PROPOSAL TO DISCUSS 11TH AMENDMENT TO INTERIM CONSTITUTION ENDORSED BY PARLIAMENT

PROPOSAL TO DISCUSS 11TH INTERIM CONSTITUTION AMENDMENT APPROVED BY PARLIAMENT UPDATE

Kathmandu, 12 Nov.: Parliament Saturday endorsed a
proposal to discuss and endorse the 11th amendment bill to the interim constitution to form an expert team to advise restructuring the present unry into a federal structure.
With the endorsement of the proposal, now the lawmakers can register amendment, if any, to the bill within a 72-hour timeframe.
The legislature was adjourned until Wednesday when the government amendment bill is expected to be approved.
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OPINION

SAARC: IS IT WORTH THE COST COST?


The 17th edition of the summit meeting of the heads of states or governments of South Asia ended Friday in the environmentally threatened but considered a tourist paradise group of islands in the Indian Ocean known as the Maldives. This is the third time that the Maldives played host to the SAARC Summit. The country had earlier hosted the 5th summit in 1990 and the 9th summit in 1997, Shyam KC writes in The Rising Nepal.
The Maldives along with Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka are the four countries which have held the regional summit three times each. Nepal and Pakistan each have held the summit twice while Bhutan has held it only once - in April last year. Thus, all seven founding members of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) have played host to the SAARC summits. The new member, Afghanistan, is the only country in the regional set-up that has yet to host a SAARC summit, and, considering the unstable political situation there, it may be sometime before Afghanistan hosts one.
White elephant
The long journey from 1985, when SAARC was formally established by the summit meeting of seven South Asian countries in Dhaka, Bangladesh, has not proved very helpful to the countries of the region. It has been over a quarter of a century since the regional body was set up, and it has proved almost to be a white elephant, despite all genuine efforts by the small countries in the region to ensure its success.
The only silver lining in the expensive SAARC summits has been the meetings that take place among the top leaders of the seven countries. And most of these useful get-togethers take place on the sidelines of the summit conference. But do such get-togethers justify the huge expenses that each of the countries incur in sending top-level delegations to the summit?
The SAARC region is among the poorest in the world, and most of the eight countries that make up the regional conclave can hardly afford to indulge in burdening their tax payers with expenses that bring little or no returns. The public money could have been better spent in areas that directly benefit their peoples instead of squandering on grandiose summit meetings.
But the regional body still has a lot of significance in the present day world and could help the peoples of the region in improving their standard of living if only the top leaders of the major countries of the region really and sincerely desire the betterment of the whole region, rather their own country.
On paper, SAARC has done much, such as the creation of SAFTA (South Asian Free Trade Area), but neither SAPTA nor SAFTA has been honestly implemented. There have been, over a period of 25 years, some major decisions by the top leaders of the region on various pressing issues such as the convention on terrorism, but what has come off it? The terrorism convention is conveniently forgotten when it suits the big powers.
There has been loud publicity over visa-free travel for the peoples of the region. But that has so far remained a mere myth. The SAARC Youth Award has been one bright spot in the otherwise dismal performance of our regional body. But even the Youth Award winners and the causes they advocate seem to be forgotten by the concerned authorities and even by the media once the awards are handed over in a blaze of publicity. Isn’t it the duty of the regional body as well as the governments to ensure that the works which the youths have done and for which they have been awarded are carried forward?
The same holds true for the SAARC summit. It gets all the publicity when dignitaries leave to take part in the regional gathering, but once the summit is over, few seem to care about its outcome. To many, including the government leaders, SAARC and the SAARC summits are rituals that must be attended to but otherwise has very little use. (The media in the region’s major countries during the present summit - as in the past ones - placed their focus on the meeting between the prime ministers of India and Pakistan than on the pressing issues facing the regional body.) Thankfully this is not the attitude of small countries like Nepal and others that make up the group.
The peoples of at least five small countries of the region had great faith in the regional set-up when it came into being in December 1985. The Cold War was still raging and there were hopes among the peoples of the region that the regional body would help catch up with the Second and First World - a distant dream. The region has plenty of natural resources and almost unlimited human resources which need to be tapped. The population in the region was almost one billion (it has now crossed the billion-mark), and with proper distribution of resources and education, the potentials were indeed mind boggling.
The peoples of the region, including those in India and Pakistan, were waiting for their leaders to assemble for common causes and lead the way, much as the European Economic Community (ECC) - which later became the European Union - has done in Europe and the way the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) had done. But the antagonistic rivalry between India and Pakistan appears to have been the main cause for SAARC’s inability to really move forward in any significant manner and deliver concrete fruits to the peoples of the region.
The regional body has held 17 summits in a span of just over 25 years. The Non-aligned Summits which began in 1961, on the other hand, has held just 15 summits in its 50 years with the last summit held in Sham El Sheikh, Egypt, in July 2009. The relevance of the Non-aligned Movement in today’s unipolar world is open to debate, and many consider the Non-aligned Summits in the present day world to be a mere waste of tax payers money, even though it did have its significance when the world was divided by the Cold War.
Bleak future
Unless SAARC makes suitable and timely reforms in its charter and paves the way for real regional cooperation (and trust), the future looks bleak for SAARC. At the end of the 17th summit, there will no doubt be a much-publicised joint statement from the heads of state and government, but will the governments of the region live by what they declare in the Maldives? If the past is any guide, there is little to hope for, and the summit like in the past will merely prove to be another burden to the tax payers of the region.
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