May 27, 2003	Tuesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 24,1424

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ISLAMABAD, May 26: Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz said on Monday the South Asian countries should resolve all their issues on the basis of mutual respect and equality to help improve the living standards of their people.

“Let us resolve that we will work together, build our future to rekindle the hope among our people; promote trust and work for restoring peace in the region,” the minister said at a two-day regional seminar on current domestic policy, challenges and prospects in South Asia.

The seminar was attended by eminent scholars and former diplomats from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal.

He said no peace could exist nor a proposition for cooperation be tenable if the people were denied their fundamental and inviolable right of freedom.

“We will have to respect basic freedoms to create a tension-free environment. We will have to respect each other, create an environment where we treat each other with respect, equity and trust, and solve all issues in line with the wishes of our people,” he said.

He said nearly 40 per cent of the population or 515 million people of the region lived below the poverty line of less than a dollar a day. Also, the region had the highest infant mortality rate of 75 per 1,000 people and the lowest adult literacy rate of 49 per cent.

Mr Aziz said this situation was confounded by an acute disparity in income — the top 20 per cent of the population earned 40 per cent of the total income, whereas 20 per cent of those at the bottom earned 10 per cent of the total income.

He said the South Asian countries needed to work in two directions: to improve the state of human development in their own countries, on the one hand, and cooperate among themselves to increase the overall size of the economy available in the region, on the other.

The minister said there was so much that our nations could do for mutual benefit that was constantly denied to us by our enduring mistrust.

He said it was the right time for the South Asian countries to realize they had lost a lot of time in mistrust and must come forward to make better use of their resources for the well-being of their people.

He said the continuous mistrust of each other in the region resulted in a rise in security expenditures, which diverted the governments’ attention from the object of poverty alleviation.

He said it was the existence of durable peace in the region that could free the resources currently engaged in meeting the challenge of mistrust that kept us in a bind.

“I am a strong believer in the ability of economic interests to hold people together. As such, I am naturally inclined to build the case for cooperation and development as a tool to promote peace and goodwill,” he said.