December 31, 2001	Monday	Shawwal 15, 1422

NEW DELHI: Yet another summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) has been jeopardized by hostilities between India and Pakistan, the two largest members of the seven-nation regional grouping.

The fly in the ointment this time is the aborted attempt by five members of a suicide squad to blow up the sprawling, sandstone building which houses India’s Parliament. This ornate edifice was built by British colonials 80 years ago as the Central Legislative Assembly for territories that later became Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

In all, 14 people died in the Dec 13 attack, foiled after security personnel fought a pitched gun-battle outside the several entrances to the circular building. The dead included all the members of the suicide squad who were identified by Indian police as Pakistan nationals.

The upshot is that the background for the scheduled Jan 4-6 summit in Kathmandu, the first in the new millennium, is provided by the spectacle of the two quarrelsome neighbours imposing sanctions against each other and amassing troops along their 1,800 mile long border.

Far from SAARC’s objective of fostering historic and cultural affinity and promoting regional cooperation, the two countries are now assessing how much economic damage has been inflicted mutually by Thursday’s tit-for-tat ban on civilian flights over each other’s territory.

President Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee have confirmed that they would attend the summit but there is little chance of them meeting on the sidelines.

Already the summit is overdue by two years. India requested the original December 1999 date postponed because of the military coup in Pakistan which saw Musharraf seizing power from former prime minister Nawaz Sharif in October that year. Apart from Nepal, where SAARC is to have its permanent secretariat, the other members are Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bhutan and Bangladesh.

On Friday, India said it would allow President Musharraf and his delegation to fly over India to reach Kathmandu for the summit in a slight easing of a diplomatic offensive aimed at getting Islamabad to hand over for trial leaders allegedly behind the Dec 13 attack.

India has also announced that it would extend by five days a Jan 1 deadline it had set for halving the number of personnel in each other’s missions both of which have been unilaterally downgraded by India to the level of deputy high commissioner. While SAARC summits are supposed to avoid contentious bilateral issues, the special focus on terrorism at Kathmandu could prove explosive in the current Indo-Pakistan context. Already the Indian side wants to include “cross-border” in a proposed resolution on terrorism.

Musharraf has referred to the Kashmir issue as the ”unfinished business of Partition” and has called the Kashmiri Mujahideen “freedom fighters.” But Musharraf has condemned the Dec 13 attack on the Indian parliament and clamped down on two organizations named by India as responsible for it - the Jaish-e-Mohammad and the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba.

The US, which depends heavily on Pakistan in its ”war against terrorism” in Afghanistan, declared the two organizations as terrorist outfits on Wednesday.

Apart from terrorism the summit is due to discuss a boost in regional trade from the present 3.4 per cent of global trade, through the establishment of a South Asia Free Trade Area (SAFTA). India already accords most favoured nation status to Pakistan but this has not been matched by Islamabad mostly as a result of the conflict over Kashmir.

Relations between India and Pakistan have proved so inimical to regional cooperation in what is one of the world’s poorest regions and home to a fifth of humanity that diplomats have even suggested the creation of an alternate trading group that excludes Pakistan. SAARC summits in the past have been threatened by the May 1998 tit-for-tat nuclear tests that the two countries set off and by the 1999 undeclared war that the two countries fought at Kargil on the Line of Control.

On the other hand the 1998 summit in Colombo actually improved rapport between Sharif and Vajpayee and paved the way for the bus ride that Vajpayee undertook to Lahore in February 1999.—Dawn /InterPress Service.