SAARC dumps early summit amid Indo-Pak tensions

SAARC dumps early summit amid Indo-Pak tensions

COLOMBO (AFP): Bilateral bickering between India and Pakistan is holding up a summit of a seven-nation regional grouping which is already a year overdue, Sri Lanka's foreign minister said on Monday.

The summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) was due to be held in Nepal in November 1999, but an escalation of clashes along the India-Pakistan border prevented the summit from going ahead.

Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar said that there were still no prospects of an early meeting given the continuing tensions between the South Asian neighbors.

"A sense of skepticism or cynicism about the future of SAARC must not be permitted to spread," Kadirgamar said. "Given the present circumstances ... no meetings of the summit process are immediately envisaged."

However Kadirgamar, who opened an extra ordinary official- level SAARC meeting here on Monday, said the fledgling regional movement would overcome the "problems that bedevil relations among some of us."

"They are intractable, but not insoluble," Kadirgamar said. "There is a vast reservoir of goodwill among all the parties of our region which in time will propel the member states concerned to get together, to bury their differences, and move SAARC along."

SAARC secretary general, Nihal Rodrigo, said their official- level meeting was no substitute for a summit and cautioned that they should forge closer regional ties in the face of challenges posed by globalization.

"The meeting being inaugurated is meant to promote a collective encounter of the functional kind, it is not meant to delve deep into a review of its past performance nor to make philosophical projections into the future," he said.

Rodrigo said there was a lack of cooperation among member states and attributed it to a "want of closer encounters of a practical kind."

India has also been reluctant to attend a summit with Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in October 1999.

Sri Lanka's foreign minister urged the officials to make a strong recommendation on time frames for a South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA). SAARC had earlier set a 2001 deadline for a framework treaty on free trade.

However, Asian diplomats attending the three-day meeting here said it was a formidable challenge to meet that deadline given the internal problems.

Sri Lanka which currently holds SAARC'S rotating chairmanship remained optimistic for the future of the organization which was formed in 1985, but has little to show by way of results.

"Whatever the political climate may be at a given point of time, a sense of South Asia is clearly evident among our peoples, and is bound to grow," Kadirgamar said.