| December 8, 2003 | Monday | Shawwal 13, 1424 |
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Russian train bombing
Rickshaw ruckus
THE 12th Saarc summit which will be held in Islamabad in January 2004 will hopefully come as a turning point in the politics of South Asia. Since January 2000 when the 11th summit was held at Kathmandu, Saarc has failed to meet again at the heads of government level because of the impasse in India-Pakistan relations. Since the Saarc charter specifically stipulates that a summit can be held only if all members attend, the conference scheduled for January 2003 in Islamabad had to be called off when India and Bhutan failed to confirm their participation. It therefore augurs well for the peace and stability of the region that all members have now agreed to attend the summit. The fact is that politics and economics cannot be separated when it comes to inter-state relations. Although Saarc is essentially an economic grouping of seven South Asian countries, the state of their relations largely determines the progress they can make in economic cooperation. In the case of Saarc, even convening a summit meeting has posed a major problem when mistrust and tensions between members have vitiated the political climate between them. Coming against the backdrop of the confidence-building measures that India and Pakistan have undertaken in the past month or so generating goodwill in South Asia, the 12th summit can be expected to go off well. A major offshoot of the summitry will be the bilateral meeting between the Indian and Pakistani prime ministers which has been arranged on the sidelines. If this gives a fillip to Indo-Pakistan ties, its impact on Saarc will be beneficial since they are the two biggest members of the grouping and its future virtually depends on the state of their relations.
The summit is expected to focus mainly on economic cooperation. The positive aspect of Saarc has been that the seven members have continued to meet to cooperate in various sectors such as health, technology environment, media and so on. Even while relations at the highest level were making no headway, ministers and officials had continued to meet. They have paved the way for greater cooperation by setting up the infrastructure for closer interaction which would benefit tremendously once the summit gives the nod of approval. The key area on which attention is focused is free trade. The South Asia Preferential Trade Agreement, which was signed in 1993 and was to create the South Asia Free Trade Area, has still to be realized. It is said that the Safta agreement has been drafted and will be presented to the summit. This will provide for a phased liberalization of trade in the region, which in any case will not be completed by 2008 as had been originally envisaged.
It is important that the free trade area be implemented without much delay. Too much time has already been wasted and while the rest of the world has moved on, the South Asians still do not trade freely among themselves. Intra-regional trade is a paltry 3.4 per cent as compared to Asean’s 38.4 per cent, 37.3 per cent for Nafta and 63.4 per cent for the EU. In a globalized world where regimes such as the WTO determine the flow of trade to the disadvantage of the smaller developing countries, these groupings have helped many states neutralize the disadvantages of the new system. If Saarc fails to create the free trade area, its members will be the main sufferers.
FRIDAY’S suicide bombing of a train in Russia’s North Caucasus region has all the horrors of a terrorist attack: it left 42 civilians, mostly students, dead and over 160 injured. The Kremlin has blamed the attack on Chechen rebels fighting for independence from Russian rule. However, the mainstream rebel leader, Aslan Maskhadov, has rejected the allegation, saying his organization condemns attacks against innocent civilians. This is the third attack of its kind on the North Caucasus rail system passing through one of Chechnya’s neighbouring provinces in less than three months. It came just two days before parliamentary election (held yesterday) in which President Vladimir Putin’s supporters calling for intensifying Russia’s war on terror were set to win.
Independent analysts believe Friday’s suicide bombing to be the work of one or the other splinter groups within the rebel forces acting either on their own or in conjunction with Al Qaeda. If there is any truth in the latter assertion, the latest bombing once again underscores the need for a serious dialogue aimed at resolving the crisis in Chechnya, which has been bleeding since it declared independence from Moscow in 1991. The Russian armed forces’ renewed action against the rebels, initiated by Mr Putin in 1999 and followed by a controversial election that installed a pro-Moscow president in Chechnya, may have forced the breakaway republic back into the fold of the Russian federation, but Moscow’s highhanded approach has made the violence spread out of Chechnya and into Russia itself. The hostage-taking drama in a Moscow theatre last year in which 129 people were killed after security forces stormed the building, and several subsequent attacks against Russian targets, are cases in point. Mr Putin’s refusal to engage the mainstream rebel leaders in a political dialogue since the September 11 attacks in the US — and the West’s softening of its stance on the Kremlin’s excesses in Chechnya — may win him a second term in office when Russians vote in a presidential election next March, but it is unlikely to promote the prospects of peace and security in Chechnya.
RICKSHAW drivers have protested against the on-going drive by the traffic police to replace rickshaw silencers with new, environment friendly ones. The protesters have threatened to go on strike to pressure the government into stopping the campaign. This is the time for the city administration and the police to be firm so that a hundred odd rickshaw drivers do not hold the public to ransom. Rickshaws are a major cause of noise and air pollution. The reason for this is that rickshaw drivers do not put proper silencers on their vehicles and instead install modified ones which do not reduce the noise or the smoke but are understood to cut petrol consumption. Many experts say that this is a misconception and that petrol consumption is not affected in any way, no matter what silencer is used. Either way, modified silencers add to the urban din and discharge toxic fumes and smoke. Karachi’s traffic police chief has said that so far 15,000 new silencers have been installed in rickshaws as part of the ongoing campaign. However, he has complained that the rickshaw drivers change the new silencers and install their old ones once they have been given a fitness certificate.
The traffic police need to keep up the pressure on a long-term basis by conducting more checks and inspections on rickshaws. Also, more attention should be given to how fitness certificates are issued so that only rickshaws that are fit are allowed to ply. Unless a sustained campaign is launched against this menace, the problem is expected to re-emerge within a space of a few weeks once the current campaign ends.