KARACHI, Aug 29: The two-day South Asian “Labour For Peace” conference will be held here from Sept 1, to focus on the effects of militarization and globalization, and their impact on the masses due to diversion of resources.
Unfolding the agenda of the conference being organized by the South Asian Labour Forum in collaboration with the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research, the organizers told a news conference that 41 foreign delegates from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh would participate along with Pakistani delegates.
It will be the first ever attempt to bring trade union leaders and representatives of labour-support organizations of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka on a single platform on such a large scale, to explore venues for a joint struggle for securing fundamental human rights, including the Core Labour Rights, and express their solidarity with the peace movement.
It was emphasized that renewed peace efforts between Pakistan and India need more concrete support at the grassroots level.
Political and diplomatic channels are actively busy in support of the peace initiative.
However, marginalized and working classes, in South Asia, the major victims of the strained Pak-India relations, are visibly missing from the scene.
Karamat Ali, director PILER, who was flanked by trade union leaders from different organizations pointed out that escalating conflict in the subcontinent had led to increased defence budgets at the expense of social sector spending.
“Forty per cent of world poverty is concentrated in South Asia, yet the region remains one of the most militarized areas of the world. At a time when global military expenditure is declining, the trend in South Asia has been the opposite”, he said and added that India and Pakistan fared badly in virtually all development indicators, yet defence spending as a percentage of combined expenditure on health and education, for example, had been 65 per cent in India and 125 per cent in Pakistan.
He pointed out that Pakistan government allocated merely 0.6 per cent of the GDP and three per cent of the total federal expenditure for poverty alleviation, whereas defence accounted for 5.2 per cent of the GDP and 22.8 per cent of federal spending. He said these were a few of the basic facts that illustrated the manner in which increased military spending was linked to a decrease in human development and security, and how the Indo-Pak conflict exacerbated lopsided government priorities that affected the interests of the poor and working classes. Mr Karamat Ali further said: “Militarization/nuclearization not only poses a threat to the overall wellbeing of the socially, politically and economically marginalized majority segment of the populations of the South Asian countries, but it also threatens fundamental political freedoms. Militarization has thus led to a curbing of civil liberties and has undermined citizens’ right to dissent”.
The organizers of the conference have stressed the need for the trade unions across the subcontinent to close their ranks and play their role in the struggle of the working people against militarization and towards a peaceful and economically prosperous South Asia.
