germany and France would never see eye to eye'' can integrate, why not South Asia, he argued.

Regional leaders must allow pragmatism to take precedence over political rhetoric since a ''regional grouping is an inevitable fact in the new world order'', he said. ''Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, over 33 regional groups have been established,'' he pointed out, adding that South Asia risks further marginalization if it doesn't hurry. ''South Asia has been exceedingly slow.''

(Inter Press Service)

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